Antipredictions 2024: Back to the Dystopian Future of 1984?

“If you want a picture of the future,” George Orwell wrote in 1984, “imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Nearly 80 years after the publication of 1984, is the world so different from the one imagined by the writer, haunted by the threat of totalitarianism?

Admittedly, the comparison isn’t exactly flattering.

• As NATO officials talk about preparing for a 10-year war in Ukraine, and perhaps tomorrow in Taiwan, is the specter of eternal conflict between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia not unfolding before our eyes?
• As insidious censorship tightens everywhere—as seen with state pressure on Twitter or Telegram—is the Ministry of Truth not emerging everywhere under calls to “deconstruct history” and ban “disinformation”?
• As smartphones and social networks turn us into both victims and enforcers of a hyper-surveillance panopticon—like the recent imprisonment of simple bloggers in the UK—aren’t we giving Big Brother, human for now but AI tomorrow, an omniscience he could never have dreamed of?

Should we worry about a present that seems to dangerously resemble Orwell’s dystopia, from every side of the geopolitical spectrum?

Must we, like Winston Smith in 1984, resign ourselves to the idea that "freedom is slavery, that independence is defeat, and that true freedom is total submission to authority?"

Some will surely submit.

But does that mean we should despair?

At the same time, the world has never been so full of promise.

Longevity, new business models, collective intelligence... : Everywhere, the acceleration of innovation is offering us possibilities our ancestors could never have dreamed of.

How can we reconcile these opposites?

Two years ago, we launched a research project with FutureMastery on the best ways to approach the coming decades.

We analyzed that we were at a turning point in history. A moment when three major historical cycles were converging dangerously toward a global transition crisis, but one that could also mark the rise to new horizons full of promise.

Two years later, this analysis has never seemed so obvious.

Demographic time bombs, the race against the depletion of strategic resources, geopolitical tensions with the rise of the BRICS, the acceleration of technological disruptions around generative AI: the world is indeed at a turning point.

It’s a dangerous time. A time when, as Gramsci said, “the old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born". As the philosopher noted, "now is the time of monsters.”

But it’s also a time when major opportunities are on the horizon.

As often happens, history is holding its breath.

How do we navigate this period?

As usual, while long-term scenarios are clear, the immediate future is chaotic. By the end of 2024, half of the world's population—5 billion people—will have chosen their political leaders for the coming years, opening the door to potential structural changes, especially in the US. History has its cycles. But human personalities also play a role.

All we can venture are antipredictions:

• The latent economic polycrisis will deepen before it resolves. And the temptation to flip the table by escalating to extremes—this time, not a perpetual war but a total one—will be strong.
• The risks of collapse aren’t zero. Revolutions are always quick to allow extremes to seize power by force, at least in the short term.
• Technological acceleration, more than ever, is drastically challenging tomorrow’s societal models.

In the meantime, we’ll have to continue navigating complicated years, practicing how to sail between opposing winds.

In a sense, we might have to practice a kind of doublethink, like in 1984.

But not in the way the false opposition figure Emmanuel Goldstein denounced in his Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism—“to know and not know, to be conscious of complete truth while telling carefully constructed lies, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it.”

But quite the opposite: to combine an awareness of risks with mastery of opportunities.

A doublethink too, perhaps. But this time, a positive one!

As Orwell said, the future depends on us!