🧵 The Short, Weird History of Fake Futures
Why we keep imagining tomorrow wrong—and why it always looks the same.
The Future Is Just Us Wearing Different Clothes
The future doesn’t really exist. It’s basically Schrödinger’s cat—we talk about it constantly, but it’s never actually here. For centuries, we’ve been drawing maps to places we’ve never been, slapping “Here Be Dragons” on the unknown and calling it foresight.
When you look back at old predictions—every sad “where’s my jetpack?” moment—you realize something uncomfortable: we’re not predicting the future at all. We’re just cosplaying the present in fancier outfits.
The Victorians imagined steam-powered everything because steam was their entire personality. The 1950s pictured chrome kitchens and pill dinners because that’s what abundance looked like to them. And now Silicon Valley billionaires promise mind uploads and digital immortality, which says less about tomorrow and more about today’s tech-bro fantasies.
Every future vision is basically a Mirror of Erised—it shows what we want right now, dressed up as destiny. We’re not peering through a telescope. We’re staring at our own reflection.
Phase 1: The Victorian Steam Dream (1890s–1930s)
“What if we just… added more gears?”
Victorians imagined the future as louder, faster, and more mechanical: pneumatic tubes for mail, food, even people. They dreamed of “meals in a pill” because eating was inefficient in an industrial schedule. Bodies were machines; time was money.
What they missed was that real change wouldn’t be visible or noisy. It would be invisible—electricity, software, systems you can’t hear clanking. Pattern #1: we can only imagine futures using the tools we already understand. Every tomorrow looks like today with better special effects.
Phase 2: Atomic Optimism (1945–1965)
“The future will be clean, white, and glowing.”
Postwar America imagined nuclear-powered homes, robot maids, and flying cars. The Jetsons predicted video calls but couldn’t imagine women working or anyone escaping the 9-to-5. They slapped “atomic” on everything the way we now slap “AI” on toasters.
The Space Race wasn’t just science—it was Cold War therapy. They believed infinite energy would fix human conflict and that technology would improve people by default. Instead, we got traffic jams, fragile families, and no time to enjoy the chrome kitchen.
Phase 3: Space Age to Cyber Utopia (1960s–1990s)
“The future must look impressive enough to justify itself.”
As optimism collapsed under Vietnam and Watergate, futures got darker. Star Trek showed clean progress; Star Wars showed grimy survival. Steampunk emerged as nostalgia for machines you could see and fix, conveniently ignoring the colonial mess behind them.
The ’90s then promised a digital utopia—open borders, endless growth, the “end of history.” What they missed was that connectivity doesn’t create understanding. It creates surveillance, misinformation, and tribal warfare. Y2K panic revealed a secret fantasy: maybe this whole system would crash and we could start over.
Phase 4: Corporate Digital Futures (1980s–2000s)
“The future will be interface-shaped.”
As computers went mainstream, the future stopped being mechanical and became visual. Corporate tech culture imagined tomorrow as glass, grids, and glowing UI—cyberpunk cities, infinite dashboards, humans permanently plugged in. Power shifted from engines to interfaces.
The promise was mastery through information. More data, more screens, more control. But these futures assumed humans wanted constant interaction, when what they really wanted was relief. The most “advanced” interfaces turned out to be exhausting, fragile, and unreadable. We didn’t drown because there wasn’t enough information—we drowned because there was too much.
Then something quietly broke. Progress stopped feeling inevitable. Culture looped. Products flattened. As Mark Fisher put it, the future began to cancel itself. Innovation shrank into iterations, nostalgia, and reboots. It became easier to imagine collapse than transformation—because genuine alternatives to the system itself were no longer thinkable.
Phase 5: The Digital Minimalist Future (2000s–2010s)
“The future will disappear.”
Silicon Valley promised a future that fades into the background—smart homes that anticipate your needs, frictionless interfaces, sterile white rooms that signal “progress.” The bet was simple: if technology worked perfectly, we’d be happy. Instead, optimization stripped away the weird, messy human texture that actually gives life meaning.
At the same time, tech billionaires began designing private escape hatches. New philosophies emerged arguing we should care more about hypothetical humans in the distant future than people suffering right now. That’s why Mars keeps coming up—not because humanity needs saving, but because some problems feel easier to flee than fix.
And beneath all this futurism sits an uncomfortable truth: a revival of old eugenics logic. Obsessions with “optimizing” genes, worrying that the “right” people aren’t reproducing, and imagining a future reserved for the enhanced. Those with the most power cast themselves as humanity’s shepherds, projecting their anxieties onto the cosmos—while the rest of the planet deals with very real, very present crises.
Why Fake Futures Keep Repeating the Same Mistakes
The future keeps disappointing us because we keep asking it the wrong questions. We search for spectacle instead of structure, gadgets instead of systems. Every era mistakes its desires for destiny, projecting today’s fears and fantasies forward and calling it foresight.
What actually reshapes the world is rarely dramatic or cinematic. It’s slow, distributed, and mostly invisible—networks instead of jetpacks, infrastructure instead of icons, coordination instead of genius. The future doesn’t arrive with a reveal. It seeps in through protocols, incentives, and habits.
So if we want to imagine something real, we have to stop treating the future as a mirror. As long as we do, it will only ever reflect the present back at us—slightly polished, vaguely utopian, and already obsolete the moment it appears.
Catch you next time,
Marta
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Fun and interesting, but is phase 5 supposed to be 2010s-20s or same period as Phase 4?