Atlas of Unfulfilled Warnings: Why Seeing the Future Does Not Stop Us

The Absurdity of Foresight

“Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.” ^[1]

In every age we believe that we are smarter, more advanced, better equipped, further evolved and have greater understanding than those that come before us. We are not ignorant. When it comes to technology however, and despite the warnings on our screens and in our books, we seem eager to allow these cautionary tales to come to life.

We agree with Orwell, say democracy protects us, and install another camera in our streets. We scroll an endless stream of pointless drivel, call it “doom scrolling”, and quote Huxley while we do so. We praise the ingenuity of Asimov, and ask the machines to enhance our work life. And we thank James Cameron for the groundbreaking cinema, while unrestricted systems establish themselves in the market.

Our entertainment shows us ways that problems could be created in real life, that technology could cause bad effects to humanity, and we still fall in love with the systems that made the stories possible. All the times that science fiction talks about the terrible impacts to humanity, all the ways that society could change for ways we disagree with, and because they entertained us we haven’t learnt from them.

We use the stories as an allegory, explaining why we should be cautious and why these new technologies are not safe. We embrace the descriptions of negative futures, while we stand back and let them filter into everyday life. There is an absurdity in our composed observation of the development and release, new inventions are a necessity and our foresight constitutes a form of prevention, but not an adjustment to our pathways. People talk about catastrophe in a future tense, as if it is not certain to happen.

Foucault observed that systems of knowledge and control develop not via tyranny but through consensus, and that power becomes entrenched in routines to the point where resistance appears irrational. Baudrillard envisioned the ultimate phase, wherein imitation supplants reality, and even rebellion is predetermined.

The riddle of our time lies between these two ends. Our civilisation, while adept at articulating its own warnings, becomes addicted to their realisation.

II. Familiarity as Anesthetic

People do not pay attention to everything equally. New things take work and mental brain power to adjust to; old things fade away. Over time, conditions that stay the same do not need to be thought about anymore. They are no longer weighed, relegated to parts of the brain where they exist as expectation. Familiarity persuades through persistence.

Daniel Kahneman observed that what is encountered often enough begins to feel plausible, then normal, and eventually expected.

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition.” ^[2]

Michel Foucault was less interested in how behaviour comes to regular itself, in his analysis of modern power his concern was the quiet transformation of a subject. In his book, Discipline and Punish^[3], traced the transformation from kings who ruled by fear into systems that rule by routine. He expanded this idea into more domains, and showed that it could be applied to many areas.

“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [...] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.” ^[4]

Individuals begin to monitor themselves when the observation is constant, and the consequences of deviation of the norms are predictable. Normally not out of fear, but calculation. What matters is that someone may be watching, the possibility is enough to adjust behaviour. Then, over time, the presence of surveillance is not registered as intrusion, but a condition of participation in the action.

The crucial shift, Foucault noted, is that power succeeds when it disappears into routine. Once this discipline is internalised it feels practical, efficient and neutral. We don’t even feel the constraint, just making sensible choices in a defined space. And this is how familiarity creates an anesthetic, the system only needs to persist, not to justify itself, and submission becomes an act of habit and procedure.

Adjacent to Foucault’s idea that internalised discipline is rulership by routine, is Hannah Arendt’s erosion of judgement. Her observation was that repeated actions in stable systems cease to feel like choices, they become tasks, expectations and roles. The danger in this is not cruelty or fanaticism, although they can become outcomes; the danger is thoughtlessness, the suspension of moral reflection through routine.

Arendt’s concern with judgement did not come from philosophy, but while observing the trial that became Eichmann in Jerusalem^[5]. It was the absence of fanaticism and hatred that struck her, how procedural Eichmann appeared. She described this condition as the banality of evil as a way to explain the mechanism: he did not lack intelligence, and he was aware of his action, but he lacked the habit of judgement. As Arendt observed:

“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, but terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

In such conditions the moral dimension does not disappear. People just do not decide what is right each time they act, they instead follow procedures, rely on precedent, and assume that what is normal is acceptable. Responsibility is distributed across processes, as opposed to being held onto personally. What has become familiar, seems to filter discomfort, and resistance seems disproportionate to the inconvenience of moving against the established system.

Here, the intersection with familiarity as anesthetic ties into Arendt’s insights, because when behaviour is routine judgement atrophies because it is no longer exercised. Moral evaluation fades in the absence of friction, we do not decide less ethically, we do not decide at all. The system has absorbed all intention, and individuals are cogs in the machine, rather than agents making decisions. Over time, this produces a form of ethical silence.

The warning here is that systems that remove the need for judgement enable harm to endure unopposed. This is not due to an ethical deficiency, but simply that the structure does not require ethics to be exercised. Once the rules are understood, there is a rational response to adapt, rather than to oppose. And this is quiet achievement of familiarity: it allows the unacceptable to become ordinary without ever requiring explicit consent.

