Commentary on Jens Beckert's “Where Have All the Futures Gone?”

“There's always problems in life. There's this problem, solve that problem, solve that problem. But there need to be things that inspire you. There need to be things that make you glad to wake up in the morning and say, I'm looking forward to the future.” So spoke Elon Musk just after Trump's inauguration. “I’m super fired up for the future,” he continued, “It's going to be very exciting.” ¹ In the space of less than 60 seconds, Musk mentioned the future five times. His intervention stood out in part for its fervour—who speaks like this in politics today? As a source of inspiration, the future looks arid, replaced by nostalgia and crisis governance. Yet his speech was also a reminder of where the future lives on—among the zealots of Silicon Valley. As politicians recoil from the politics of vision, they cede the radical imagination to the corporate world, where it serves agendas that resist democratic control.

For two centuries modern politics took its cue from the future. Across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, parties and movements defined themselves by future-oriented programmes of change. Short-term goals, such as improved working conditions, were paired with longer-term projects of transformation. For Karl Kautsky, leading theorist of socialism, it was all about clarity of vision: “All other political parties live only in the present, from hand to mouth; the Socialist party is the only one which has a definite aim in the future, the only one whose present policy is dictated by a general, consistent purpose” (Kautsky, 1910/1892). What socialists pioneered, others would copy—the party as the vehicle of a long-term cause. Winning elections meant mobilizing the masses, and a manifesto for progress was indispensable.

It was not just partisans but democrats in general who were drawn to the open future. Multiparty politics meant convincing those of different stripes to endorse the same institutions. On what grounds might people accept election results that went against them—how could there be “losers’ consent” (Anderson et al., 2005)? One answer lay in the abundance of time: those denied access to state power this time might claim it the next. From the perspective of the future, political fortunes could be seen as provisional: the defeated had reason to continue their involvement, and desist from violence when things went astray (White, 2024).

Things look different today. One sees politicians pushing backward-looking stories of decline and forever firefighting the latest emergency. Presentism, even nihilism, is the main theme of the Zeitgeist. To the extent that officials do lift their eyes to the future, a preoccupation with quantitative targets and risks tends to displace more encompassing visions of how things could be shaped. Whether it is objectives for growth or for decarbonization, the focus is on isolated policies rather than programmes of change (White, 2025). The future-oriented concepts that make an appearance—“recovery” and “resilience,” for example—tend to be vague and stripped of a sense of agency. No surprise that many listeners tune out, caught between fatalism and frustrated impatience.

If anything, it is the political Right which seems most enthused about the future today. Consider the cultural politics of Giorgia Meloni's government in Italy. A recent exhibition at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome on “Il Tempo del Futurismo” celebrated the aesthetic achievements of the Italian Futurists of the 1900s (figures such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giacomo Balla), along with avant-garde technological innovations of the time such as the seaplane. That the exhibition had political intent was suggested by the reports of interference in the team of curators by the Ministry of Culture. As the New York Times put it, this was “a show that seems to glorify the Mussolini years,” positioning far-Right politics not as retrograde and destructive but forward-facing and innovative. ² The future still matters in the meta-politics of the Right—but in a way that is strongly coloured by longing for yesterday's futures.

So what led to the demise of a more ambitious politics of the future? In Jens Beckert's terms, “Where have all the futures gone?” (Beckert, this issue). At one level this shift is a function of turbulent times—why make plans when the world is uncertain? As Beckert's intervention well captures, conditions of insecurity can make long-range speculation seem irrelevant. From financial crashes to pandemics and wars, it is the relatively near horizon that can look the most critical. A scholar of the U.S. military observes that security officials increasingly discount the long-range forecasts their advisers prepare for them, preferring short-term forecasts that address the concerns of the moment. Rather than peer into the distant unknown, policymakers want to be told “what happened today and yesterday, and what is likely to happen tomorrow” (Johnson, 2008, p. 355). Especially for public officials wary of anything that smacks of ideology, a sense of emergency inspires a focus on immediate and practical steps. As international politics becomes increasingly multipolar, this redoubles the sense of a volatile world, too unpredictable to plan in advance for. Such views find their corollary in everyday life. For individuals trapped in immediate concerns—debt, precarious jobs, and on short-term contracts—planning the future can seem like a luxury.

But this presentism also tracks how politics is structured. Future visions need collective associations to sustain them (White, 2024, p. 10). If governments today are marked by the absence of vision, it is because power tends to be concentrated in the least ambitious. Stephanie Mudge has traced how parties increasingly sideline their activists, where future-oriented commitments are typically strongest, in favour of leaders, electoral strategists and policy advisors (Mudge, 2018). Operations are run by those most focused on short-term success—opportunism is the name of the game. The appeal of a more radical stance is evident when politics falls into the hands of an activist base—as with Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign in New York. But for the most part such groups are kept far from positions of influence. Party platforms and manifestos, once the stuff of bold vision, have widely been reduced to a catalogue of small goals, whose achievement or failure matters little.

