Perhaps the standout event of 2026 is already over―the US campaign against Venezuela, with the plainly-declared aim of taking over its oil resources. There is widespread outrage about national and international laws being breached, but isn’t it just as outrageous that oil remains a credible casus belli this deep into the 21st century?
Back in the progressive era, the world was expected to be almost fully nuclear-powered and squeaky clean very soon. And then, most inconsiderately, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima melted down and sentiment turned against the atom. It was left to renewable sources to fill the gap, and the solar energy industry is proving its viability. But the futurists of the past, who predicted the death of fossil fuels, could not have imagined that a pro-fracking, climate-crisis-denying nation-state would lead a fightback against green energy in the future. That’s just one of the serious questions that futurism got wrong, and it’s a wonder that it still thrives.
Speaking of nation-states, weren’t they expected to wither away as globalisation made borders porous and irrelevant? But outside of regions like the European Union, they remain the building blocks of the world’s land surface. Borders have always been differentially porous―shamelessly transparent to capital in various forms, from outsourced services to blood diamonds, but retarding the movement of humans by using visa forms and border bureaucracies.
Now, nation-states are tightening their borders by imposing stricter eligibility norms. Former colonial powers are turning back immigrants from their erstwhile possessions. Dual citizenship is being viewed with suspicion. If it is any comfort, communist internationalism―the comradeship which allowed activists like M N Roy to cross borders like they existed only on paper―collapsed on its inner contradictions much earlier. The age of the world citizen, once a figure of terrific stature, is over.
Futurism has been a force for about a century, from about the time of H G Wells. It has cast the horoscope of the human race using sounder techniques than astrology, but it has not been very much more reliable. Its hit rate has been high only in science and technology. Scientific prediction is based closely on facts, is incremental rather than exponential, and it goes wrong only when it ignores the universal forces of economics and politics―an invention must fulfil an obvious need, but must also be financially viable.
The Sony Walkman changed the future of music from communal listening, when families gathered around a radio or a tape deck, to individual music and personal playlists, the iPod and then streaming services like Spotify. It spread fast because it was cheaply manufactured and easily cloned. On the contrary, the century-old dream of setting up human settlements on Mars remains elusive because it would require dozens of nations to collaborate financially, setting aside their individual interests. Mass international cooperation was another prediction which is now failing, as the postwar compact unravels.
Media was supposed to have been transformed over the last three decades by the internet. Instead, it’s been transmogrified from a skyline of towering mastheads into a mishmash of paper, digital and TV which has increased information overload. In the 1990s, media moved online in a mad scramble and advertising followed. But they had not anticipated Facebook, which became the gateway for news and arbiter of what is seen and what goes unseen. It took the lion’s share of advertising and broke the business model of traditional media. The idea of definitive media is now history.
Mid-20th century futurists saw a rosy future for communications. Arthur C Clarke wrote presciently that with comsats, it would be no more difficult to communicate with someone on a different continent than to speak to your neighbour. In 1945, Vannevar Bush dreamed of the Memex, a desktop storage and retrieval system which interfaced personal data with external networks―in short, hypertext and the internet, visualised decades before the very words existed.
Alvin Toffler, the most memorable futurist, also wrote of networks. But none of them anticipated that the internet would thrive on digital garbage, pornography and fake news, which are perverting politics and society. They did not foresee generations which instinctively feel that the viewport of a smartphone screen is more visionary than the naked eye. Authors anticipated that AI would relieve drudgery, but not that it would also relieve them of their identity and financial security.
While the end of communism marked the most colossal prediction failure of the 20th century, the foundering of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis, which followed, is no less significant. Nations have not settled upon liberal democracy as the sole credible option. America’s competitors, Russia and China, are autocracies. One is run by oligarchs under a permanently elected leader, the other by a party controlling an aggressively capitalist economy that manufactures everything. The end of the rules-based multilateral order, which is in progress, is no less significant. Spheres of influence, which steered geopolitics from the age of prehistoric empires to the world wars, are again in the offing.
The very idea of progress, which has driven civilisation from the world wars to the present, is now in question. Can humanity retain its faith in the direction of time’s arrow, or should it accept the mystical view that time is cyclical, that history comes, goes and comes back fitfully? And does futurism have a future anymore?
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)