Over twenty years ago, I wrote a brief post on a private message board run by a now-disgraced comics author (not that one, the other one, and not that message board, the private one that had about twenty people on it) where I talked about what I called \"the grim meathook future\". That's all it was: literally just a reply to someone else's post about futurism (I can't remember who or what it was). But one of the members of the board, the legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski, shared it on his blog and it sort of went viral.
\nWhat I said was this:
\n\"I think the problem is that the future, maybe for the first time since WWII, lies on the far side of an event horizon for us, because there are so many futures possible. There’s the wetware future, the hardware future, the transhumanist future, the post-rationalist (aka fundamentalist) future.
\n\"And then there’s the future where everything just sort of keeps going on the way it has, with incremental changes, and technology is no longer the deciding factor in things. You don’t need high tech to change the world; you need Semtex and guns that were designed by a Russian soldier fifty-odd years ago.
\n\"Meanwhile, most of the people with any genuine opportunity or ability to effect global change are too busy patting each other on the back at conventions and blue-skying goofy social networking tools that are essentially useless to 95% of the world’s population, who live within fifteen feet of everyone they’ve ever known and have no need to track their fuck buddies with GPS systems. (This, by the way, includes most Americans, quite honestly.)
\n\"You can’t blame them for this, because it’s fun and it’s a great way to travel and get paid, but it doesn’t actually help solve any real problems, except the problem of media theory grad students, which the rest of the world isn’t really interested in solving.
\n\"Feeding poor people is useful tech, but it’s not very sexy and it won’t get you on the cover of Wired. Talk about it too much and you sound like an earnest hippie. So nobody wants to do that.
\n\"They want to make cell phones that can scan your personal measurements and send them real-time to potential sex partners. Because, you know, the fucking Japanese teenagers love it, and Japanese teenagers are clearly the smartest people on the planet.
\n\"The upshot of all of this is that the Future gets divided; the cute, insulated future that Joi Ito and Cory Doctorow and you and I inhabit, and the grim meathook future that most of the world is facing, in which they watch their squats and under-developed fields get turned into a giant game of Counterstrike between crazy faith-ridden jihadist motherfuckers and crazy faith-ridden American redneck motherfuckers, each doing their best to turn the entire world into one type of fascist nightmare or another.
\n\"Of course, nobody really wants to talk about that future, because it’s depressing and not fun and doesn’t have Fischerspooner doing the soundtrack. So everybody pretends they don’t know what the future holds, when the unfortunate fact is that — unless we start paying very serious attention — it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.\"
\nAside from drastically underestimating the popularity of then-novel social media, I was absolutely fucking right about everything, basically because I understood something that Francis Fukuyama didn't: the human race's capacity for shooting itself in the foot.
\nIf we had stayed at roughly turn of the millennium levels of consumption, we would now be able to almost entirely power the planet off of renewable energy. We'd still have seen technological growth - computers are far more powerful now but use far less electricity to operate - but we'd still be reliant on far more robust supply chains rather than the just-in-time manufacturing and delivery we mostly use now, which drastically fails in, say, a global pandemic. Back then, private equity buying up and enshittifying everything - a term coined by Cory Doctorow, whom I've known for decades and used to take to the Double Down in Vegas when he was in town for conventions - was a novel idea, but still a looming threat on the horizon to people who were paying attention, like Naomi Klein.
\nWhat I understood was that the future Fukuyama imagined - his \"end of history\" - didn't take human perversity into account, or that the neoliberal market-driven democracy he saw in the West wouldn't be globally distributed or in fact globally desired.
\nAnd let's tell the truth and shame the devil: pretty much all of the biggest problems our species is facing come either from the ațtempts to spread the Western consumer lifestyle across the planet or a reaction to it. It's an unfortunate fact that a China and an India built on the American model of prosperity - a sedan and an SUV in the garage of every suburban home sprawled across the edges of the cities, made of ticky-tacky and all just the same, filled with conspicuous consumer consumption and junk - would be a goddamn apocalypse. People sometimes misunderstand me when I say this as though I'm saying the Chinese and the Indians and everyone else shouldn't have what we have in the global West/North/whatever. Which I am, but I'm also saying we shouldn't have it either. They shouldn't try to replicate it and we should have it taken away from us.
