what comes next
we live in a time of defeatism.
the climate clock is ticking. ai is putting the first of many people out of work. israel keeps killing children in gaza. it’s the close of yet another election year where morale is low and expectations are lower. the social platforms of yore are slowly collapsing inwards, stagnating into cesspools of toxic waste. culture is out of new ideas, cannibalizing more and more recent past just to keep the content flowing. kids can’t read. everyone is filled with microplastics. no one can afford a house. no one can afford children. no one can afford anything that isn’t cheaply made and dropshipped from china. except the rich, who just keep getting richer.
all of that is scary, yes, but what’s even scarier is that so few people are pointing the way toward anything better. even if they are, who believes them? belief in such claims these days comes riddled with questions: what are they peddling, or how are they scamming you? and so dystopias loom everywhere. in this cultural environment, utopias are, at best, the wishful thinking of the naïve—and, at worst, the willful manipulation of people’s hopes for a better future toward selfish ends.
when antonio gramsci was imprisoned under mussolini, he wrote:
the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
or, as slavoj žižek paraphrased (into what’s since become a kind of political meme): “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
we’ve inhabited our current interregnum for some time now, and we’ve observed and diagnosed many symptoms of morbidity. so many, in fact, that a predominant view among young people now is that we live in a dying empire led by bad people.
but the funny part about narratives is that: the more widespread they are, the more ripe they become for interruption. people are contrarian. every cycle involves a dominant narrative, backlashes to the narrative that becomes competing counternarratives, and then the slow rise of a successful counternarrative entering dominance. rinse and repeat.
even as monsters surround us, we’re seeing the glimmers of a new world—and its new narratives—struggling to be born. so, in a deeply cynical moment, what better world could come next, and how do we get there faster?
i’ve been considering this question for a long time (arguably, on and off my whole life), rarely with satisfying answers. but for the first time in years, there are fractures in the status quo large enough to see what’s coming after it. it looks bad out there—really grim—but i think some possible antidotes are evolving out of the ills of our current era.
back in july, i sequestered myself upstate for a week with a singular focus: to write. i thought i knew what i wanted to write, but, as the week progressed, the subject morphed and expanded into something else entirely, becoming unwieldy enough that i had to set it aside until now. here is the output of that intention: the first in a series of essays, each exploring a bold assertion (or, at minimum, aspiration) for the future as a site of promise and potential rather than catastrophe.
what comes next?
the rebirth of agency
much of the past decade or two, the culture moved toward systems thinking—grappling with the workings and effects of systemic issues. we were emerging out of an era of euphoric individualism in the 1990s, where the broad sentiment was that anything was possible; anything could be yours if you were just willing to step up and take it. it was a highly effective belief in that it was simple and made people feel powerful. the flip side of a narrative of individual agency, of course, was the implicit conclusion that any successes or failures were wholly earned.
the counternarrative? a far more complex reality of differential opportunity and the webs of power that enmeshed that state of the world. we live in this culture now, an information-dense environment where we’re constantly bombarded with data and other heuristics to understand systems too vast and intricate to otherwise grasp. it’s a narrative that speaks to a bird’s-eye view of modern life, with each individual or institution as a component in an infinitely large machine. this worldview doesn’t make us feel powerful—the opposite, really—but it makes us feel smart.
this systems-centered culture laid a lot of groundwork; for instance, it’s hard to imagine how major shifts in public opinion on social issues or the climate crisis would have been possible without it. but i think we’ve reached the limits of this paradigm. more and more, we’re starting to see people push against the perception that they’re trapped within these systems and their rules, focusing instead toward what they can do in spite of them.
take identity. there’s the seemingly neverending “anti-woke” backlash on the right, but what’s much more interesting to me is the picture on the left—a parallel desire to transcend identity flattened into labels like gender and race, turning from a more defensive self-consciousness of difference and toward a matter-of-fact ease. the settings where these dynamics are possible are still fewer in number than they should be, but they’ve grown quickly and steadily.