The British–Ghanaian author Kodwo Eshun once observed that those who neglect the future cede this terrain to others who may use it against them. To shape hopes, fears and expectations is to exert a distinctive power. “In the colonial era of the early to middle twentieth century,” Eshun wrote, “avant-gardists from Walter Benjamin to Frantz Fanon revolted in the name of the future against a power structure that relied on control and representation of the historical archive. Today, the situation is reversed. The powerful employ futurists and draw power from the futures they endorse, thereby condemning the disempowered to live in the past” (Eshun, 2003, p. 289). As we might gloss this: those who fail to develop visions for the future are condemned to live in a world shaped by the visions of others.

The demise of future-thinking in contemporary politics coincides with its renewed embrace in the world of Big Tech. Consider the book The Technological Republic by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp, nothing if not grand in its ambitions: “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the national and the articulation of a national project – what is this country, what are our values, and for what do we stand …” (Karp and Zamiska, 2025, p. xiv). Karp writes scathingly of firms that just seek a quick profit, insisting on the need for a higher purpose: “Palantir itself is an attempt … at constructing a collective enterprise, the creative output of which blends theory and action.” Peter Thiel, also of Palantir, addressed his 2014 best-selling book Zero to One to the budding entrepreneur, encouraging them to view the startup as the “largest group of people you can convince of a plan to build a different future.” Corporate monopoly should be the goal, as the basis on which “to make the long-term plans and to finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can’t dream of” (Thiel & Masters, 2014, pp. 7, 29). Such figures cast themselves as seers with eyes on the bigger picture. Among Thiel's investments today is Praxis, a company seeking to build private cities from the Mediterranean to Greenland, packaged as libertarian utopias for the rich.

Political manifestos may be largely dead, but corporate manifestos are not. Today's Kautskys work in the private sector. A recent mission statement from Palantir was explicitly political in ambition, with an agenda ranging from compulsory national service to long-term military spending. The text evokes history on a sweeping scale, charting the shift to “a new era of deterrence built on A.I.” ³ Another tycoon of Silicon Valley, the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen, penned a “techno-optimist” manifesto in 2023 that likewise extolled the need to build the future on AI. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential. … We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights. We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone … We believe [it] can save lives – if we let it” (Andreesen, 2023).

These corporate actors seek to ensure that the future is imagined to their benefit, granting them and their projects a central place. Many are the issues of public concern where social hopes and expectations can have material importance, yet on which democratic politicians now seem so reticent. Big Tech and AI are areas where public input and control may clearly be called for, but it will happen only to the extent that people believe regulation is possible and desirable. Likewise, in an increasingly tense geopolitical context, the old questions of disarmament and non-nuclear deterrence remain as relevant today as to the peace movements of the 1960s, but will find support only insofar as we can look beyond a future of automated systems designed for war. Reordering the economy to serve equality and democracy is as necessary today as in the nineteenth century, but depends on seeing trajectories of change that are not those endorsed by corporate elites.

Is a political rejoinder possible? Beckert's text reminds us of the many reasons to be pessimistic. Public spheres are fragmented, states are hemmed in by debt, and the dry spirit of technocracy is deeply ingrained. Moreover, the very associations modern democracy has relied on for future visions are in crisis and hard to restore. Reviving them would entail much more than just pushing politicians to be bold: as Beckert correctly notes, the problems go well beyond a failure of imagination. But some of the factors involved are in principle open to address. If the rise of a more managerial outlook within parties tracks the distribution of power within them, alternative arrangements might change their complexion. Parties structured in a more internally democratic fashion, so as to give more voice to the activists among them, would be better able to maintain themselves as communities of principle (Bickerton & Invernizzi Accetti, 2021, p. 180ff.). Organizations affording their members more control in the present may find themselves inspiring more confidence in the future. There are still people with vision in politics—they just tend to be kept at arm's length.

If existing political associations turn out to be beyond redemption, then democratizing the future will need new sites of imagination and collective power. Naturally, a degree of scepticism remains in order: Beckert's contention that we live in a state of “futural anomie” would seem to exclude the possibility that such efforts can make headway without social change on multiple dimensions. But the limits of the achievable are only ever discovered in practice. In any case, the political imperative seems clear enough, since social change needs agents to steer it. As with the parties of old, politics needs places where people can organize and dream—where they can “look forward to the future” without being a CEO. The rich and powerful are already mapping and making the future they would like to see: their opponents must do the same.