(WHY) THE FUTURE IS MADE OF NOTHING

FIGURE OF A WOMAN, CIRCA 3000 BC, ANATOLIA

I. THE GOLDEN THREAD UNRAVELLING IN YOUR HANDS…

I’m reluctant to write what I see happening next. The weight on me is too heavy. The pressure feels oceanic. I don’t want to share these thoughts, don’t want, don’t want to…

But there are times when you and I should speak frankly, like old friends. I know that everyone these days wants to know what the future holds. And of course, it’s the job of figures like me to understand it.

Come and sit around the fire with me. We’re going to speak of time and dust. Of the millennia gone by, and the years and decades to come.

I place the golden thread of civilization in your hands. And now you must hold it close. Before it turns to dust.

II. …IS HOW CIVILIZATIONS COLLAPSE

The future will be made of nothing.

When people ask about the future, they don’t understand, see, know how to glimpse, the present. So let us understand where we are now.

Our civilization is beginning to crumble.

America is collapsing. Fascists and theocrats have begun to battle over the world’s resources, choking off its oil supply. Water, air, land, minerals, all these will inevitably be next. There is no paradigm left to follow, and in the absence of one—for geopolitical order, aka democracy, for the global economy, aka trade, for politics, for human relationships, for prosperity—the result will be what it always is. Chaos and implosion. A long spiral into conflict, in which the most aggressive, violent, and brutish will sneer at…

At what? What are they already sneering at? Jeering at? Leering at? The project of human civilization.

Civilization is a set of somethings. Let us call it that to make it crystal clear and put in plain English what it really is. Here, I mean existential somethings. Let’s make that simple, too. Somethings that allow us to exist. As more than just “animals,” and I put that in quotes because animals are far more civilized than human beings in their most primal form. The lions are not out there causing climate change or preaching fascism, after all.

So. Civilization is a set of somethings. What are they? Let’s make a short list. Science. Art. Literature. Knowledge. Democracy. History. Truth. Consent and consensus, peace, the rule of law, nonviolence.

In all these, through all these, we find a sense of equanimity in life. We forge a home in existence. If you doubt me, go ahead and imagine existing without them. What would life feel like? Be? And of course the sense of panic, doom, and despair now beginning to overwhelm us as societies and as a world—they’re exactly what it feels like to no longer have a home in existence, a safe place, a Haven in my language, in Heidegger’s terms, a dwelling place in being itself.

Please understand me. Your future is going to depend on it. Do you want one? Or do you want to throw your life away like so many people around us right now?

The golden thread unravelling in your hands (and mine) is how civilizations collapse.

III. THE FUTURE IS MADE OF NOTHING(S)

Civilization is a set of somethings. When civilizations begin to crumble, as ours is, those somethings become nothings.

Not instantly or overnight. They shatter, erode, disintegrate, unravel, deteriorate, degenerate, atrophy. There are many forms and ways of becoming nothing. But the point I want you to understand, if you really want to see into the future, is this.

The future is already crystal clear.

It is made of nothing.

Let’s take a hard look at the world around us. What does science says we should be doing? Something, anything, about our existential threats, from inequality to illiteracy to insecurity to climate change. We should have a Marshall Plan for all that, at a worldwide scale, to put it mildly. Literature, history, art—all tell us the same thing, unless somehow you missed the point of tragedy. And here we are, doing…

Nothing.

So. It’s very easy to see that in the future, the set of something which define a civilization, in this case, ours, become nothing.

Let’s take another example to make the point clearer, though. Imagine, I don’t know, a more ancient civilization. It was agricultural, and depended on irrigation. The rains were uncertain, and so its priests demanded human sacrifices to placate the gods. They created elaborate calendars to match the uncertainty of the harvest to the bloodlust of the gods. Some will know exactly which ancient civilization I speak of, but it doesn’t matter. The point is that this civilization had its own somethings, too. Crude science, knowledge, religion, technology. And as it fell, all of that became nothing.

Now think about our civilization. Please. Think. I don’t mean: regurgitate what the New York Times or Atlantic are telling you to believe. Just think for yourself. What is left of science in five decades, when today, nobody cares about it in any whatsoever to the point that it makes zero impact on our priorities as a world? How about art? What about knowledge? And so on.

But we are about to explore these domains, and I will begin the one that will frighten many of you the most.

