After dread
A short talk / article written for the Global Foresight Summit 2020. Available below as embedded audio.
It took just a fortnight for ‘these uncertain times’ to become a cliché. Sharp discontinuities like this pandemic – let’s not call it a black swan, because it was both predictable and predicted – have a habit of injecting new terminology into public consciousness. This time around: social distancing, herd immunity, furloughed workers, and flattened curves. We shake our heads at the same press reports, archive those same panicked retailer emails, stare in disbelief at the same steepening graphs. It’s an unfortunate golden age for information design. If 2019 was the year of the algorithm, 2020 is surely the year of the logarithm.
But who’d have thought it? The shock of the new is that the new turned out to be… absence. With half the world in lockdown, there’s no movement, no commerce, no economy. Covid–19 has forced the shark of modern capitalism to stop swimming. And so the only persistent narrative of our lives collapses around us, and the void rushes in.
It’s in vacuums like this that fear begins to spread. With the peak still days away, we fear for our loved ones, our health workers, our jobs, and even our votes. As part of that much-discussed group, Team Underlying Conditions, I myself feel this fear acutely. And fear changes us. We start to see our fellow human as a potential enemy, a hostile vector, and this fear turns us against the world. It undermines neighbourhoods and communities. It sours us to humanity.
But, thinking about it, fear isn’t quite the right term. The mathematics of the situation are more about statistics than probabilities. It’s not fear: it’s something more like dread. What we feel isn’t just concern that bad things might happen: we know they’ll happen, that they’re happening right now. All we can do is hope the statistics end up being less awful than they might be. Covid–19 is a progressive illness: it’s the second week that kills you. Similarly, the stress of lockdown could easily cause a gradual worsening in our collective spirit. In our darkest times, it’s not just the virus we fear, but the future itself.
For many of us, particularly the sort of person who watches or gives talks about the future in their spare time, it’s a novel experience to live amid dread. Plenty of other folks, typically the ones society has trodden upon and discarded, would contend that dread is nothing new. But here the mathematics also dictate the eventual pattern, and reassure us this dread is only temporary. Exponentiality can’t last forever in a finite population. Soon, although nowhere near soon enough, we’ll reach a point of viral saturation, of immunity, or – if we’re lucky – develop a vaccine, at which point those terrible red lines will crawl back down those log plots. So we know this dread will recede in time, to be replaced by a complex mix of relief, guilt, and anger.
But there is another dread. Just like Covid–19, climate crisis is underpinned by scientific certainty. The punishment’s in the post; the only question is how bad things will get. And so the predominant emotion about climate is also not fear but dread.
Again, this is hardly news to a particular section of society. An entire generation is already grappling with climate dread, seeing the future not as a promise but as a threat. Their reward for their noble, sad defiance – school strikes and protests against the tide of certainty – is name-calling (‘snowflake’) and scorn from the generations that fiddled with their satnavs while the planet burned.
We have to be careful here not to overextend the comparisons between Covid–19 and climate crisis. It feels crass and insensitive, whataboutery at precisely the wrong time, and it would be a category error to claim that how we experience one will foretell how we experience the other. But it’s also a mistake to overlook that future horrors act as the backdrop to today’s dread. If we can learn anything about this crisis that alleviates the next, we must.
As the RSA’s Anthony Painter describes, this crisis gives us an opportunity to forge a bridge world that crosses some of the chasm between today’s rotten systems and the sustainable versions we’ll need to survive climate change. Similarly, Dan Hill points to weak signals, glimmers of more resilient futures amid the crisis.
Because as well as the very real horror, the mass slowdown caused by the virus is giving us a glimpse of something else, aspects of another green world just within reach.
And, of course, we have the memes. Dinosaurs return to Times Square; Nessie comes ashore at Inverness. Nature is healing, thanks to this overdue pause.
Where everyone seems to agree is that things can’t go back the way they were. As Fred Scharmen says, this isn’t the end of the world, but it’s certainly the end of a world. We live in an era of ‘in an era of’s: this crisis has struck at what we’re repeatedly told is a hugely vulnerable moment, when our trust in grand narratives, institutions, and expertise has collapsed. We’ve learned the economic recovery was built of balsa-thin gig-economy precarity, and authoritarians have exploited our democratic disquiet. So we conclude this dislocation has finally demolished the fragile walls of whatever came before; that our old presents and futures are now anachronisms.
