Finding hope in the year 2122
I don’t know about you, but my 2021 was a mix of good and bad—but mostly bad. We started off the year ridding of the worst president in U.S. history, but only after he greatly eroded trust in our most basic of democratic institutions. Science gifted us vaccines in record time, but a third of the country refused them, half of the world doesn’t have them, and their efficacy is waning as we’ve left the door open to more variants. I had an empowering and affirming year of gender milestones and yet more trans people were murdered in 2021 than any year on record, as conservatives escalated its assault on trans rights and women to retain power. And as much of the world reentered a version of normal with some schools and workplaces opening, people with disabilities, caregiving responsibilities, and anyone burdened by pandemic fatigue, burnout, depression, or long COVID was quickly left behind in service of our country’s profit machine.
It’s the new year, so the obvious thing to do is to further reflect on these triumphs and calamities and look forward to the coming year. But I don’t want to do that. The last year brought me a lot of trauma, isolation, and pain and I’ve already spent enough time with my therapist reflecting on those things. And I’m just too cynical at this point for next year to give me any hope: progressives will likely lose office, the pandemic will likely kill a few more million people, marginalized groups will lose more rights as white conservatives try to secure white power, and we’ll likely all stumble into 2023 wondering how another year of pandemic life could have possibly gone so fast.
So instead of dwell on that, I’d like to think more hopefully about a more distant future. But a few years isn’t enough: not a lot happens in a presidential term. A decade isn’t enough either: I’ve lived long enough to know that while some small things can lead to meaningful changes (flip phones can get color screens and the internet, LOL!), most of these changes take multiple decades to lead to lasting change.
How about a century? History teaches us that 100 years is enough time for big change: countries can come and go, technology can reshape and be shaped by culture, and our ecosystems can shift from stable to precarious. A century from now is also not too long after I’ll be dead; my grandparents have generally lived to 100 and it seems fun to imagine the future I might glimpse on my death bed in 2080.
So how would I like 2122 to be? Here are my wishes.
First, the basics: I’d like for humanity to still be around. I know to some this is a controversial opinion. Some of my more cynical friends see humanity as a cancer and think it would be better if we just slowly disappeared from Earth, letting it evolve life more committed to sustainable ecosystems. But I’m too humanist to want that. Whether we’re the pinnacle of intelligence in the universe or minor species amongst greater minds off planet, I think we have some beautiful things to offer the universe: love, curiosity, beauty, laughter, and art should live on.
For that to happen, we have to achieve some other things in the next century. For example, I hope we can stabilize our planet’s climate by 2122. We have the knowledge and technology to do it already; all were really lacking is trust, agreement, and leadership. And while these all seem in short supply now, humanity has a way of producing them when things get truly dire. Perhaps that means things are going to get worse before they get better. Perhaps the rest of my life will be defined by weathering that worse and helping make things better. Either way, I’ll be content when I hit 90 if I see an upward trajectory in our ability to work together to sustainably survive alongside other life on this planet.
Of course, survival is a pretty low bar. I’d also like us to make progress in equity in the next 100 years. For instance, by 2122, I’d like the world to come together to establish food, health, wellness, and shelter as a global right for every person. Our planet is too rich with space and resources to operate as if anyone must starve, live outside, or stay ill or depressed. We already have all of the wealth and knowledge we need to guarantee this; we just don’t have the will to share our resources to help each other. Perhaps the rest of my life will be helping people see the obvious need to invest in every person’s wellbeing, for their sake and ours.
I’d also like to see global culture change in liberating ways. For example, by 2122, I’d like for every human culture on the planet to recognize, embrace, and celebrate, the radical diversity of human sex, gender, ethnicity, and ability. As someone who is on the margin of many of these facets of human experience, it seems obvious to me that all of these things vary in rich and multifaceted ways. But it’s also obvious to science, with continued evidence of countless sexes, gender identities, gender expressions, cultures, norms, and values. And it’s also obvious to any scholar of religion that there is no right or best way of being—there are many ways of being. If we know that humanity is diverse in these many ways, surely in a 100 years we can help everyone know this and begin creating new cultures (and religions?) that incorporate these basic facts of nature.
Most of the dreams above require another thing to be true first: I hope we’ll learn to center community as much as we center individuals. To an extent, we already do this, even in the United States: we value individuals and individualism in this country—and have for 400 years—but we have also regularly come together to value community, in the form shared projects such as public roads, schools, and health care. Other countries achieve this balance much better. But even the most socialist countries have overlooked equity in favor of equality—often because as individuals, we fear or do not trust other individuals, at the expense of community. Perhaps by 2122, we can all learn new skills to build trust and community and recognize it as a crucial resource for safety, sustainability, and progress, even as we celebrate individuality and self-reliance.
As a technologist, you might be surprised that none of the dreams above imagine technology in 2122. That’s not for lack of ideas—I would love to see computing become as easy as learning a musical instrument (i.e., hard but achievable by anyone)—but more because I view technology as orthogonal to the dreams above. I think, for example, that even if we made no foundational progress on new technology, we could still achieve all of the things above. New technology might help us get there faster as much as it might slow us down. I think of technology more like the byproduct and amplifier of culture change than as a driver of it. If anything, we need more humanities and social sciences in our lives, and for our humanities and social sciences to more deeply engage human diversity and its relationship to technology.
But there’s room perhaps for an even more cynical take on technology, especially when we begin to imagine the paths we might take to achieve the dreams above. Technology might be a central part of helping us adjust to global warming in the next 100 years, but it will also likely be distributed in unequal ways, saving some and abandoning others. It might help us connect, as the internet has help us do, but those connections won’t always be in service of the dreams above. Many connections, in fact, are counter to those dreams, working towards a future defined by individualist greed and therefore mutually assured destruction. Resting our dreams upon something as fickle as technology seems like a poor strategy for progress.
This isn’t an argument against technology, but rather a warning: how we create it, how we use it, and more importantly, how we refuse to use it, may very well determine whether my imagined 2122 is possible. After all, we are nothing if not creatures that lean on tools to live our lives and love each other. A good place to start then—in 2022, perhaps—is to start thinking quite carefully about guidelines, policies, and norms about how we use technology in pursuit of the goals above. And equally as important, how we can start educating everyone to follow these guidelines, policies, and norms as we collectively try to survive and thrive in the next century.
Of course, none of this is going to make 2022 any more bearable than 2021. In fact, I’m increasingly convinced that we’re at the beginning of a very turbulent century of emotionally and physically exhausting political, social, and environmental chaos. But I think we can find hope in looking beyond the near term and instead imagine the 22nd century we need to start building. After all, for our biggest dreams to come true, that building needs to start today.
