The Near Future
CrowdSource 5.19.2025
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: visions of the next few days and years.
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The Cyberpunk Future Is Here
In a recent essay,
argues that the lull in hardware innovation (lamented by writers like Peter Thiel, Tyler Cowen and Ross Douthat) is over. We are at the threshold of the future.“Internet, AI, Robotics and Biotech.” According to Smith, the cyberpunk science fiction movement predicted our future:
The “cyberpunk” writers of the 1980s and 1990s — William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Masamune Shirow, Bruce Sterling, Mike Pondsmith, Kojima Hideo, Konaka Chiaki, Vernor Vinge, and many others — didn’t envision a future entirely devoid of hardware innovations, but most of what they envisioned for the 21st century centered around advances in the internet, AI, robotics, and biotech.
Imperfect Prophets. Smith’s caveat: Cyberpunk authors were good at predicting new technologies, but their “social extrapolations were a bit more hit-or-miss than their technological visions.”
The State is Still Strong. “Modern corporations aren’t exactly weak, but Google, Huawei, Apple, and BYD don’t resemble the lawless, heavily armed quasi-state actors of 80s/90s fiction. Instead they’re all under the thumb of national governments.”
“Inequality, while certainly a problem, isn’t as pervasive as the cyberpunks envisioned.”
Find Another Hideout. “Cyberpunk heroes might be able to hide out in the anonymous darkness of cities, but in the actual future, true privacy is pretty much dead.”
“Sinofuturism.” In another essay, Smith explores the trend in China boosterism, and assesses Chinese technological progress:
Personal air taxis, ultra-fast car chargers, and humanoid robots that can do flips are not the last whiz-bang gadgets you’ll see come out of China. Nor will China’s innovation be limited to the electrical sphere. And China’s massive research spending spree, together with Trump’s deep cuts to American science funding, mean that the future has never looked brighter for Chinese scientific supremacy.
This Can’t Be the Future. Smith nevertheless believes China’s model of the future won’t be emulated by the rest of the world, because
… much of China’s technological leadership has a darker side. … China is also the global leader in electronic surveillance, to the point where they’ve basically turned their whole country into a panopticon. China uses the internet to repress dissent, and AI will make that task easier. China’s government has also shown an eagerness to use the internet to spread dissension and stir up hatred in other societies around the world …
What is Cyberpunk?
Mirrorshades, a famous anthology containing works by all the major cyberpunk writers, is available for free online. Its preface, by Bruce Sterling, defines the movement:
Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk. The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry — techniques radically redefining — the nature of humanity, the nature of the self.
The Most Terrifying Hour
Other recent visions of the near future (always the most terrifying hour):
“End Times Fascism.”
and Astra Taylor argue that the American ruling class fears near-future catastrophe, and that this fear informs their ideology: “End times fascism is a darkly festive fatalism — a final refuge for those who find it easier to celebrate destruction than imagine living without supremacy.”Decadence Overcome? Last month, Decadent Society author
announced that he believes decadence to be over, at least in the tech realm: “we have entered a time of technological acceleration rather than stagnation.”Europe Is Rapidly Changing. The European near future, according
, involves “the militarization of society, the erosion of democratic norms, the consolidation of technocratic power and the suppression of dissent …” These are “the contours of a new political paradigm, one born of fear, dependency and institutional inertia.”AI Will Alter Daily Life.
says that whatever big changes are coming, they will arrive here sooner than expected: “… recent advances in AI have pulled the meanings of ‘soon’ and ‘more time’ much closer to the present—so close to the present that even the skeptical view implies we’re in for a wild decade or two.”“AI 2027.” In a New York Times interview,
, former OpenAI researcher, explains how AI could replace humanity by 2027.Hold That Thought. We are unlikely to get human-level AI anytime soon, reports Cade Metz.
Pandaemonium. Critic and biographer Alan Jacobs looks back to the Industrial Revolution in order to anticipate the AI-driven near future.
Things are going to slide in all directions Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore The blizzard of the world Has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul
— Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
Is the Future Back?
What will these visions of the near future mean for politics?
“The Dregs of Time.” A year ago,
and diagnosed the West as suffering from a lack of future: “A sense of doom is shared on all sides of the political spectrum. … Radically different in their goals, they share one common vantage point: an apocalyptic imagination.”“The Human Need for a Goal.” Riffing off of Krastev and Benardo’s piece in April,
speculated whether MAGA has a vision of the future:
The Trumpist movement has exposed the human need for a goal. It has (for now) the political winds at its back, a taste for risk, and a technological project — not only colonizing Mars, but DOGE, and a new geopolitical order, and Greenland — to work toward. That’s why the moment feels equally frantic, fascinating and dreadful.
What will the near future bring?
From the Crowd
Count Your Blessings. Responding to the latest podcast, socialist author
challenges ’s statement that “the world is fallen and irredeemable”:
Well, it’s in a pretty bad way, no doubt about it. But there’s a difference between a growl of protest and a shrug of despair. If “irredeemable” means anything, it means that there are no solutions to the world's major problems, a conclusion that would seem to call for detailed, extensive historical arguments, demonstrating that we have rarely or never solved humanity's major problems. Can Damir — or anyone — believe this?
Two hundred years ago 90 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty; today it's 10 percent. Three hundred years ago, average life expectancy was 35-40; today it has doubled. Three hundred years ago, democracy and representative government existed almost nowhere; now a majority of states are at least formally democratic. Three hundred years ago chattel slavery was commonplace; today it is extremely rare. Three hundred years ago, women everywhere had no economic or civil rights.
And so on and on, no doubt with equal statistics of failure and misery on the other side of the ledger. What that proves is not that the human condition is irredeemable, but that redeeming it is hard work, requiring courage, perseverance, and imagination. Compared with those virtues, sighing that “the world is fallen and irredeemable” seems like — forgive me, Damir — a pose.
What is a Siege? WoC contributor
makes useful distinctions in an exchange over ’s most recent essay:
… the Battle of Stalingrad — a classic “double siege” — is said to have killed 20 to 25% of the city's civilian inhabitants (whom the Russian authorities largely refused to evacuate). That was 200,000 people. And that was in 4-5 months.
But there are differences, too. The Germans and Russians didn’t just bombard each other at Stalingrad. The unit-to-unit, soldier-to-soldier battles were, as least as I’ve read, brutal and unremitting, with high casualties on both sides. While there certainly have been Israeli military casualties, I just don’t know the degree to which the IDF and Hamas have been similarly engaged. It may be a function of how the war has been reported, but one has often been left to wonder just what the Israelis have been shooting at.
This is not to say that it’s, eo ipso, a war crime to bombard (or starve) a besieged city. But sieges — once warfare par excellence — haven’t been a prominent feature of war for a long time The only exceptions I can recall in my lifetime are Sarajevo and Grozny (both Muslim cities, btw, with the second still having not recovered its pre-1990 population).
A problem is that Gaza isn’t precisely “besieged” in the classic sense — the Israelis can move freely (though not safely) through most of it. And, besieged or not, if the Israeli War objective, as Shadi claims, is to expel Gaza’s citizens by making it uninhabitable (a very different objective than “destroying Hamas”), then some kind of red line would seem to have been crossed.
See you next week!
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