Miscellaneous Reminders About the Future

I really do not love Arachne being a place where I dreamscape the world we will inherit. I think that there are a number of flaws around the process of prediction in general, and there is no reason to believe that we can project out, say, ten years with any amount of clarity. As systems of probabilistic forecasting "improve," I believe it is important to remind ourselves of lesser examined things that remain steadily and uncannily true as the march of history progresses. These are truths around the rate at which changes permeate populations, the way that norms go out of fashion. Social changes for a social animal. The only thing that has been true and certain for the last couple thousand years of human history is that at the end of the day we are just people. And it's for that reason I want to lay out some reminders about tech and the future.

These are things I attempt to tell myself in some fashion every day.

You are alive today and reading this for the generations of ancestors whose names you'll never know, who never even had names. They used their technology to keep their babies alive, from shamanic hygiene practices in the paleolithic era, to rudimentary vaccination in Egypt, to modern onesies with cleverly placed zippers. They invented language and writing to share what they knew. They performed stories and built agrarian economies.

For the vast majority of our species' timeline, we've done these things not for money or fame. We did them simply because we cared enough about each other because we knew we could not survive any other way. And there is piles and piles of evidence to reinforce this. We cannot go it alone.

I don't want to neglect the atrocities, oppression, and dehumanization that has occurred through this time. But I must remind myself that the better world we have today than the one we had 100 years ago was made possible by legions of people, regular people, who simply cared enough to imagine something a little better.

I remind myself this when thinking about social media, for example. The existing technology of profit-incentivized social media is decidedly anti-social in many ways. It reinforces anonymous or digital interaction over regular day-to-day real life. It does not always feel like it is actually bringing us closer together.

But I try to remember that nothing is incontrovertible, no law, no practice, nothing stands for very long. And that is because people always and will always care.

The future we live probably won't look too much different from the present we live.

Go with me on this. I've written for Arachne before that I believe we've reached "peak hardware." I say this because many of the world's computer and phone makers have, after two-ish decades rapidly accelerating the ubiquity of computing power, begun to slow down meaningful changes year to year. Just this week, Samsung debuted its new phones, and the internet resoundingly smashed the snooze button. The phones look practically identical to the old phones.

After decades of science fiction lighting up our minds with efficient people-movers, flying cars, and other death defying public works, it has become evident to me that actually the "future" that most people want to live in is not one of profound technological marvel. It is one where their kids can walk to school safely. Where their water is clean, and so are the streets. Where the threat of disease and cancer is mitigated. Where working to make money for someone else isn't the main throughline of your life.

When you walk down a New York City street, you are seeing dozens of things you will still see for possibly the rest of your lifetime. Strollers, bodegas, cars, trucks, sidewalk cracks, puddles, the way a traffic signal sways when the wind rushes between buildings. There will still be people who push those strollers, and guys who make the bodega sandwiches, and crews who fill the potholes. The future we will get to see is very, very much like life today in all of the most important ways. I remind myself this in an attempt to stay grounded in the present and in what I believe. I remind myself this every time I see a commercial for some AI agent that is promising to give us a four day work week or whatever.

I remind myself this to remember my very "first world problems," and it gives me a boost when I think about what it is I want to be in service of.

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish philosopher, said these words first. Martin Luther King Jr. quoted them in what I guess has become Arachne's favorite King oration, "How long? Not long." And they have been rattling in my head recently when I think about tech, media, the arts, basically anything I care about.

It has made me see the world in an elaborately constructed mesh of lies. That sounds a little darker than I intended it to be, lol. What I mean is that when I saw one of the world's richest men and biggest losers do a sieg heil twice the day his new friend became president, I recognized the lie. No nation is above any other, no race is above any other, and no person is above any other. It is a pernicious and frequently convenient lie to believe the other way.

When I read about Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, saying "I mean, get over it" as a response to predictions that the president's tariff policy is inflationary, I see a lie. This lie is the one that anyone has to give a single solitary shit what Jamie Dimon says.

It is a lie that any company needs more masculine energy, it is a lie that DEI is threatening our entertainment hubs, it is a lie that Affirmative Action was reverse racism. It is a lie that we can't afford to build more housing or provide free college education. Sometimes it is a lie borne of lack of observation, sometimes it is a manufactured lie to retain a flimsy status quo. But I attempt to remind myself every day: no lie can live forever.

That's all for this week

I know that this was kinda a weird one. Unemployed life, am I right?? I have some other more concrete topics I want to talk about, but didn't have much time to do the research that would've made it worth it to share. I got some texts this week about things people want to read about here. You can absolutely feel free to reach out with anything you want me to look into.