\nThere is no such thing as a perfect system, but what you consider a successful system largely depends upon what you think good is. I like European democratic socialism myself, because I like systems where everybody has their basic needs taken care of but you can still try to prosper by giving them the luxuries and optional stuff. I don't want to see Apple destroyed: I wanna see ConEd and United Healthcare destroyed. I wanna see people not suffer and die because a few people think healthcare should be entirely for-profit. You wanna charge people ten grand to suck the fat outta their asses and put it in their cheekbones or whatever, great. Let's all pay into the system that gives us antibiotics when we get a chest infection so it's cheaper. If that notion tightens up your asshole in terror, you might want to consider the possibility that you're just a greedy fuck.
\nEarlier today on Facebook I talked about how the American rail companies basically tricked a million European immigrants to come and terraform the middle out the country by pretending it was beautiful, temperate, fertile land rather than a desolate dry freezing and burning hellscape... and how it worked. If you pair that tale with the story of how General Motors and a bunch of related corporations - including tire manufacturers - conspired to get rid of streetcars and light rail across America a few decades later, a pattern emerges: much of what we consider organic sociocultural evolution is in fact the work of rich people pulling strings behind the scenes.
\nIn the same way that the 19th century railroad tycoons hired a poet to turn the Great Western Desert into the Heartland, generations of Don Drapers worked everywhere to teach Americans to believe that cars were freedom: freedom to travel, freedom to live outside the urban cores, objects of both economic and sexual desire... yadda yadda yadda. Trains and streetcars and subways represented slavery, a life permanently chained to The Man's whim.
\nAnd we bought it, hook, line and sinker. Even when the gas prices went up, even when they started charging everywhere for parking, even when they went everywhere that cars were supposed to give us freedom to travel *to* and paved Paradise and put up a parking lot, we still bought into that bullshit.
\nBut it's not sustainable - not for us, not for anyone. It's just math. And the chain of actions required to shape America into a car-centric society led us directly to where we are today. The prime minister of Iran was overthrown in 1953 and replaced with the Shah in a coup that was planned and executed by the CIA and British Petroleum to keep Iranian oil fields from being nationalized. This isn't conspiracy theory, it's admitted fact - the same way right-wing coups in Central and South America were managed by the CIA on behalf of the United Fruit Company. That's literally where the term \"banana republics\" comes from, for those of you too young to remember. Every single American conflict since the Vietnam War has been about protecting American access to other countries' resources, even the ones that were held on the flimsy pretext of \"weapons of mass destruction\" or human rights. If America really cared about human rights we woulda been in the Congo or Saudi Arabia. But the only human rights we really gave a shit about were American humans' rights to have all the oil and bananas they wanted whenever they wanted them, cheap. These are just facts.
\nAnd the only way you can pull that off is if you either spread the wealth equally - which of course we don't - or can scare everyone into doing your will. Which we did until one bent loony trust fund nutjob from Saudi figured out you could use the West's own tools against it and take a couple of those massive planes we have in the air constantly and fly them into buildings. And it turns out that the greatest military might on Earth isn't enough to defeat Afghani geography or Iranian Lego memes. Meanwhile, whatever your position on the smartness and morality of arming Israel is (and I think my position is pretty clear), it didn't win us any more friends in that part of the world either.
\nThis is the stuff Fukuyama didn't even seem to consider. As this article points out, he thought the only real danger to the neoliberal market utopia he envisioned was simple boredom and restlessness.
\nYou've probably seen the old cartoon with two scientists at a chalkboard filled with arcane mathematical proofs... and in the middle is written the words \"AND THEN A MIRACLE OCCURS\", and the caption is the one guy saying to the other \"I think you need to be a little more explicit in step two.\" That's how Fukiyamism - and Clintonian neoliberalism - always looked to me. How, exactly, were we gonna export neoliberalism to Africa? Were we gonna sell Humvees to the Tuaregs? A Maytag washer and dryer in every sub-Saharan shanty? How was that gonna work when those countries have been buried under bullshit debt to Western/Northern countries for centuries and their corrupt and brutal governments directly and knowingly installed by Western corporate interests for just as long. You know why the Rwandan genocide happened? Because the fucking Belgians invented two tribes, the Hutu and the Tstutsi, and they told the darker folks they were Hutu and the lighter folks Tstutsi and played them off each other for over a century until nobody remembered these \"tribes\" were arbitrary and the Hutu resentment of the preferential treatment of Tstutsi boiled over. It was literally for no reason except that Europeans found it easier to control a divided population.
