Some Predictions
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a vintage Yeezy Season 3 boot stamping on a human face — forever.
By Eric Shorey
CW: Racial violence, sexual violence, gun violence, self-harm, suicide, mental illness
In the future, everything will be the same — but worse.
In the future we’ll have run out of nostalgia. A million amateur cultural critics have noted the ways that fashion’s 20-year retro-cycle has been shortened to 15 years, and more recently to around ten. “I Love The 80’s” turned into “I Love The 90’s” turned into “Best Week Ever” — nostalgia for a few days prior. Fashion brands will no longer have fresh trends to re-cycle. The only thing chic will be what happened yesterday. Balenciaga will begin selling limited edition $5000 t-shirts with the headlines of the day before screen-printed on them. Hypebeasts and fashionistas will program bots to buy up the shirts milliseconds after they appear on the website. Then, they’ll re-sell the shirts for closer to $50,000 that same day. The value of the shirts will depreciate almost instantaneously. Shirts that feature headlines from a week ago will be worth less than nothing. But in the few days in which the shirts remain a hot commodity, they will be used as a kind of shadow currency — essentially a money laundering operation for the hyper-wealthy — all happening in micro-moments. An invisible stock market of instantly out-of-fashion garments; a crypto-economy of instant consumption.
In the future, the right will win. Having learned that the surefire way to game both capitalism and democracy is pure and utter ruthlessness, they will emerge victorious in a series of major elections, after which Democratic gains will be rendered statistically impossible due to rezoning, the curtailing of voting rights, and bald-faced election jerry-rigging. They will unapologetically gerrymander and sabotage their way to victory. They will start engaging in election tampering. Then, when the few remaining Democrats in power attempt to investigate, the Republicans will accuse them of radical hypocrisy. They will increase taxes on the poor and will offer tax subsidies to the uber-wealthy. They will pay people to be rich. The left will have collapsed into internecine battles eventually escalating into intra-community violence. White gay men, in an attempt to assimilate, will start attacking transgender POC in the streets. Racial minorities will wage clandestine urban wars against each other. The far-right US government, in a pitiable and purposefully shallow attempt at what they’ll pretend is equity, will mandate that all television shows, movies, video games, and literature will have specific character quotas reflecting actual population statistics: if 20% of the population is Asian, 20% of the characters must be Asian. They’ll call it “racial fairness.”
In the future, social media will be considered the cigarettes of the 21st century. Endless amounts of scientific research will empirically demonstrate that social media exacerbates depression, intensifies anxiety, and facilitates the spread of mass psychogenic, pathological phenomena. In the minds of your average American, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok will be implicitly associated with mental illness. Twitter will have mostly devolved into a never-ending series of sadomasochistic sexual fantasies (usually rape fantasies, often fantasies of childhood sexual abuse) and echolalia- and coprolalia-like rants typed out by people suffering from active delusions. Huge swathes of people will still read it every day. “It’s entertaining!” they’ll say. These sites will mostly be used by the terminally cool, the decidedly self-destructive, or the maniacally conspiratorial — which, unfortunately, will amount to a sizable chunk of the population. Suicide rates will skyrocket. (The right will blame the uptick in self-destruction on Marxist academic institutions and will fight to criminalize humanities eduction. Eventually, they’ll succeed.) Despite the ever-more-obvious links between social media usage and psychopathology, the government will not restrict or censor the Internet in any way, nor will they implement tools to curtail its damage. They wouldn’t want to stifle anyone’s profits, now would they? Instead, they’ll run multi-billion dollar, ham-fisted advertising campaigns that repeatedly announce the deleterious effects of social media on the public’s mental health. The commercials will be decidedly un-cool: they’ll feature out-of-fashion celebrities and obscure one hit wonders spouting corny slogans. “D.A.R.E. to log off!” or something like that. When opening your web browser, a mandatory reminder will flash on the screen: “WARNING: SOCIAL MEDIA USAGE IS DETRIMENTAL TO YOUR MENTAL WELLBEING.” These efforts to warn against the damage caused by social media will, of course, have a reversing effect. Perhaps the campaigns were always designed to have a reversing effect…
In the future, crime will become irrelevant. Both Republicans and Democrats will join in non-partisan agreements to hyper-fund the police, despite continuous declines in actual crime (other than hate crimes and school shootings, which police forces will no longer monitor at all). The politicians will share purposefully misleading and obviously doctored statistics to an increasingly anxious and increasingly gullible population, thus convincing the public of the absolute necessity of facial recognition software. Ethicists and researchers who decry the usage of this tech will be characterized as pro-crime communists by the news media and will be fired from their jobs. Cameras and video technology, having already become completely ubiquitous, will be able to identify you (with close to 100% accuracy) and match you to your personal records (which, of course, include your favorite brands) using micro-images of tiny patches of skin, eyelash patterns, ear shape, finger shape, posture, and gifs of minuscule unconscious gestures. The remaining street activists, all of whom will be queer — heterosexuals will have lost their taste for protest entirely after seeing the brutality with which opposition is always met and realizing the sheer ineffectiveness of dissent — will begin donning confounding, psychedelic make-up patterns that scramble the facial recognition software.