IV. THE FUTURE OF THE ECONOMY

What’s the future of the economy? Again, I’m hesitant to share it with you. But I’ll tell you if you want to know, because time is short already.

The future is made of economic nothings.

What happens in very short order? AI eviscerates what’s left of “jobs.” Jobs become nothing. Don’t imagine that “the trades” will be immune, because in a few years, humanoid robots will be doing physical labor, too. So: the labor market goes from a something to a nothing. It becomes an absence. It ceases to exist.

Please see with me clearly. The way this issue is framed is still cloaked in haze. Pundits speak of 30% or 50% job losses. This is a poor way to understand what happens. In actuality, the labor market ceases to function as one. It becomes something else. It is not a marketplace anymore in any sense whatsoever. In this case, it becomes nothing.

What happens as a consequence of that? People don’t have incomes anymore. As they’re starved of incomes, their wealth ceases to exist, too. As their wealth ceases to exist, the fiscal balance of nations deteriorates swiftly. And in the end, money becomes nothing, too.

In this case, it becomes nothing and everything at once, which is perfectly acceptable in the higher mathematics we’re employing now. The tiny handful of people left with—literally—all the money in “the economy” emerge as its new kings and emperors and dukes. That is why they are trying so desperately to pile up as much of it as they can now, and soon enough, they will try to turn it into hard assets, land, minerals, slaves, and so on.

So: the economy becomes nothing. We can scarcely describe what will be left as “an economy” in the sense we use the word now. What do we call social-scale organizations where half of formerly working age people will never have work, can earn money, have lost all the wealth they might have inherited, and in which nations have no resources even with which to protect or shield them? Is any of that “an economy”? Maybe in some feudal sense of the term, but not really even in that one, because even in those constructs, people were employed, if only as servants and soldiers.

What do we do as economies become nothing? Nothing, because there is nothing to do. That is why this sense of panic is breaking out. There is nothing you can do about something becoming nothing. That’s like saying that you can fight a tsunami with water. It can’t be done. The physics don’t allow it.

Now. What can be done, at least between you and me, before all this happens, or accelerates to a more severe degree, of course, is to make as much money as we can, which is why I started teaching how to do just that.

Sure, there are those who’ll already say things like “AI will create more jobs than it’ll destroy!” LOL. I suggest you chuckle at that and ask them: where? How? Like what, exactly? And even if it does, who’s going to pay for them? With what?

V. THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY AND CULTURE

What happens as economies become nothing? What’s already happening? One of the great accomplishments of civilization was to value knowledge. Knowledge was something to aspire to, invest in, accumulate, and be rewarded for.

But that’s all breaking down now. Knowledge is something of a liability now. Young people are told college is a poor investment. As citizens, it’s something to scorn. As people, it avails us little. Having too much of it is the mark of being a “liberal elite” or maybe something more sinister.

So now let’s think about the future of people, culture, and society. Already, we can see that another crucial civilizational something—knowledge—is on its way to becoming nothing. That’s been happening for a while. People stopped reading books quite some time ago. What do they do now instead?

They…inhabit these strange cultural spaces. Netflix and TikTok. Spaces where they…scroll…endlessly. What are they looking for?

They are looking for nothing. The point of our culture now is to numb us. It is to reduce our intellects and spirits and emotion to zero, to an absence, to nothing. We breathe a sigh of relief when we find some dumb shit Netflix show we can zone out to for ten whole episodes—ten hours of a silent slow suicide, thank you, I can become nothing for a while.

Now. This is something else, and something new. Lowbrow culture has always existed, but its point hasn’t been to turn people into nothing. In his day, Shakespeare’s plays were famously low culture—but they made people laugh, yell, scream, cry. The TV wasteland in its golden age wasn’t about becoming nothing—it was “mindless entertainment,” sure, but the point was to be entertained, by certain social myths, amused, titillated, gripped, what have you.

People are becoming nothing before our very eyes. That is what they are encouraged to be. It is what our culture now exists for, and all it exists for. If I want to find a genuinely life-changing movie, for example, by Antonioni or Truffaut or whomever, doesn’t matter, I can never find one of those on Netflix or Amazon. Let alone, LOL, TikTok. Amazon isn’t going to ever recommend you read Sophocles, it’ll tell you to read some junky bestseller a billion times over again. It is as if the heights of human culture never existed at all. They didn’t just disappear—they never were. And so course people are becoming nothing.

