You might well wonder what the heck we were up to in the mid-2020s.
You might well wonder what the heck we were up to in the mid-2020s.
Dear American resident in the year 2051:
I don’t know how you’ve come upon this missive a quarter century after it was written. Maybe it’s still alive in text form on what we once called the “internet,” or perhaps it’s being read to you by an artificial-intelligence-powered simulacrum of me. (I just assume I won’t make it 25 more years once someone inevitably invents a drone that can deliver Chick-fil-A directly to my mouth.)
I want to apologize to you, denizen of the future, for the decisions that we, the people of 2026, made that determined how you live. In America today, drastic societal changes over a small period of time have had immense impact on our lives — they’ve come faster than our minds can grasp them. You likely have had time to reflect on our poor choices.
“It is pleasant to observe, how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next,” wrote the second-most-famous Swift in world history (Jonathan, not Taylor). And you are now no doubt paying the taxes levied by our generation.
When you ponder the era in which I’m writing this, I hope you see it as a ridiculous anomaly. In the space of two weeks, the president of the United States suggested that New Mexico be renamed “New America,” posted a computer-generated video of himself cosplaying as the Green Lantern, called a New York Times reporter by the name of Maggie “Maggot,” posted a graphic ranking himself as the greatest president in U.S. history, and moved to mothball the Kennedy Center because courts blocked his effort to add his name to the building. To cap this all off, he offered American voters a $5,000 bribe to elect Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.
If all this sounds like America was an open-air asylum for a few years, then congratulations — your generation has righted the course of the nation and returned to sanity. On the other hand, if none of what I have just said seems out of place, then we have foisted on you a perpetual cycle of politics-as-entertainment, where only self-aggrandizing hucksters rise to power.
Yet the 2020s were a time when we decided that many of humanity’s imperfections were too much to handle, so we looked to technology to sand down the rough edges, making personal tasks smooth and effortless. We outsourced our knowledge to AI, making smart people dumb and dumb people think they were smart. Whereas knowledge was once a valuable commodity, earned by those who worked hard to gain it, every fact in the universe — subject to editing by the owners of AI companies — became publicly accessible, with insights deriving from that information easily plagiarized and passed off as one’s own.
If you’re reading this, it means that AI didn’t kill off humanity, as some techno-geeks are currently warning could happen. (As of this writing, leaders of the largest AI companies are pleading for a type of regulatory capture that would shut out potential competitors — the “stop us before we end the world again” strategy.) So we survived, but constrained by an algorithm that prevents learning from mistakes and unpredictable happenings. Everything taken care of by the cloud. We knew the risks, but we wanted it anyway.
Presumably, in 2051, AI will have fixed every problem, allowing you to lead an easier, conflict-free life. Or was it the opposite? Profit often follows controversy, so settled facts will be muddled by those selling their own vapid expertise, casting many Americans into information holes from which they will never escape.
As the Beatles sang in 1967, “Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about.” Everything is entertainment. In our time, politicians became influencers. Actual influencers taught young people that in order to gain attention, you have to behave in such a way that nobody could stand to be with you in a room for more than 15 seconds. Actors strove to be politicians, while politicians strove to be actors — with each side demonstrating a manifest unfitness for the other job.
And yet while tech bros concocted ways to drain the world of its humanity, society decided that it was best to spend its time on manufactured controversies, such as whether using pretty women to sell products sets women back. Or breathlessly covering a 22-year-old quarterback’s dumb joke about a viral video. AI is supposed to give us all more free time, which we now choose to spend pretending to be outraged at mundane, predictable cultural happenings.
Are you annoyed by the tiny drone the government uses to follow you around, so it knows your location and activities at all times? Are you sick of strangers wearing glasses with cameras in them, so they immediately know your life history as they peer at you walking down the street? Well, back in the mid-2020s, a lot of people thought full surveillance of all our movements was a great idea. Are the people of your time familiar with the word “privacy,” or is it as foreign to you as the word “blatherskite” was to the people of mine?
Surveillance of individuals will likely have gotten easier, as there will be fewer people inhabiting our country. Interpersonal relationships, which produce offspring, have been losing their appeal, given that basic needs can be delivered by a Wi-Fi connection.
What else did we mess up? Thanks to us, the great college sports rivalries are gone, replaced by a bloodless conference money machine. Speaking of money, thanks to the 2020ers, you can now bet on anything via prediction markets, as once purely enjoyable activities came to be seen as gambling opportunities.
If the future goes well, I hope none of this column makes any sense to you. Here’s hoping that somewhere down the line, we all wise up and realize that while humans are often inconvenient, loud, inconsistent, unpredictable, and complicated, they make the world a place worth living in. I hope you can all have a hearty laugh at the mid-2020s and that America is made great once again with President Sydney Sweeney at the helm.