Sorry to be a downer, kids, but we are all seriously fucked. This may or may not be news to you, but I just wanted to get it out there. That way, if I turn out to be wrong and the future proves instead to be some socialist utopia brimming over with cotton candy and cute puppies, my enemies can look back and point out what a tool I was. Unfortunately, such a happy event is not something I have to fear.
Over the last few months it has become increasingly obvious to me that those who see the future as an Orwellian nightmare are being unduly optimistic. The future is not a boot stamping on a human face forever, it is much worse, something that in Orwell’s day could not even be imagined. That’s when you know the future is fucked – when science-fiction dystopias start to pale in comparison to the reality bearing down upon us like an out-of-control freight train.
The world’s workers are a mere two or three decades away from being rendered totally obsolete. The plutocrats have long been wondering what to do about these troublesome bastards, and in the 20th century the treacherous, self-destructive idiot-savants commonly referred to as the intellectual classes started working on the problem. Already we have middle-class workers being replaced by computer programs that allow one person to do what was previously the work of dozens, and working class workers being replaced by everything from ATMs, to self-checkouts, to cashless holes in the wall that dispense the latest hit DVDs without the product having to be sullied by the hands of the proletariat.
In all probability, this mechanization/automation of the workforces means that in twenty years or so most men will be living in a permanent underclass and most women will be working for peanuts. Most of my fellow leftists – as well as most MRAs – don’t seem to be aware of it, but this is why a male dominated power structure has no problem with male workers being sidelined. Why else do neither right wing nor “left wing” governments and institutions do anything about the education gap? Because a female workforce is a compliant workforce and the bastards know it. Replacing male workers with females will allow a smoother transition from a human workforce to a mostly machine workforce. It will make the junking of the human worker a proposition much less likely to result in violent rebellion which, though it has little chance of succeeding, could cost a few plutocrats their lives. And it is when this transition is fully completed that the darkness will really descend.
If you think the rich bastards treat the rest of us badly now that they still need us, wait till most of us have been rendered as useful as the common cockroach. When that time comes – thirty or forty years from now – the majority of women will join the majority of men in the permanent underclass and everyone will be just one big, unhappy family. Contrary to the deluded and ecstatic visions of the feminists, the upper classes will still be male dominated – possibly even more so as surrogacy and adoption become more acceptable. There will, however, be a small middle class composed of workers whose jobs are not so easily performed by machines – the dexterity of surgeons and the dishonest adroitness of lawyers come to mind – and this may be engineered to be female dominated and hence more easily controlled. On the other hand, this class may be so small and so powerless that the bosses won’t care which sex dominates it – even a workforce composed of veritable Spartacuses would be unlikely to carry out a rebellion guaranteed to be a suicidal failure – and once plutocratic support evaporates so will the current over-representation of women amongst those walking out of universities with fancy bits of paper.
And with the reference to Spartacus, we come to the topic of revolution.
As I see it, no real change is possible without revolution or the serious threat of such. By revolution I don’t mean some neo-hippies sitting in a park in New York going “Tut-tut” at the Masters of the Universe, but the old fashioned kind of revolution. The sort of thing that today would be labeled terrorism – you know, a bunch of Americans trying to get rid of Mad King George, French peasants sick of feasting on grass chopping off aristocratic heads, that kind of thing. The problem is that such a revolution is not about to happen, at least not soon enough to have any real chance of success. Right now, there are not enough people aware of just how bad things are to make for any viable attempt at revolution, and the media has so much control over most people’s perceptions that by the time reality becomes such a brutal and dismal wasteland that none but the insane and the intellectually defective will buy the plutocracy’s lies they won’t need propaganda to keep us down –  they will just shoot us dead. By then the western world’s police forces will have been so heavily militarized and the new and expanded definition of terrorism so deeply entrenched that it will be child’s play to simply exterminate any group attempting to rebel. Even if the media bothers to cover such massacres, the public will be too cowed to do anything. Most of them will choose to be silent for fear of getting a knock on the door at 3am, and many others – unwilling to face their own cowardice – will simply convince themselves that the rebels must deserve their fate.
(And no, the Faux Democracy that has a stranglehold on the developed world holds no real promise. The plutocracy not only owns virtually all the politicians but has also taken many of them into the fold.)
Even after the darkness falls, there will be the brave and rebellious few carrying out the occasional attack on the tyrants – a futuristic version of the French resistance, with the crucial difference that the Liberation will never come – but those heroic few will only be able to cause some tiny amount of bother for the plutocrats, they will be too small a force to actually change anything.
What we are left with is a very grim future indeed, one which, as I stated earlier, makes most science fiction dystopias pale into insignificance.
So what are we plummeting headlong into? In my view, the future will be a pit of poverty and squalor that will make America’s ghettos and trailer parks look like Beverly Hills. It will be a world in which 99% of the human race will, at worst, be left to starve in the ruins of once-great cities, and at best be humanely exterminated by the few plutocrats with enough humanity to care about the mercy of a quick death. It will be a world of walled cities surrounded by automated machine guns and autonomous killing drones ever watchful for any starveling desperate enough to risk certain death for one last chance to rummage through the garbage bins of the rich. It will be a string of state-run, corporate-controlled killing sprees, all part of one last desperate scramble for fast-dwindling resources, instigated by psychopaths for whom too much is never enough. It will be a waking nightmare, a dark fantasy come to screaming life, a new Dark Age dominated not by religion but by technology, a cesspit of human suffering and inequity the likes of which has never before been seen. That, as I see it, is what awaits the bulk of  humanity. I really, really hope I am wrong – but I seriously doubt it.