How the Future Breaks Down
Three Ways the Next Few Decades Unfold, And Why They Matter
by umair haque
It’s a pun. A bad one. Get it? How the future breaks down. How the future…breaks down. Sorry about that, but…
Just a smattering of headlines from the last few days. “Earth’s jet streams described as chaotic, ‘like a van Gogh painting.’” “Millions face a relentless summer of smoke that won’t end anytime soon.” “Humans approaching limits of ‘survivability’” — who said that, Extinction Rebellion? Nope, CNN. LOL.
You get the drift. Things are dire. But what does it all mean? When I peer into my little economists’ crystal ball, I see three scenarios, broadly, that we’re heading into. Which one affects you most depends on what kind of choices your country is going to make, unfortunately, which means it’s largely out of your hands. Let’s discuss them a little bit.
The first way the future breaks down is accelerationist capitalism.
Now, the caveat I always have to add for Americans: capitalism doesn’t mean the dry-cleaning business you own, that’s just commerce, capitalism is profit maximization being the primary motivating impulse of a society, its institutions, everything privately owned, by mega, well, capital, like hedge funds, traded on markets, right down to the basics, like water, energy, healthcare, wheat, financialized, commoditized, profit-maximized.
What do I mean by “accelerationist capitalism”? Just take a look at America. It’s a society with no functioning systems, really, for anything. Energy grids are on the brink. Water systems have already broken in many places. Food — LOL — inflation’s out of control. Then there are slightly less basic systems like healthcare, education, childcare — nonexistent. Those don’t exist in America because the central idea has always been that capitalism will provide all these necessities. Does it? Not very well, and even then, at an astronomical cost. So while Canada’s pioneering a new childcare system that’ll cost $10 a day…Americans would be lucky to pay $100. Unaffordable for most, which means that of course raising a family is that much harder.
It’s easy enough to see that this form of social organization — let’s call it absolutist capitalism — is a disastrous failure. America’s the only society in the world like this, and it’s the bizarre combination of nominally rich, but effectively poor. Who else is on this path? Britain is — after almost a generation of increasingly fanatical governance, its water system, LOL, just collapsed, and its NHS has been destroyed. How long did it take to build an NHS? 75 years. To implode it? Just a decade or so.
America shows us that absolutist capitalism doesn’t work — cross the border into Canada, and you’ll live a remarkably better life, in every imaginable way, from health to happiness to trust to peace and nonviolence. Britain shows us that if you choose the path of absolutist capitalism, LOL, you’ll wreck — at light speed — what few functioning systems you do have, even mighty, revolutionary, once world-renowned ones like an NHS. And yet this scenario is very, very real. America’s not going to change anytime soon, and neither is Britain. Other countries are following this path, too, from India to parts of Africa to regions of Asia.
So what’s the “accelerationist” part? Think again of Britain. The fanatics and lunatics who govern it don’t care. They don’t care that its systems are profoundly, shockingly broken — right down to water, LOL. They just keep on…doubling down. That’s acceleration. Think of it as an ideological suit of armor — that protects you from reality. Or think about America. It’s a nation also accelerating — straight into regressive collapse. The Supreme Court just took rights away from women and minorities. That’s a kind of acceleration, also.
This form of collapse is intimately bound up with the part of the political spectrum that goes from the warning purple of nationalism to the violent red of fascism. Why don’t societies like America and Britain give up their beliefs, even in the presence of all the evidence in the world that it’s not working? That the only result of these foolish choices — absolutist capitalism — is collapse, harder and faster?
Because a large segment of society sees that as a good thing. They see collapse as a Great Purification. The suffering and pain it inflicts a just punishment, for people they regard as “liabilities” or “parasites” or just plain old subhumans.
Think how a fascist does, as repellent as that is: the end of the world as we know it as a wonderful thing, because everything from mega-weather to no functioning institutions sort the uberpeople from the underpeople, and hey, as things fall apart, maybe you can indulge in a little bit — or a lot — of violence and hate, too. Calamity, apocalypse, disaster in this worldview, isn’t something to avoid, but something to welcome. Politically, it cleanses, socially, it purifies, and economically, you get to “take back control,” as the Brexit slogan went.
Where does this scenario end? It ends in a dark place. Democratic governance breaks down, as it is in, for example, America. Systems no longer reliably provide basics — and that’s a good thing, in the eyes of the fanatics, who form their own compounds and armies and paramilitaries and whatnot to defend what’s “rightfully theirs.” Instead of a modern society, social organization becomes every man, woman, and child for themselves. People flock to authoritarian demagogues, in fear, spite, rage, and hate — from Britain’s Brexiters to America’s snarling fanatics.
What’s left is a kind of libertarian shell of a society — a wretched, broken thing, where hostility and violence have replaced trust and community, nothing works, nothing much exists, really, socially, from systems to institutions, and democracy is a hated, despised thing, unless it comes in the form of the authoritarian’s Orwellian, performative masquerade of it.
Now add climate emergency. LOL. All that would be bad enough, but in this age? It’s going to be…surreally so. Isn’t it already? Think of America. There it is, half blanketed by smoke from Canada burning, and half sweltering under heat domes. That’d be bad enough, in a society where people weren’t at one another’s throats, fanatics and lunatics weren’t taking the rights of social groups away, and because nobody much was investing enough in systems, they were beginning to break down.
But when you put those together? You get rapid, severe regressive acceleration, of the kind that’s happening now, in both America and Britain — society fragmenting, dividing, pulled apart by the follies of spite and hate and ignorance, instead of cooperating to try to salvage something of the future. Those who welcome breakdown, collapse, implosion, because it frees them to be their worst selves lean into it. Here we have climate emergency and democratic, system, economic, institutional collapse all compounding each other, in the name of money, power, and domination.
The future for such societies, obviously, looks incredibly bleak. Ask yourself what America looks like…a decade from now. With a Supreme Court like this. With a GOP that welcomes open violence. Fanatics and lunatics of the worst kinds increasingly dictating everything from public life to local institutions. Now add climate emergency, and you get a sense of the weird sci-fi Mad Max style authoritarian slash libertarian dystopia all this breaks down into, fast.
Or imagine Britain’s future a decade from now. NHS, a shell. BBC, basically something like Fox News. Water systems, food systems, energy grids, all failing. And the fanatics and lunatics are still leaning into it all — but now, the planet’s on fire even more than it is today. Good luck with that. That’s a portrait of jaw-dropping breakdown in an age of emergency.
So what’s…a little better…than that?