2015 Barack Obama, then US president, signed the SPACE Act into law. Less than two years later, Kaua’i, the fourth largest of the Hawai’ian Islands, finalised a deal with Solar City allowing the island to meet its entire electricity needs from solar power. Around the same time, technology entrepreneur Mark Cuban declared that the world’s first trillionaire would emerge in the space of artificial intelligence.
In Seattle, meanwhile, Amazon trialled its first checkout-free store using ‘just walk out technology’. Almost simultaneously, Foxconn’s CEO, Terry Gou, announced the construction of a major facility by the company in Wisconsin. Eight hundred miles south in the state of Mississippi, David Ishee, a dog breeder and biohacker, was refused permission by the FDA to edit the genome of dogs he bred in order to eliminate a specific but common condition. His response? That he might do it anyway as an act of civil disobedience. A year after that FDA ruling, in February 2018, SpaceX oversaw the successful launch, re-entry and landing of its Falcon Heavy rocket – the predecessor to the BFR booster the company intends to deploy in its manned missions to Mars in the 2020s.
All of these events share a certain sense of the future. Renewable energy, asteroid mining, rockets which can be used multiple times and even fly to Mars, industry leaders openly discussing the implications of AI, DIY enthusiasts immersing themselves in low-cost genetic engineering. And yet, that future is already here. It turns out it isn’t tomorrow’s world which is too complex to craft a meaningful politics for, it ’s today’s.
In attempting to create a progressive politics that fits to present realities this poses a problem because, while these events feel like something from science fiction, they can also feel inevitable. In one sense it’s like the future is already written, and that for all the talk of an impending technological revolution, such dizzying transformation is attached to a static view of the world where nothing really changes.
Introduction
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