the evolution of diversity and inclusion in tech is one case study: the d&i efforts of the 2010s tech industry slowly became passé as people moved out of the margins. there’s a tenet in reggie james’ manifesto for “the new technologist,” where he argues against “filtering one’s work through identity labels”—not because identity is unimportant, but because it often becomes the container for the work rather than letting it stand on its own. implicit in that is the assumption that the work will be taken on its own now, at least by most.
there’s a lot to be said about the diminishing of dedicated spaces for identity-based communities, but it’s easy to miss that: what we’re seeing is what it looks like when these ideas are winning. which isn’t to say that the ground has been ceded, or that it can’t be lost again (and, in fact, it looks likelier than ever that some will be in the coming years), but i think it’s important to recognize ideological victories where they exist.
in this process, the politics of progress has matured. olúfẹ́mi o. táíwò makes the argument for a “constructive politics” rather than “a politics of deference” in his book elite capture, with the rationale that focusing on purity and symbolism detracts from concrete meaningful progress.
A constructive political culture would focus on outcome over process—the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding complicity in injustice or promoting purely moral or aesthetic principles.
the cultural shift from identification and correction toward integration and action moves us once again toward agency and frees us to think more about what we want to do, rather than who we are and how that positions us within a system. and, as zygmunt bauman notes in liquid modernity, an increase in agency is what widens the potential for progress:
To people confident of their power to change things, 'progress' is an axiom. To people who feel that things fall out of their hands, the idea of progress would not occur and would be laughable if heard.
defeatism is an unstable state; people can remain paralyzed for long periods of time, but the urge to break free slowly becomes irrepressible. we’re seeing it happen with the resurgence of the simple but effective meme that’s bounced around silicon valley for many years and taken hold again: “you can just do things.” this refrain is so obvious on its face that it only really makes sense as a counter to an implied dominant narrative: that you can’t just do things. few would describe the culture of this era this way, and yet the resonance of the counternarrative points to a truth to it.
this same strain of defeatism has also become ingrained in modern progressive politics. perhaps the defining trait of progressivism in the hostile environment of social media is bias toward inaction, born out of fear of complicity. i saw it in myself as a pathological aversion to wielding power that could even hypothetically cause others harm. but there was a constant tension there: to work toward a better world, you have to act. to act, you have to build and exert power. to exert power, you have to be able to accept some negative consequences with the positive ones. nothing comes for free, and navigating the landscape of possible actions and their consequences is the work, not opting out by staying still. an ideology that avoids complicity at all costs, at its most extreme, eliminates any possibility of creating a better world.
i’ve written about inventing the future by nick srnicek and alex williams before, but as time has passed, i’ve become more and more confident that it’s one of the most important books of the past decade (a bold claim, i know). its basic thesis rings truer than ever: that the key project of the left is to build global hegemonic power around an ambitious technologically and socially progressive vision of the future where everyone is free to act.
If power is the basic capacity to produce intended effects in someone or something else, then an increase in our ability to carry out our desires is simultaneously an increase in our freedom. The more capacity we have to act, the freer we are. One of the biggest indictments of capitalism is that it enables the freedom to act for only a vanishingly small few. A primary aim of a postcapitalist world would therefore be to maximise synthetic freedom, or in other words, to enable the flourishing of all of humanity and the expansion of our collective horizons.
a culture of agency accelerates change, for better and for worse. luigi mangione’s shooting of the unitedhealthcare ceo captures both ends of this spectrum—the undeniable potency of one person’s power to create a shock to an unjust system, but also the dangerous volatility of agency taken to its logical extreme. crucially, though, in contrast to the resigned stagnancy of the era we’re leaving, a renewed belief in agency widens the possibility horizon. the path forward lies in navigating this tension: exercising our capacity to act while critically weighing the systemic consequences of these actions. what comes next isn’t predestined; it’ll be shaped by what we do, and whether it serves the few or the many depends on us.
it’s been a while! this end-of-year window around the holidays is consistently one of the rare occasions life slows enough for me to write, a luxury i treasure, but hoping to be in your inbox again soon.
as always, responses are my single favorite part about sharing to this newsletter, so if anything sparks a thought for you, i would love to hear it.