By Paul Wallis
March 9, 2025
DIGITAL JOURNAL
Photo by Rock'n Roll Monkey on Unsplash
The future and other euphemisms for bland discussion sprinkle the news like dandruff. It’s lightweight unwanted tissue. The cheerful bastards producing the gruesome headlines basically spray the target subject with digressions.
The question is this – When do the 5 second attention spans stop running the world?
The large and irritable elephants in the room get a mention, but without a trace of objectivity. AI, standards of living, education, and just how to have a life are turned into the equivalent of discussing new décor.
This is where relevance gets a word in at last. The total lack of objectivity is the problem. None of this babble is about how to enable the future, how to make it happen. It’s never about human survival. It’s all about how bad the future is likely to be. The paranoia about AI is quite adequate to see how counterproductive this thinking is.
It’s like going into the ER with a broken leg and all you talk about is whether you’d like to break the other leg for a matching set. Recycling old science fiction ideas is also an excuse for pretending to have a clue about the future. Not anymore.
In an interesting aside, the Institute for the Future of Humanity, founded by Elon Musk’s “favorite philosopher” was shut down by Oxford University last week. The philosopher is also responsible for the theory that humanity lives in a simulation…? Oxford apparently couldn’t stand him.
That’s how seriously the subject of the future is taken.
Are we planning super-education?
Clean, safe world for kids?
Talking about getting rid of the last century of toxic waste?
Wiping out diseases and ensuring people are healthy?
Even thinking about a remotely rational form of making a living?
No. We’re talking about current gizmos and come-and-go tech. The entire subject of the living future is being monopolized by old rich fools determined to keep people in the 1950s.
That’s not good.
“Back to the office. Back to the kitchen. Back to the grave.” Media does far more than its share in promoting this funeral procession of obsolete ideas.
The prehistoric economics of this stampede to oblivion are arguably worse. The world doesn’t work that way anymore. 8 billion broke people are struggling now. The old system can’t work anymore. Another decade or so of this could be truly catastrophic.
The irony here is that misinterpreting the past is now sabotaging the future. The idealized future is the media image from the past. Everyone would be rushing about in rocket ships using video links and flying cars while wearing impractical clothes and doing the same jobs.
“Things” were being done to make life better. That seemed reasonable at the time. Life expectancy and quality of life improved from its rustic levels. People were healthier, and astonishingly, more productive than the vistas of hyper medicated zombies we see now. The optimism of the times was largely based on facts.
People also had fun. They didn’t have psychos in every workplace, every subject, and every headline. You could afford to have fun, too, more or less, another critical factor. You looked forward to more fun.
Since finance, crime, and politics took over things have deteriorated badly. The future has to be more than the next deal, the next scam, the next ripoff. The hatred of these constant recitals of avoidable disasters is real enough.
So what is the future of humanity, you enquire warily from a heavily fortified kebab fortress?
It’s one of two things:
An ongoing total failure to deal with everything.
A massive effort to fix everything before it fixes you, permanently.
Not much of a choice, is it?
Lose “disruptive”, “dysfunctional”, and “post-apocalyptic”. They’ve been done to death, and much good they’ve done anyone.
Try getting rid of finance, crime, and politics. Couldn’t hurt.
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