Future Tense

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I was just watching the opening scenes from the 1987 film RoboCop, and saw the future now, writ large in Technicolor. This film, alongside many other dystopian fictions of the era, actually seem to have been a playbook for capitalism and rogue politics for this first quarter of the twenty-first century, with megalomaniac billionaires foisting crackpot visions of the 'benefits' of blind technological advance, despite little empirical evidence as to its actual, societal efficacy. It is a vision of conquest and control in the service of profit. We used to take this kind of movie with large pinches of salt tempered with small twinges of 'what-if? Looking at the corporate structures and mega-vanity projects currently extant, I think we should have taken more heed of these 'entertaining' narratives with a good deal more perspicacity than we did at the time. We are living in the future we were watching in fiction back then. Robots are a thing. Artificial Intelligence is a thing. Quantum computing is becoming a thing. Out of control capitalism already holds sway over world politics, law and order. Human beings are being taken out of the economic equation by technology without the social backup systems we used to take for granted.

We have sleepwalked headlong and willingly, like lemmings [poor metaphor, but you know what I mean], into the kind of dystopia we used to lap up avidly when it was safely locked away in its fictional playpen. The moneyed madmen still rule the roost. Cracks are showing in this maniac edifice, thankfully, but it is up to ordinary people and decent politicians, where possible, to nudge the current narrative back to some semblance of commonality, normality, and consensus. If this ends up needing a revolutionary pitchforks moment, so be it; otherwise collectively we need to exercise and enforce the only sane alternative: some form of social democracy. The über-rich adolescents [of whatever physical age] cannot be continued to be allowed to dictate the way the world is managed, as the only way is down, and they've already started to despoil near-Earth orbit, the Moon and Mars with their junk projects, which is a pretty good indicator of their actual, venal, motives...

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