Drag, as a result, will again be made illegal following an immense public safety campaign in which the art form will be characterized as dangerous to society because it circumvents “the software that keeps our families safe.” The politicians will pretend it’s about security, but it’s obvious to everyone that they are attempting to criminalize non-normative gender presentations of all kinds.
In the future, the metaverse won’t really be a thing. People don’t like feeling dizzy when they put on the clunky goggles. The hardware might get slimmer and more seamless, but it’s redundant: our digital lives are already thoroughly integrated into our “real” lives. It didn’t work with Second Life (despite colleges and corporations investing millions into virtual campuses) and it didn’t work with Playstation Home. Sandbox is stupid and ugly. Animal Crossing is probably as good as it gets. We don’t need a separate realm for online interactions. Once every 5 years for the next 50 or so years, some trendy (or post-trendy) tech startup or mega-conglomeration will attempt to reboot this same absurd idea. It will attract some scammers every time, hustle-and-grind types selling digital real estate for a few mil here and there, making their money, buying their yachts. And then people will stop caring.
In the future, CNN and MSNBC will become what Buzzfeed used to be: SEO-driven clickbait, pictures of cute animals, aggressively pleasant articles about novelty food items, quizzes about what mental illness you might have, personality tests based on debunked psychological theories from the 1970s. They’ll start introducing listicles of “hilarious” reaction gifs from TV shows that haven’t even debuted yet. Leftist news orgs — along with the study of history — will be criminalized due to their “perpetuation of disinformation” designed to make “normal” people “feel bad.” Other centrist news orgs will be reduced to fluff and occasional fear-mongering. Fox News will function as State Media. Obviously.
In the future, hentai-addicted Internet trolls, using a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories (or, also, videos of cute animals) as bait, will utilize a hideous series of subliminally psycho-active images, videos, and sounds that will effectively erase the personalities of those who view them, allowing the perverse keyboard warriors to amass control of brainwashed, ultra-paranoid, paramilitary organizations that will perpetrate quasi-state-sponsored violence against sexual and racial minorities. The police will look the other way because, like the trolls, they find it funny.
In the future, there will be four major religions in the United States. (Other religions will still exist, of course, but they’ll be considered politically inconsequential.)
1) Atheism
2) QAnon Originalism (adherents and disciples of Q, who study the original Q Drops as Holy texts)
3) QAnon Textualism (adherents of “interpreters” of Q, who claim to have either divine information, back-door CIA intel, or both — most QAnon Textualists will have never read the original Q’s actual posts)
4) A grotesque pseudo-Christian amalgamation of nationalist/jingoistic evangelical fascism and prosperity gospel ideology that amounts to a machiavellian worship of American wealth. Using Christo-fascist jargonistic dogma, this new kind of Jesus-freak (whose faiths, beliefs, behaviors, and spiritual practices no longer have anything do with Jesus’s actual teachings) will revere the trillionaire children and quadrillionaire grandchildren of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos as living Saints. Kanye West will have formed his own church, a slightly smaller offshoot of this fourth category, in which he espouses himself as a kind of God-King.
Hypebeasts, tech bros, and the hyper-religious mentally ill will flock to his congregation in an unlikely and semi-psychotic partnership. He will reject all forms of psychopharmacology and encourage his cultists to enter a permanent manic / ecstatic state, representing a demented, omnipotent union with God / Himself. He’ll begin self-harming on stage with entire stadiums full of believers cheering him on. He will continue to amass wealth through extremely profitable, billion-year contracts with Gap, Bose, Sony, Adidas, and Pizza Hut. Vintage Yeezy garments will be considered Holy Relics. His grand-daughter, Donda West II, will be the first unborn child to be offered a lifetime (and post-lifetime) influencer contract — with Prada. Even after she dies, her hologram will sell handbags.
In the future, Barron Trump will be President.