VI. THE FUTURE OF PEOPLE AND RELATIONSHIPS

People are becoming nothing because there is nobody left to be.

Who can I be now? Who should I be now? What’s the point of becoming somebody, anybody, especially, yourself, let alone the highest and truest form of yourself? Should you bother becoming, I don’t know, a doctor-scientist or a great poet or artist in an age where the only that matters is if you become one of five psychotic billionaires who have all the money left in the world?Should you be a mother or a father when your kids will only struggle in strife and despair? Should you be a well-rounded human being, in a time where that’s the most reckless and foolish thing of all?

People are wrestling with these questions, and increasingly, their answer is the same. It’s a chilling one. It’s not worth it. Being somebody, anybody, me, myself, the best in me, etcetera. They are being who they are supposed to be now, according to the algorithm and the model, the fascist and the authoritarian, the crackpot and the fool. Nobody.

And so people are becoming clones, in a sense. Everybody is nobody, because nobody is supposed to be anybody anymore. There is nobody left to be, and that is by design, in a world where only five people can be anybody at all, have any possibility, contain any value. Clones don’t need to have relationships. What would be the point?

One plus one equals zero in this mathematics of nothing. Like any higher mathematics, it contains paradoxes. One plus one also equals infinity, if you’re the one who controls the algorithm and the model—infinite wealth. The algorithm and the model are now the only vessels or containers of possibility left. People are not. They are worthless now, and they’re beginning to sense it, hence, the spreading feeling of panic and ruin.

How does zero add up to infinity? What kind of insane machine performs that calculation?

VII. THE NOTHINGNESS MACHINE

I read a headline yesterday. It said: “Next Einstein, 14 Years old, Hired by Jeff Bezos.” Perhaps you see my point. Einstein probably would have vomited laughing all over himself. He worked at the post office when he made his greatest breakthroughs. There, he didn’t have to pretend that the only thing left to be was a servant.

People are choosing to become nothing because there’s nobody left to be. Take a moment to understand this. It’s a rational choice, in a sense, because the future is made of nothing. And if the future is made of nothing, what’s the point of trying to be something or someone in it? Isn’t that sort of like trying to, I don’t know, use an airplane to take off from the bottom of an ocean?

The next Einstein is out there. So is the next Sophocles, the next Galileo, the next…but in a world where something is becoming nothing, what chance will they have?

The tragedy before us is one of possibility turned to ashes.

What was once a civilization now is just a Nothingness Machine. It takes somethings, and turns them into nothings. Science, art, literature, economies, people, a planet. It turns everything into nothing.

And the only point of human existence left, we’re told, is to get rich by becoming skilled in using the Nothingness Machine to cash out a jackpot every time the wheel is spun.

I feel a sense of grief about that. Not because it’s so corrupt and disgusting and awful. But because it’s true. Only a few things matter now, and chief among them is money.

VII. THE TASK OF CIVILIZED PEOPLE IN TIMES LIKE THESE

So. The future is made of nothing. What was a civilization is now simply a set of technologies, machines, for turning somethings, science, democracy, art, truth, reason, peace, consent, life, into nothings, and “making money” along the way.

There are those who’ll misread this as nihilism. It’s the precise opposite. A reminder of the value of humanism, in all the ways above, economic, social, cultural, individual, collective. A warning against the consequences of the Nothingness Machine. (And it’s a hint to make as much money as you can now, before collapse hardens into its most severe forms, too.)

Where does that leave us? At least those of us who abjure all this is as repellent and horrific and nightmarish?

It leaves us with the obligation to create and tend to and nourish and nurture and mend and heal and cherish and treasure and defend and replenish somethings. Newer and better somethings, if we’re lucky. Now we are going to have to take the somethings we care most about, and safeguard them, to whatever extent we can. For some of us, that’ll be science, for others, democracy, for others, their community. For some, art, for some, knowledge. And so on.

Now we are guardians and caretakers of an extinct species.

Us.

The people history will say were once known, for just a brief moment, as having had a beautiful, peaceful, and prosperous civilization.

Hey, motherfuckers, I cry back to history, from the end of this futile page. At least there were those of us who tried. That’s more than I can say for the fascists, the flunkies, and the fools.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)