‘Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.’ —Arundhati Roy
And so, in an era of narrative collapse, there’s a scramble for new narratives. Predictably, various interest groups are already jostling for position, trying to project their own blueprints onto the ruins. Far-right accelerationists see the virus as a perfect catalyst for collapse, intensified by prepper paranoia and racist conspiracy, and allowing a world of white supremacy to emerge from the rubble. Leftists, myself included, have found a new home for our common refrain: surely capitalism really is dying this time? Writing for Al-Jazeera, Paul Mason compares Covid–19 to the Black Death (a comparison not welcomed by all), and claims the panic measures governments and banks have resorted to are one-way valves; in other words, that a new economic world is already upon us. Economic pipe dreams have become immediate, urgent reality. With interest rates having never recovered from 07/08, the only lever left to pull was the one marked ‘cash’, in the form of massive quantitative easing and the closest thing to Universal Basic Income conservative governments could conceivably offer. Along the way, claims Mason, giants across numerous sectors will have to be nationalised – airlines, retailers, railways, insurers – all humiliating concessions for die-hard believers in the power of the free market.
It’s clear the role of the nation state is being transformed, although we must remember that in some countries – the United States, India, and Brazil, say – it’s only regional government that is holding society together in the face of federal denial and incompetence. And it’s likely the Overton window has already lurched left, as voters realise capitalism is now so fragile it has to be bailed out by socialism every decade or two. But I’m not convinced by the urge to stamp set-piece futures onto the blank canvas. Nor is Richard Sandford.
Are these futures right for the post-pandemic world? They were made before the current situation, after all, using the ideas and categories and levers that were in place before the virus spread. I think it’s worth asking whether the building-blocks of these ready-to-hand futures are going to be unchanged. […] There are some big changes underway that might mean we don’t value futures the way we do now, or at least that we might value different futures.
An even larger concern is how eagerly we believe the status quo will quit without a fight. Remember, just five years passed between the starry-eyed postcapitalism of Occupy and the jolts of Brexit and Trump. Old habits have a nasty tendency to return to claim their ancient territories; the industrial growth era may be in the ICU right now, but it’s desperate to make a full recovery, and has all the resources it needs to do so.
In times of dramatic flux, it’s hard to remember the old reality, but there’s a corollary: on the other side, it’s likely we’ll try hard to forget the crisis times. The world may well find itself so pleased to have survived through the present dread that it wilfully ignores the larger dread to come. After all, the politicians have promised us a V-shaped recession, suggesting a painless rebound to the way things were. It’s easy to imagine a developed world joyfully lapsing into comforting consumption, rebooking those cancelled vacations and finally upgrading the SUV as a reward for months of enforced temperance. To paraphrase Herbert Marcuse, whatever you throw at capitalism, it will absorb and sell back to you.
This pandemic has reshuffled the deck of probables, plausibles, and possibles. Foresight professionals know this crisis is urging us to reimagine healthcare, supply chains, and urban space. Many of us would agree that the airline industry, currently elbowing its way into the bailout queue, will rightly find its power diminished in the coming decades. Some of us would contend the ideology of eternal growth deserves some overdue competition from steady-state or degrowth perspectives. But it would be a huge mistake to think these preferable futures, however appealing, justifiable, or essential, will automatically come to pass. The moral course is never a given, and should doesn’t always translate to will.
Change happens where power meets appetite, but dread stems from a lack of agency: the future is only something to fear if we can’t influence it. And lack of agency is surely a hallmark of recent years. Networked technology, worshipping the twin gods of simplicity and magic, has indeed done simply magical things, but simultaneously eroded people’s understanding of their possessions and eroded their privacy alike. The tech giants, once seen as useful innovators, have become vast repositories of power and wealth. Economies have become riddled with complex tumours of creative accounting and financial obfuscation. Inequality grows, power centralises, information overloads, and people feel control over their destinies slipping away.
