Published at 1:13 am. Updated at 9:00 a.m.
Olivier Niquet Special collaboration
At the beginning of a new year, it is generally appropriate to imagine its outlines. However, I am of little interest in what the year 2024 has in store for us. In the short term, I'm hoping for at best modest progress: that the Canadian gets a good pick in the next draft, that Bernard Drainville gives us a new a cappella song, and that people notice more quickly when they're blocking the way down escalators. That would be my year. That's not too much to ask.
My expectations are low because I continue to be disappointed by those who must design our future. It seems to me that we have very few politicians of the future. Our managers are guardians of the status quo. They clog up the systems that clogged others before them. The future they offer us extends to the date of the next elections. So why risk rushing citizens by trying something new that will have an impact in 25 years?
Because I'm disappointed with the present, I regularly turn to science fiction. My favorite is one that leans more toward science than fiction. The one who imagines the models of a possible future to make us understand how everything could go wrong. Or turn around.
Our politicians, who are avid readers, should from time to time take an interest in this all too often avoided genre. If they read a doomsday scenario based on plausible scientific information, they might say to themselves, “Sad, I have to do something.” Or conversely, exposed to an idyllic utopia, they might say to themselves, “Crimepof, why not?”!
In a recent interview, Kim Stanley Robinson, a master of the genre, explained that science fiction serves, among other things, to draw public attention to little-known scientific theories: “You tell a story to thwart the course by telling the story Warn people about it.” Prepayment. » These likely futures consist of collapsing biospheres, shifts toward obscurantism, space travel, system-built disinformation, transgenic humans, nuclear escalation, or patriarchal totalitarianism.
No, it's not a yo-yo, but it's easy to understand that these are not far-fetched prophecies. Our world already offers us clues to these expected fates.
The big “reset” that some people who like to socialize a little too much have warned us about is probably not a concerted effort by the big people of the world to start from scratch, as Joe Bocan would say. Rather, it is our willful blindness that leads us back to the starting point.
The freedom that the democratization of information production should have offered us has been used by the tech giants to leave us to the opportunists of outrage. As we obsess over videos of people giving us goosebumps by whispering, organic makeup tutorials, or recipes for cheeseburgers in fajita rolls (I recommend), the information loses its appeal. Everything is brought to equal level and many benefit from it.
Conservative forces around the world currently have the wind at their backs and that does not bode well for the future. However, it all boils down to conservatives fighting to “preserve” the planet and ensure the survival of the capitalist system. If the world collapses, the business world will collapse too.
Most are proponents of magical thinking. The cornucopias assure us that technology will triumph over humanity's problems and that there is no point in worrying about it too much. We must not confuse Cornucopian and Serpuarian, this neologism that is bombarded at us in the hope of encouraging us to recycle our old devices (I recycle devices, but I refuse to use that word). We don't have to recycle, we just have to wait for the invention of the machine that converts plastic into fertilizer for plants…
The word comes from the legend of the Cornucopia. Pluto, the Roman god of wealth (a sort of Elon Musk in a toga), had this horn in his possession, filled with an all-you-can-eat buffet that Casa Corfu would have nothing to envy. Cornucopianists believe that human genius is an inexhaustible resource. However, you don't have to have spent a lot of time reading comments on La Poche Bleue's Facebook page to have this much faith in humanity.
In reality, the technology is in danger of serving our current gods of wealth, who will set out with their phallic rockets to build a better world on Mars, far from the world they destroyed after maximizing their RRSPs .
Some science fiction novels imagine a future where hibernation puts a person to sleep for years, only to wake them up in a better world where a cure for cancer would have been discovered, where there would be no more war, and in the people would no longer sleep their bananas in bags in the supermarket. Or vice versa, in a world that has become completely stupid.
Despite these discouraging observations about the present, I am an eternal optimist (some would say a happy fool). I would rather believe in the option of a better world. In science fiction novels, things always go bad before they get better. I don't know what 2024 will bring, but if we could perfect hibernation, I'd be willing to risk sleeping until 2100. I am confident that by then human genius, in its infinite greatness, will have made it clear to us that long-term thinking is the best way to build the future.
Who is Olivier Niquet?
Olivier Niquet has a background in urban planning. A radio columnist, notably featured on the ICI Première show La jour (est encore jeunesse), he has published several books, including “The Kings of Silence: What we can learn from introverts to be a little less stupid and ( maybe…”) ) save the world. He is also a speaker and contributor to the websites tourniquet.quebec and sportngraphe.info.