Don't worry, be happy. All those who feared a dystopian future got it wrong

A world where corporations run the politicians, promote endless war and secretly manipulate public opinion through the media. Thankfully, these bleak visions never materialised

Try to imagine this utterly intolerable, dystopian future:

1. We reach a point where the corporations grow so large and so fabulously rich that politicians can no longer afford to upset them by legislating to curb their power. The corporations are simply too big to fail.

2. In fact, politicians only pretend to be in charge of policy. Like other sectors of society, their services are effectively bought by the corporations. Secretly, the politicians prioritise the interests of these corporations, and the billionaires who stand behind them, over the interests of the publics they are supposed to represent. Democracy serves as a facade behind which a kleptocratic class rules.

3. The corporations use their power to advance legislation allowing them to concentrate their wealth even further. They monopolise huge chunks of the economy, like a parasite feeding off the blood of its host. When they disastrously mismanage these monopolies, as they do intermittently, they lean on the political class – their servants – to bail them out with public monies.

4. The biggest profits are made from war, which is ever-present. The corporations use their politician-servants to manufacture enemies from which the public needs defending. This proves a great success. In a fear-driven society, the public is readier to tolerate austerity – the gradual dismantlement of public services, which the corporations can then take over and run as profit-generating enterprises.

The public are persuaded that the flow of money out of their own pockets into corporate coffers – into expanding the war machine – is necessary for national security. The public’s most cherished freedoms have to be sacrificed, they are told, to prevent society from growing weak and vulnerable. And the corporations vilify anyone who questions their power as an internal enemy, allied to the external enemy.

5. This grand deception works only because the billionaires also control the media, which serves their interests. The media tolerate limited dissent to give the public the feeling that there is a full plurality of voices. But anyone who really dissents – who challenges corporate power – is denounced by these very same media outlets as a crank, a socialist, an antisemite or a terrorist. Few hear their actual arguments, either because these labels are enough to justify denying them a platform or because the media corporations use their control over the algorithmic basis of modern communications to make sure dissent is secretly corralled into social media dead-ends.

6. As the rule of the corporations goes wrong ever more catastrophically – the resources needed for endless growth run out; the externalised costs of the corporations’ rape of the planet create ever more toxic waste-products and disturb the fragile equilibrium of the climate – the media’s role grows.

Its task is to distract the public with an endless diet of smaller crises that can be blamed on “enemies”, nature or chance, but never on the corporations themselves. Public energies are invested in worrying about – and arguing over – the threat from Eurasia and Eastasia, the dangers of terrorism, the menace posed by immigrants, the narcotics epidemic, health emergencies, unexpected “weather” events, the AI apocalypse, the hazards of free speech, and so on.

And while the public worries about these things, the corporations suck more money out of the economy, claiming it is needed to protect everyone from Eastasia today and Eurasia tomorrow. That new technologies must be developed to root out terrorism and to stop the boats. That a sophisticated war is being fought at home and abroad against the drugs barons. That a brave new world of medical breakthroughs is being engineered. That vital “green” technologies are being invested in and will save the day. That AI safeguards are being created. That more responsible ways to police speech are being devised.

All of this is a dark vision of one potential future. Most likely, it will not come to pass. Our societies are too robust, our freedoms too secure, the corporations too contained for this bleak world ever to emerge.

Postscript:

I had not realised I would need to spell out what this piece is saying. It is not a description of a possible future, as some appear to think. It is entirely a description of our present times. I have imagined nothing. I have drawn exclusively on things we should all be able to see happening around us. Unless we change our current trajectory, the future is likely to be far darker than anything I have set out here.

[Many thanks to Matthew Alford for the audio reading of this article.]

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