Is it any surprise, then, that some turn to conspiracy for comfort? 5G masts aflame, pizza restaurant death threats, anti-vax paranoia: all stem from a need to explain a world beyond our control. Populism is of course the political wing of conspiracy, a promise that there’s been a solution to the world’s problems all along, but the elites have kept it from you this whole time.
Conspiracy is in league with dread. It excuses people from contributing to the future: why bother, when invisible hands are pulling the strings above us? Conspiracy is a withdrawal from the future, an abandonment of any prospect of agency. Conspiracy and dread both anaesthetise; they conquer all ambition.
The privilege to talk about the shape of the future is just that: a privilege. Events like the Global Foresight Summit are understandable and probably welcome ways for us to discuss challenges ahead. But we must recognise that folks like us – whether we work in technology, foresight, or design – wield disproportionate influence over the future. Surely, then, an emerging responsibility of our collective fields is to ensure this power is better distributed in years to come? We have to re-engage the public in discussions about their futures; we need to restore some of the agency they have lost in recent years. We have to help forge a future beyond dread.
If the world should never return to normal, it follows that there should be no new normal for our fields, either. For too long we’ve been serving the wrong goals: helping large multinationals and tech giants accrue more power and wealth at the expense of other actors, contributing to the atomisation of society by designing products for individual fulfilment ahead of the wellbeing of our communities. Our rethought world will need to prioritise people and societies, ecologies and environments, ahead of profit and productivity. If you use this crisis to thought-prophesise about the new era ahead, don’t you dare return to your cosy consulting gig with Palantir or Shell afterward. Own your impact. Act in the interests of this better world you espouse, and withdraw your support for the forces that brought us to the brink.
We therefore have to rethink our metrics of success. Richard Sandford again:
‘[The old goal was] to claim new ground and set the agenda, working with the ways of managing attention that cultural commentary depends on now: a combination of posts on Medium, op-eds, twitter threads, podcasts, blog posts, articles in the Atlantic/Tortoise/Guardian/the Conversation/etc. The need to produce commentary to the rhythms established by this network favours publication over reflection. It’s hard to see how this will lead to the new way of doing things that is necessary for us to avoid returning to the old normal.
To me, the primary goal of the foresight community now should be to re-empower the people of the world; to use our skills to help people feel some agency in shaping their own futures. Right now, that means helping people out of helplessness. When the industrial growth era finally breathes its last – whether it’s killed by this pandemic or by climate crisis – we’ll need to mourn it. Those of us who believe in brighter futures to come should walk alongside others through this grieving process, helping them cross the familiar waters of denial, anger, bargaining, and depression. Only once the world learns to accept and understand the loss of this era can we work together to forge brighter eras ahead.
The counter to dread, we are told, is hope. Hope is another of those modern-day clichés, with climate literature in particular following a rigid template: first the doom, then the hope, carefully dosed and tempered by a demand for enormous urgency. Even then, we must be mindful and cautious that the hope we swear by might be unconvincing or invisible to others. Philip Marrii Winzer’s piece I’d rather be called a climate pessimist than cling to toxic hope makes the case for a community decimated by the modern age.
As Aboriginal people, we’ve been fighting the capitalist, colonial system that created this crisis for over 200 years. Forgive me if I find your brand of hope a little hard to swallow […] We know we’re in an abusive relationship with the institutions of power and capital that occupy our lands, but does the climate movement? Much of what the movement focuses its energy and resources on feels a lot like asking an abuser to change their ways.
To me, the message is clear: we will not succeed by simply evangelising our own paternalistic, privileged messages of hope upon others. We won’t convince others that we can conquer the climate crisis by pointing to our previous models of utopias yet unrealised. The only sustainable way to defeat dread is to give people the skills and the powers to forge their own preferable futures. Hope comes from communities, not from experts; it arises with empowerment and inclusivity, not the promises of politicians.
If we are at last able to banish the vestiges of the doomed status quo – as indeed we should – then we have a huge task ahead. Everything is now up for grabs. Our world will need root-and-branch reform, redesign, and reclamation. If we’re to prevent old inequities returning, and keep future generations out of the captivity of conspiracy and hopelessness, we need to force power and money to flow in new, sustainable directions through new, sustainable systems. We have centuries of effort ahead of us. After grief, after dread, comes the most important work of our lives.
