How to stay hopeful
This week’s question comes to us from Kevin Smith:
Dystopias are fun to read about but suck to live through. What do you think society looks like in 25–50 years? Is there hope?
Dystopias were fun to read about because I understood them as warnings, and I assumed everyone else reading dystopian fiction understood them the same way as well. They were, after all, written as warnings, and at least as far as I was concerned the author’s intent was very clear. The same can be said about movies. When Darth Vader first appeared on screen to me as a 10 year old, I immediately understood that this was a bad guy. Everything from the lighting, to the angle he was filmed at, to the menacing soundtrack acted as a signifier that this was the villain of the story. I was 10 years old, and I got it. I’m guessing you did too, as did the majority of our readers.
And yet… just a few weeks ago Sam Altman, Sith-in-Chief at OpenAI decided to unveil GPT-5 with a tweet of the Death Star appearing over the horizon. Cool. At least comparing his “there are five B’s in ‘blueberry’” super-toy to a planet-destroying weapon was honest, if not in the way he believed it to be.
Apparently, some of us didn’t understand that dystopian novels and movies were to be seen as warnings, but instead as recipes. Which is bad enough. What’s worse is that so many of the people who did understand are now fawning over these fools in order to curry favor, stay on the corporate ladder, and feed our faces to the leopards in the hope that the leopards will not eat their face. Spending ten minutes on the Death Star Intranet, otherwise known as LinkedIn, will reveal way too many people telling you to “get with the program,” “don’t get left behind,” “it’s coming whether you want it or not,” and other fear-inducing scenarios that can be mostly summed up as “I joined the empire to save my skin and I’d feel less guilty about having joined the empire if I could convince you to also join the empire.” Linkedin should just implement an OPEN TO FASCISM badge. It would do well.
The thing is, I wrote about building the Torment Nexus last week, and then got really depressed, so I don’t want to do it again. Mental health and all that. So this week I want to focus on the last part of your question. “Is there hope?”
I think it’s important to have something to walk towards. So let’s look at what society could look like in 25–50 years, because honestly one of the things that drives me insane is thinking of all the progress we could be making as societies (plural, always plural) if we weren’t living in this dystopian nightmare.
The problem with dystopias is that dystopias are easy. You simply stop giving a shit about things or people that you should give a shit about, or things that don’t affect you directly, thinking they’re somebody else’s problem and boom—shit starts getting dystopian real quick. Dystopia is basically entropy playing out to its natural conclusion. Add a few unethical dipshits, give them unlimited money to build data centers, and we can get there by Tuesday.
The bigger problem is that the opposite of dystopia is utopia. Which literally means “no place” in the original Greek. Utopia is hard. Utopia means that everything is perfect. No problems. No mess. The idea of utopia is such a fantasyland that most religions just punt it into a thing called “the afterlife.”
It’s impossible to achieve a utopia with people because people love problems and messes. It’s kind of our thing. And we’re good at it! It’s easier to picture a dystopian future because all you have to do to get there is nothing, while a utopia seems unrealistic. Which it very much is. Mostly because of Brad. So we need to forget about that whole idea. (We also need to stop inviting Brad to things.)
There is hope if we give ourselves hope. So let’s give ourselves some. As a treat. Grab your bike, cause we’re going for a ride and step one is leaving your car behind.
Hope comes in small steps.