III. Science Fiction as Rehearsal

We would often say that the most useful role of science fiction is prediction, a way to see what the future looks like, but the most important role is rehearsal. It makes places where people can enter, explore and process the environment without consequences. They are welcome to watch, change and experience the world with characters that already live there. The stakes are not real, the threat is under control, and the reader can experience the discomfort without obligation. When the book is closed, all that remains is the experience.

But the experience doesn’t go away.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four^[6] the telescreen creates an uncertainty that generates power for the Party. Characters temper their actions, are careful about their speech, and make sure to exist as Big Brother would want them to live. In the story, the anticipated punishment works as a disincentive to rebellion, the threat of violence and omnipresent visibility enough to train its subjects.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Winston knows the system is false. He understands how it works, and how cruel the system is. But most of his energy is spent trying to stay alive within it, learning when to speak and when to be silent. How to appear unremarkable. Being aware is not a form of freedom, only help him stay inside it longer.

Living in a world like this is more than learned fear. There is learning to exist, learning what behaviours are risky, what should be hidden, and what needs to be done to stay alive. By the time resistance appears, the reader understand why it shouldn’t succeed.

In Brave New World^[7] there is a different, yet complimentary, form of rehearsal. The population is controlled through comfort, not surveillance alone. Pleasure take place of punishment, force is replaced by distraction. Stability is a virtue, as it replaces uncertainty. The effect is maybe more disturbing, in a world like this there is not much urgency because there isn’t much friction. Resistance isn’t a thing, because the population is happy and content.

“People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get.”

Narratives like these offer immersion with no strings attached, we can see the danger, feel the fear and still walk away. They allow us to experience the emotion of living in these offered realities. This is where rehearsal becomes ethically ambiguous.

When we begin to live in a world in similar conditions, one with either distributed surveillance, behavioural optimisation, systems that incentivise compliance and mitigate dissent, we have already experienced them with some kind of felt-emotion. Science fiction doesn’t engage in this familiarity, allowing people to get used to the future before they experience it.

It doesn’t mean that we don’t read science fiction as a warning, but giving a warning doesn’t mean someone will respond. An imagined future becomes a setting to be navigated, improved and lived in. This kind of rehearsal prepares us to recognise, not necessarily to resist. And recognition, as we have seen, does not always sharpen refusal. Sometimes it makes adaptation feel inevitable.

IV. The Comfort of Inevitability

Once a future is explained as inevitable things happen differently, what may demand resistance just invites adjustment. The language of inevitability arrives most often as an explanation, what you see as a natural outcome of scale, efficiency or progress. Maybe there are other alternatives, but they get dismissed as impractical. And, over time inevitability becomes a shared sense that resistance is futile, possibly disproportionate.

Accepting inevitability is a way to be freed from the burden of decision, in systems that feel inevitable we no longer need to weight consequences, the future is treated as decided, and we only need to endure. This is where we come to look at Albert Camus, and the condition he described in which humans accept the lack of meaning in the world and continue to live within it - The Absurd.

In the face of the Absurd many of us learn to live within what cannot be moved. We adapt and persist. Awareness does not make this less, only makes it understandable for us to continue, and the feeling is of a quiet settling, the chose to settle rather than to question.

Inevitability is much the same. When a system is unavoidable moral energy is taken from refusal and toward optimisation. The system isn’t an adversary. If we take a look at Minority Report, the future is operationalised, not only predicted. In the film the existence of precognition reshapes responsibility, the knowledge of an outcome means that intervention is a procedure, it isn’t ethical.

Once systems become stable, choices within become inevitable. Things feel familiar, and rehearsal takes away the sharp edges of choice. By removing the anxiety of choice there is comfort, moral uncertainty is replaced with pragmatism. People see themselves as participants in the larger process, and responsibility starts to fail, agency vanishes. In such conditions resignation isn’t felt as loss, it is often experienced as realism. Those who remain to fight are no longer principled, but naïve.

This is the quiet triumph of inevitability. It does not silence opposition. It reframes it.

V. What Familiarity Leaves Behind

What remains is not if these systems are recognised. They often are. Nor is it if their consequences are understood. They frequently are. This should have us stop and consider the role of foresight.

If we can imagine the future, and it can be anticipated and culturally absorbed, then foresight is not a brake, it functions as transition. Allowing us to move emotionally through a transitional period, from shock to orientation, before anything changes in society. By the time we can explain it in the real world, we have transitioned. In this case, awareness may not generate resistance to an ideological change, it may be a precondition.

In these situations people recognise what is happening, but in these systems recognition becomes enough; once the edges of a system are understood the ethical urgency dissipates. Familiarity transforms critique into competence. So why do we continue to persist walking into these futures? People don’t get crushed by decisions, usually we participate, adapt and stabilise the systems we claim to distrust.

This should help us to raise a more difficult question: If being familiar with an idea prepares acceptable, responsibility doesn’t end with recognition. Maybe responsibility has to move toward those who take known futures and build the structures we engage with? Maybe there is responsibility sitting on the shoulders of those who read science fiction, and then build the systems described in those dystopias?