Episode Details

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Mark Fisher / Slavoj Zizek / Fredric Jameson

Where did the future go?

It’s not just that our future looks bleak. You can’t boot-up Netflix without the latest political dystopias, civilizational collapse thriller or a “gritty” new take on the post-apocalypse punching you in the gut.

Going on social media in the 2020s is like being repeatedly slapped in the face with a wet copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

We’re a generation trying to figure out if our skills in web-design are transferable to surviving the Thunderdome.

And the news is legitimately packed with existential disasters. Ecological collapse. Nuclear risk. Resource wars. The construction of yet another data center that uses more energy than the state of Oklahoma so we can pay a supercomputer to draw subpar manga.

We keep building a new machine to solve the problem caused by the last machine we built to solve a problem itself caused by one of our machines. All the way back to flint axe and the carrier bag.

Machines. We can’t live with them, and we certainly can’t live without them.

And it seems we can’t imagine anything beyond them.

Watch the full video essay on YouTube

Science fiction tells two stories of the future.

In one, humanity steals fire from the gods and grasps control of our machines. In these Promethean futures men, competent men with engineering degrees, build the future with machines.

The crew of the Enterprise and its warp engines explore strange new worlds. The Psychohistorians of Asimov’s Foundation build a higher civilization. Men leave Earth to build megastructure ringworlds and dyson spheres again and again from Starmak