\nAnd none of that stuff is gone. It didn't vanish when the Wall fell, as Fukuyama seemed to believe. We couldn't create markets in the developing world while maintaining our profit margins, so we simply used them as cheap labor. You may or may not recall when the Haitian government went to Hilary Clinton's State Department and demanded that American garment companies pay the Haitians who make America's underwear a living wage. This was after the earthquake that destroyed Haiti, mind you, and these people were living in the worst poverty on Earth; the difference in cost to the entire garment industry would have been literally something like a million dollars a year. And Clinton's State Department refused. They told the Haitians that if they tried to force the issue they'd simply pull the American garment factories out of Haiti and move them to another country who weren't so greedy. That year, the bonus paid to Hanes' CEO - literally one CEO of one US company with factories in Haiti - was more than paying the Haitians a living wage would have cost the entire industry all together.
\nDoesn't sound like history really ended in Haiti, does it? Sounds like the same history that's been there since before Napoleon.
\nFrancis Fukuyama was wrong and I was right, which is odd, because he's a professor of economics and political science with a Harvard PhD and I'm a high school dropout with a GED who, at the time I wrote my post, was working as a newspaper columnist for an alt-weekly in Las Vegas and working for Internet startups on the side as a designer and developer and DJing at local hipster bars for whiskey money. But the great failure of economists is that they are deluded into believing their field is a hard science like physics, with hard and fast rules, rather than essentially an attempt to quantify human behavior, which is predictable but not in the ways that they try to predict it. I simply pay attention to people, not theory. And I have always been in the odd position that I can talk to billionaires and street dope slingers often in the same day. I talked to private military contractors who were in Iraq and Afghanistan and people who lived on the Pakistani-Afghan border and saw the Mujahideen walking around the open air arms markets in the 80s with white boys in Ray-Bans and crew cuts following them around with briefcases of cash: all that lawyers guns and money cowboy shit that defined Reaganist adventurism, which, crazily enough, had consequences. I looked at how easily an American city could become feral the way New Orleans did after Katrina. When I went to sub-Saharan Africa at the end of 2013, I talked to the tech geeks at the hub in Nairobi who met with Google reps to ask them to provide server infrastructure for Kenyan startups to use only to be told (I'm directly quoting my buddy who was directly quoting a Google rep): \"We see Africa as a mobile market rather than a server market\".
\nIf you don't understand what that means, it's simple: Google would sell the poor simple darkies cheap Android commodity phones with Hood Facebook pre-installed to run on low-bandwidth connections... but the machines they desperately needed to build their own infrastructure and economy? Nah, son, nah. As far as the West is concerned, there's a sign out front of Africa, the one Tarantino didn't have out on his lawn in Pulp Fiction. They can't buy what we're selling, so two tears in a bucket, baby, come back to us when the average Sudanese can afford a juicer and a Netflix subscription.
\nAnd if I sound cynical and bitter and enraged, it's because I am, and that's also why I'm a better futurist than Fukuyama. I am not stupid enough not to see the ways the luxuries of neoliberal capitalism have made Western life easier in some ways... I just knew there was gonna be a price for it. A bunch of bills were gonna come due... and hey! Whaddya know. Now we have the term \"polycrisis\" as this decade's top neologism... or as William Gibson put it, we're hitting the Jackpot.
\nBut this jackpot pays in shit instead of quarters; it pays in extinction.
\nThe grim meathook future has become the grim meathook present; I tried to warn people, but nevertheless: here we are. Pity you can't sell reality as easily as you can sell Pollyanna bullshit, or I'd be sitting on a beach I own in Maui, writing cute little mash notes about how the stock market is up and the economy is surging, right as everyone everywhere on Earth - everyone except the oligarchs and, apparently, directors of international policy at Stanford University - gets dropped on an endless line of those meathooks and hung out in history's hot wind to dry.
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\nWhat I said was this:
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