It depends where you look. In the 2010s the World Economic Forum was predicting a fourth industrial revolution that would transform every aspect of life. In the 1990s you had Fukuyama saying that the end of the Cold War meant a new worldwide consensus on political ideology. Around the same time, the Internet was also seen as something transformative, and the ideas of nanotechnology haunted the parts of the culture attuned to technological futurism. For that matter, AI utopianism and apocalypticism has been everywhere for the past three years and has never really gone away. The war on terror, the rise of progressivism, the rise of populism, the rise of BRICS, these all have futurisms associated with them. MAGA and the Green New Deal are both intended as utopian visions. So I’d say that the idea that the future will be different from the present, and that we have some capacity to shape it, has never really gone away.
It depends where you look. In the 2010s the World Economic Forum was predicting a fourth industrial revolution that would transform every aspect of life. In the 1990s you had Fukuyama saying that the end of the Cold War meant a new worldwide consensus on political ideology. Around the same time, the Internet was also seen as something transformative, and the ideas of nanotechnology haunted the parts of the culture attuned to technological futurism. For that matter, AI utopianism and apocalypticism has been everywhere for the past three years and has never really gone away. The war on terror, the rise of progressivism, the rise of populism, the rise of BRICS, these all have futurisms associated with them. MAGA and the Green New Deal are both intended as utopian visions. So I’d say that the idea that the future will be different from the present, and that we have some capacity to shape it, has never really gone away.