In 2029, the Internet Will Make Us Act Like Medieval Peasants
What if we aren’t being accelerated into a cyberpunk future so much as thrown into some fantastical premodern past?
By Max Read
In late August, a black-sailed ship appeared in the harbor carrying a 16-year-old visionary, a girl who had sailed from the far north across a great sea. A mass of city-dwellers and travelers, enthralled by her prophecies, gathered to welcome her. She had come to speak to the nations of Earth, to castigate us for our vanities and warn us of coming catastrophe. “There were four generations there cheering and chanting that they loved her,” the writer Dean Kissick observed. “When she came ashore, it felt messianic.”
I can’t have been the only person who felt, when Greta Thunberg made landfall in New York City in late summer, as though I were living, strangely, through the early pages of a fantasy epic. For most of my life, the paradigm for imagining the future has been dystopian science fiction: In every photo of a gleaming neon city, in every story of advanced and ruthless cyberwarfare was reflected the ultramodern, hyper-capitalist visions of cyberpunk writers like William Gibson, whose work was so influential it shaped how the early architects of the internet understood their creation…
