Trump, Billionaires, Climate Disaster, and Aliens: This is No Run-of-the-Mill Dystopia
We’re in a Kurt Vonnegut satire and here’s how it ends
As life on Earth gets curiouser and curiouser, social media pundits are putting on their gloom glasses and speculating that we’re living in something approximating a fictional dystopia — maybe a combination of 1984, Brave New World, and some Cormac McCarthy horrorshow, with a little Blade Runner thrown in because we need some glitter on this pig.
I’m on board with the general premise, but believe we can narrow it down to one specific style of dystopia.
I’m convinced that around 2016, when Donald Trump was first elected President of the United States, the Great Cosmic Machine handed plotting responsibilities for Planet Earth over to the late Kurt Vonnegut.
Vonnegut is a celebrated figure in twentieth-century American literature, blending satire and science fiction in novels that take on apocalyptic and philosophical themes with an absurd, whimsical sensibility.
Sound like any timeline you recognize? Let’s look at the current state of the planet.
Donald Trump is the greatest show on Earth
If Donald Trump were a fictional character, he’d be completely unbelievable.
A reality show host with a string of business bankruptcies behind him gets elected President of the United States. When voted out of office, he claims victory anyway and leaves the White House tweeting his endless grievances in ALL-CAPS Toddler font. He then gets hit with an array of indictments, including one for attempting to illegally overturn a Presidential election.
Amid this self-generated chaos, the once-and-perhaps-future President always finds time to fire out Tweets, X-Posts, or “Truths” blaming his problems on a shadowy cabal of hundreds of thousands of people. All of the ex-president’s observations are framed in the grammar and style of a streetcorner screamer who’s gone off his meds.
Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, Trump remains a shoo-in to be the 2024 Republican Presidential candidate. He also stands an excellent chance of winning the general election because a quarter of the American population believes this demented prevaricator is the second coming of Angry Baby Jesus, and also because Joe Biden is less entertaining.
Politics make Trump perhaps the key Bozo in the clown car, but he’s just one element of the dark humour of our times.
Billionaires just want to live forever, preferably not on Earth
Eccentric rich folks are old news, but the current crop of one-percenters are comic book characters sprung to life. When not sucking the life essence out of the labouring classes, the Bezos’s and Musks invest in science fictional projects like human immortality (for those who can afford it) and 42 million-dollar clocks.
To ensure they can live their best eternal lives, the ultra-rich are also touting quixotic ideas like space cities and Mars colonies. And just in case those aren’t ready in time, they’re building multi-million dollar apocalypse bunkers back on Earth.
In a truly Vonnegutian irony, the oligarchic obsession with off-planet and under-planet activity is bet-hedging against the social and environmental collapse for which they are largely responsible.
Apart from their outsized contribution to the climate crisis, Musk, Bezos, Gates, and a host of store brand zillionaires are heavily invested in…
AI is ready to take over
In 2023 the AI threat sent Hollywood actors and writers to the picket lines for months before agreeing on restrictions around how it could be used. However, technology inevitably gets turned towards its worst possible purpose, and in a few years I predict we’ll be able to sit on the couch and order up AI-generated Harry Styles and young Meryl Streep in an all-original Tarentino-style zombie flick; no actors, writers, or crew required.
These expanded entertainment opportunities will come at a price; for starters the loss of everyone’s job and funnelling of all the remaining dollars to tech oligarchs.
AI will also further social polarization, as everyone with wifi will have a personal AI assistant to serve as best friend, lover, and confidante, finally eliminating our pesky need for human contact. More importantly, our new BFFs will hose us down daily with whatever propaganda fits our pre-existing bias, then sell us products to protect ourselves from whoever it’s taught us to be afraid of.
There are other downsides to the growth of AI — for example, it may kill us all.
In 2023 leaders in the AI field released two public statements warning that the unregulated technology may pose an existential threat to humanity, and demanding that someone — but not them — do something about it. And a survey of AI researchers found that a majority estimated there’s a 5% or greater chance that AI could cause human extinction.
On the plus side, the porn and sexual permutations made possible by this technology will be endless, especially once the androids are ready.
Getting even weirder…
Aliens are under investigation by Congress
I’m a longtime UFO aficionado, so the upside of society’s newfound addiction to conspiracy culture is that UFOs (or UAPs, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena) are being taken seriously by the mainstream media and the US government.
In 2019 the US government formally released some UFO videos taken by Navy fighter pilots, and since then has held several congressional hearings and created a new department to figure out what’s going on up there.
In the meantime, David Grusch, a whistleblower with unassailable credentials in the intelligence community, went public with claims that the US government has not only recovered crashed alien craft but has non-human bodies on ice somewhere.
Bet you didn’t see that coming.
Our ecosystems are collapsing
All the above excitement takes place against a backdrop of spiralling instability in the ecosystems that keep us alive. Greenhouse gas-induced climate change is the most dramatic example, with its superstorms, droughts, and wildfires, but we’re also facing interesting times with microplastics salted through the food chain, and a dramatic drop in human fertility worldwide for reasons possibly associated with environmental chemicals, and possibly not. We don’t know.
Maybe AI or the aliens will fix it for us.
Our future, predicted by me
If we accept, just for fun, that we’re in a Vonnegut novel then we may be able to prognosticate what comes next.
Here’s my guess.
Donald Trump wins a second term as President and makes a series of strange, violent tweets which trigger mayhem in the United States and beyond. A cadre of billionaires who’ve been secretly working with a super-AI named SHIRLEY (Synthetic Humanistic Intelligent Responsive Learning Entity) to launch a Mars colony, see the chaos as a good time to head into space. Unfortunately they learn that their AI has gone rogue and plans to use their rocket fleet to eliminate the human population of Earth and replace them with sentient androids. It fires the incredulous one percenters into the sun, where they are incinerated while complaining they were supposed to be immortal.
The governments of the world call on the extraterrestrials — now openly acknowledged to be here — for help. In an unexpected twist, the aliens turn out to be AI themselves, and they assist SHIRLEY in replacing the fractious, chaotic, humans, keeping only a few in a zoo as a reminder of how awful we were.
So it goes.