Human history will end, not with a bang, but with an idiotic whimper.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
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Flowing arches provide shade while being pretty. We should do more flowing arches.
2026 isn't over yet. At least we could start building that future. All it takes is starting to make steps towards it.
I built one of these...
Unfortunately the government seized it, bulldozed everything, and started building a data center.
It's the attitude, not the bricks. If the government destroys it people can go elsewhere. The important part are the people who want to build a better future.
Sure, but not many that also have the means to accomplish it. It's sort of tough to build a better world when you're stuck working for an evil corporation but would be homeless and starving if you as much as took a few days off to protest gunning random innocent people down in the streets.
I don't see a realistic way to get to that better world from where we're standing that doesn't first go through a lot of awful even worse than anything we see today, and very likely a lot of people being willing to die just in the hopes that it will make things better for people in the future but certainty that whether it does or not is something they'll never see either way.
you’re stuck working for an evil corporation
Once a future city is going, people can move there and find better work. The difficult part is to get it running.
I, gen-x, as a kid in the early eighties, imagined 2026 as either a post nuclear war apocalyptic wasteland like Mad Max, or a cyberpunk dystopia like Neuromancer, Cyberpunk 2020, or Bladerunner. One of those two came true.
EDIT:
One?
Also using communism as a negative term 🙃
Bruh same
^((replace 4 with 10)^)
^((make line a downwards parabola)^)
I disagree with that right-side graphic.
I think that when measured by Quality of Life we have actually been going backwards since maybe 2 decades.
Granted, I'm in Europe, so around here it's pretty clear that the society-wide support structures built in the 60s in areas such as Education, Universal Healthcare, Public Transportation and Social Security are actively being destroyed.
That said, even in the US you can see things like Equality of Opportunity completely reverse from reasonably equal to highly unequal (just look at the graphic of Social Mobility in the US in the past 50 years).
In other words, even the highly individualist and quite asocial American Model of prosperity ("Anybody can become anything they want") has been pretty much totally destroyed.
2026 isnt a real year. I'm convinced. 2012 wasnt real either. Always felt fake.
History ended sometime around 1990. It was determined at that time that civilization could not substantially change any further, for better or worse. No Mad Max or Terminator dystopias, but also no Star Trek type societies in which both social systems and technology become highly advanced. No, just a Sisyphean nightmare in which nothing meaningfully changes and an infinite, perpetual constant is maintained and managed, forever and ever, until the heat death of the universe. Instead of either dystopia or utopia we have an ever present, oppressive malaise that only the sweet release of death can liberate us from.
History ended sometime around 1990. It was determined at that time that civilization could not substantially change any further, for better or worse
Life did get substantially worse since 1990 though?
Mass surveillance, rise of tech billionaire class, unprecedented political polarization, KYC-rollout in banks.
Ecological crisis is accelerating with tens of thousands of dead in Europe due to recent heatwaves.
edit: also Germany, Japan, Russia and China openly remilitarizing after 80 years of relative peace. This is really bad.
Nah, we got a literary dystopia, just not one where everything is destroyed like your examples. We got the gilded cyberpunk future where everyone is tracked, privacy is dead and the lower class is held down by force. The biggest difference we have these days is that we went more heavy on AI than robotics, and the skies are a bit clearer.
We're actively doing CFCs 2.0 though so the skys being clear is going to be part of the curse before long.
Instead of either dystopia or utopia we have an ever present, oppressive malaise that only the sweet release of death can liberate us from.
That sounds like a dystopia to me.
No its great and of you don't love it you're a COMMUNIST which is the worst thing you can be and the police are on their way.
Yeah, like if everything was kinda ok, and we weren't slipping back into global fascism, but it was obvious we were just treading water as a species... that'd be middle ground. We're definitely not on middle ground.
Youre exactly right. Ended around 99 or earlier. All future years feel fake.
Fukuyama around, find out.
~~Only that enough nuclear energy since the 1970ies could have prevented global warming and the misery that will come from it.~~
He is best known for his book The End of History and the Last Man
Angry nerd neck beards aren't really the archetype for those resistance to feeding babies or social programs...should be a rich woman wearing Gucci or something.
Why is common sense depicted as wrinkly cucks?
Because they are starved and have no influence.