Back during lockdown, the city of San Francisco decided to make 1.4 miles (a little over 2km) of JFK Drive car-free. My readers from San Francisco, who are currently reading this while eating a $30 sandwich, know what I’m talking about, but let me give some background to the people googling “are sandwiches really $30 in San Francisco.” JFK Drive is a big, wide street that cuts through Golden Gate Park, which is on the western part of town. It takes you from the Upper Haight to the Pacific Ocean, past the Conservatory of Flowers, the DeYoung Museum of Art, the California Academy of Science, a lake where old dudes race little RC boats (honestly aspirational), and a bison paddock. It’s lovely. And for the last five years it’s been completely car-free. At least 1.4 miles of it. (You can still drive to the bison paddock.) It wasn’t easy. There was a lot of voting. There was a lot of counter-voting. There were threats of recalls. And a lot of bad faith arguments from the DeYoung. But this is all San Francisco inside baseball. The main point is that if you want to walk, bike, jog, teach your kid to bike, roller skate, etc, etc, etc, you can now do that along JFK Drive without fear of getting hit by a car. You’ll also encounter some great public art, street murals, food trucks, coffee carts, and even a few quasi-playable pianos along the route. It’s a net gain for the community.
This morning on Bluesky, Marisa Kabas asked people about their favorite part about living in a city. With over 900 replies, many (if not most) of them are some flavor of walkability, or not needing a car. Whatever a better future looks like it appears that most people don’t want to drive to it. They want to walk, ride their bike, or take the bus. In that order.
I’ve always loved cities because you can walk to so many things, and while walking you meet other people wandering around the city. Sometimes they’re wearing good outfits. Sometimes they’re walking a good dog. Sometimes they’re doing skateboard tricks in the Safeway parking lot. I enjoy seeing all this stuff.
Last week I was on a podcast and I was asked how designers could be better prepared for “the future,” or something along those lines. I said they needed to go outside more. I don’t think this is the answer the host was looking for, but I meant it. Designers, any and all flavors, need to spend more time outside. (Everyone does.) They need to walk their neighborhood. They need to eat out once in a while. They need to meet their neighbors. They need to sit on their stoops, or fire escapes, or park benches and watch the city unfurl around them.
I’m a city person. So my ideas about a better society are city-focused. I’m not apologizing for that, as much as stating the fact that I only know what I know. (It’s possible that there’s a rural utopia out there, but someone else is gonna have to write that story.) When I think of society I think of cities, because cities are composed of groups of people who’ve had to learn how to live together. When I think of a good society I think of a group of people who thrive not despite their differences, but because of them. I think of kids riding their bikes through car-free streets. I think of folks running to the bodega on the corner for a last-minute ingredient they need for dinner. I think of someone bringing home-made donuts to the dogpark. I think of flipping through the bins at a record store. I think of walking to the public library, only to find a book in the little library someone put up on the corner. I think of the kids doing wheelies on their dirt bikes on 3rd Street. Celebrating these things takes us a step away from dystopia.
The best part of living in a city is that the majority of the shit the city offers can be shit I’m not interested in, and that still leaves a whole lot of shit that I am interested in. As well as shit I didn’t realize existed until someone else offered it. Which means my city needs to be filled with people that know about things that I couldn’t even dream about. Finding and supporting those things takes us a step away from dystopia.
Cities aren’t perfect. By any stretch of the imagination. You pack people into tight spaces and shit is gonna happen. There is crime. There is homelessness. But most of what ails a city comes from a lack of love towards others. We don’t have a homeless problem. We have a compassion problem. Seeing our fellow human beings as people who need our love and our compassion takes us a step away from dystopia, and a step closer to something better.
Cities aren’t perfect. But they can be perfected. In small steps. By people like me and you.
Our current dystopia is built on fear. Fear of our neighbors. Fear of our communities. Fear of others. Fear that they will eventually come for you, so why not offer them someone else in your place. It’s easy to fall for this and let dystopia wash over you. You literally have to do nothing. You can sit there, thinking that it’s all too big to fix, because it is very very big. And it is very very bad.
Dystopia is easy. You take what people are afraid of and tell them it’s right outside their door. The cure is to open the door and see the truth for yourself. What’s on the other side of the door is your neighbors, and some of them brought donuts.
There is hope. As long as you are here, and I am here, and we are here there is hope. It may not be a lot, but with every hopeful step you take there’s a little more.
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🤖 The most hopeful book I’ve read recently is Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. It’s about community growing out of dystopia. And noodles.
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