A Vision Of The Screaming Twenties
What the next ten years could look like.
Statistically speaking, you are a twenty or thirtysomething from a majority English-speaking country. The next ten years will be what’s commonly considered some of the best of your life. Here’s what, statistically speaking, they will look like.
I’m no expert on the topics I’ll talk about, just someone who’s very, very worried. Perhaps too much so. I’ll use information widely available and comprehensible to laypeople like you and me. I’ll also link it so you can review it yourself.
According to the IPCC, climate change will — no matter what we do — lead to an overall increase of around 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2030 if past trends holds up. That might not sound like much, but we’re currently at 1 degree above pre-industrial levels and we’ve seen massive wildfires in the USA and Australia that were exacerbated by it, as well as extreme weather phenomena all over the world. Even if we manage to hit the most ambitious emission reduction targets (we most likely won’t), the next ten years will still feature an increasingly warmer climate before the trend stops or reverses.
If polls are anything to go by (they might not be, although there’s less cause for concern than in 2016), the coming USA election is shaping up to be similar to the 2008 one: a popular Democratic candidate against a widely disliked Republican whose party has last won the presidency. Historically, midterms have always been very bad for the party that won the presidential election: in the post-war era, the President’s party has lost an average of 26 seats in the House and 4 in the Senate. The 2022 midterms may also be like the 2010 ones: a resurgent Republican party, taken over by an extremist faction (the Tea Party back then, QAnon now), makes significant gains in both House and Senate. It may be enough for them to take the latter back, although the former is more of a longshot. The QAnon theory is more of a guess and the thing I’m least certain about, but there has been an increasing number of Q supporters running for congress and the pattern could continue.
AI has advanced to the point it can generate extremely convincing media of all kinds, from audio to video to articles like this one. Since technological progress is exponential, it will only keep getting better and better. It’s already impossible to distinguish a fake video from a real one if it’s made with sophisticated enough algorithms, and it’s hard to imagine what more technology will be able to do in ten years. An increasing departure from shared reality only atomizes us further: we’re already at the point where we can live through entirely separate digital worlds, which only exacerbates our differences. This makes any sort of united effort to make things better way, way harder to accomplish. But reality exists outside of us, no matter what virtual artifices we may use to conceal it. We can’t simply convince ourselves things will get better and have them magically do so. We have to rationalize the dissonance we feel with more and more delusions, in a self-reinforcing loop.
This May, a clip of White House advisor Kevin Hassett made the rounds on Twitter:
“Human capital stock”. The state of permanent dis-connection we’re in benefits those with already entrenched wealth, and as things get bleaker it’s unlikely they will show much pity. If everyone is a gig worker, and their only contact is with an AI that tells them what to do, there’s not much hope for any kind of organized opposition to the further eroding of labor rights. If this kind of pattern continues, we will all eventually be human capital stock marching to the slaughter.
We won’t notice it at all. I know, I know, it sounds insane. How could we not notice unprecedented climate catastrophes, the radicalization and descent into fascism of western democracy, the encroachment of the surveillance state on us while labor rights disappear entirely and we try to snag the best prices on the online organ trading hub? Simple. It will happen slowly. Ten years is not a long time, but it will feel like it. Eventually, the headlines will slowly blend into each other, as will the days. Things will keep getting a little bit worse forever. It has already happened in the year that started this decade. When the end of the world comes, we will suit up and head drowsily to face just another Monday.
None of this has to happen. That’s the important part: none of this has to happen. It’s simply what could happen. I don’t know what exactly you can do to stop it. I don’t know you. But hey, we are all into this mess. All 7,818,326,644 (at time of writing) of us. Getting through it is something we’re going to have to figure out together. So why not start with figuring out what exactly the problems are?
