The Futurological Schtick

One really wonders if the futurological schtick will ever stale for the saucer-eyed consumers on whom it preys...

Will we ever weary of the mainstream futurology of military recruitment ads promising combat-qua-videogames or better-than-evah EZ-pour spouts and herbal male enhancement and anti-aging face cream ads promising easy abundance and eternal youth?

Will we ever disdain the techno-utopian futurology of "serious" think-tank scenarists peddling corporate-militarist triumphalism by asking the same burning questions year after year?

How many years to AI? (only answer that matters now: not)

Is it unethical to clone them or him or her? (only answer that matters now: can't)

How will our economy cope with robot slaves? plastic abundance? digital utopia? energy too cheap to meter? thousand-year lifespans? (only answer that matters now: won't)

Can "geoengineering" solve anthropogenic climate catastrophe? (only answer that matters now: stop!).

Futurology is an advertising genre, and as such is mostly a matter of relentless exaggeration veering not occasionally into outright fraud.

In its mainstream developmentalist variations futurology peddles endless exploitation of the precarious (cheap energy, cheap labor, cheap credit, cheap goods) for the benefit of the privileged as Progress Unto THE FUTURE to fearful and greedy rubes all the while picking their pockets and looting the commons.

In its superlative variations futurology peddles delusive faith-based fantasies of outright transcendence of the human condition, deranging the contingency of our knowledge and error of our ways into fantasies of superintelligence (brute amplifications via neuroceutical pill-popping or shiny cyborg-shells, guidance via parental-angelic Robot Gods), deranging the vulnerability of our dis-ease and distress into fantasies of superlongevity (near-immortalization via scoopage into shiny Robot bodies, or sooper-genetic therapies, or uploading into cyberspatial spirit realms), deranging the demands and promises of stakeholder politics into fantasies of post-political superabundance (robo-slaves, nanofogs, ubicomp, immersive virtualities, edenic asteroids).

In all its variations, whether mainstream or superlative, one discerns in futurological formulations the squalid screaming infantile id of industrial extractive petrochemical broadcast-mediated corporate-militarist consumer capitalism confronted with the substance and prospect of its consummating oblivion into which it would prefer, however avoidable, idiotically to accelerate.