How would an old school techno-optimist make sense of the Trump administration?

<This is me venting.> I just need to vent for a moment.

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Here’s how I would summarize techno-optimist futurism as it was practiced in the 1990s:

• Step 1: place yourself in the far future. Assume that everything has worked out great!

• Step 2: work backward to the present. How did we get to this better place? What technologies or social behaviors took a great leap forward to make that positive future possible.

• Step 3: Call it a “scenario,” (not a prediction. Predictions can be wrong.) and declare to your audience that, while the future isn’t guaranteed, this optimistic scenario really seems quite likely if we focus on the right things.

This is the type of futurist scenario-work that gave us 1997’s “The Long Boom.” It was everywhere in the 1990s. It has fallen a bit out of fashion in the decades since. But, with the tech billionaires trying to make techno-optimism cool again, there is once again a market for just this type of hopium. (The hidden curriculum of the futurism industry is, much like the consulting industry, to always tell stories that the people who can write big checks like to hear.) And, as I mentioned last month, it fits well with the miraculous tradition in Silicon Valley thought. The worse things objective conditions get, the stronger the urge to believe that technology will save us.

Which brings me to what I want to grouse about today.

It’s no secret that I’m critical of the Long Boom. One of the best pieces of public writing I’ve done on tech futurism was titled “The Curse of the Long Boom.” This morning in my inbox, I encountered a new piece of writing by Peter Leyden, one of the Long Boom’s original authors. He has a Substack called “The Great Progression,” which mostly focuses on imagining the remarkably future that Artificial Intelligence will surely make possible. His latest post is titled “A Positive Reframe of What Trump Might be Doing for America in the Long Term.”

The gist of the piece is that, if we imagine historians in the year 2100 looking back on today, and we assume that everything has turned out well, then we can kind-of-sort-of-see the outline of some positive impacts. He figures (1) Trump will break up the bureaucracy and reduce spending on the military and entitlements, then (2) his “populist” movement will flame out and spend decades unable to win elections or hold power. And (3) this will pave the way for unleashing the potential of AI and building “new 21st-century systems” that the Democrats never would have been able to build on their own.

Or, as Monty Python put it, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”

(Nevermind that, in 2022, Leyden also predicted that we were at the dawn of a “new progressive era” that had been ushered in by Trump’s colossal defeat.)

Leyden bases his analysis on a facile reading of the Herbert Hoover era, and a pretty glib reading of the second Trump administration. He concludes by imagining his future historian declaring:

By 2050, the general consensus was that Trump had made America great again — just not the way he had intended. Trump did dismantle the old Pax Americana and the old 20th-century bureaucratic welfare state, but he also dismantled the political efficacy of the Republican Party and conservative movement for a couple generations, too.

Trump unintentionally laid the foundation for the next era of American greatness to begin — not by looking backward to resuscitate the past, but by allowing others to look forward and reinvent a much better future.

I’m not going to bother picking through the whole piece and pointing out, line-by-line, where he gets his history wrong. (Though I’ll just say… there’s no mention of the Dixiecrats. That’s… a choice. You really cannot tell a coherent story of party coalitions in the 1890s-1940s without the failure of Reconstruction and the Dixiecrats.)

I also can’t summon the energy for a long diatribe about why calling Trump II a “populist” is doing him undeserved favors. The man has discarded the Constitution. Just yesterday, he asked Nayib Bukele to build five more prisons in El Salvador in order to house “home-grown” dissidents. We are less than three months into this disastrous Presidency, and they are already disappearing people off of the street and sending them to forced labor camps in other countries.

This is authoritarianism. “Future historians” will have no trouble labeling it as such.

What I find myself ruminating upon today is just how well this piece demonstrates the sheer pointlessness of techno-optimist futurism.

Yes, sure, if we begin from the assumption that everything will turn out great, then we can always backfill a coherent story about how todays troubles were the preamble to a bright new beginning. If the future is bright, then it will be because Trumpism ultimately failed, and the work of collectively rejecting him made a better world possible.

But how is that the least bit useful for helping us make decisions about how we act today?

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Whenever I talk about techno-pragmatism, I begin from a simple credo: “There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out very well for anyone.”

I still have hope for a better world. But optimism doesn’t render that better world any more likely. Ignoring the prison camps and the demolition of the administrative state and the assault on every institution that could possibly resist the authoritarian takeover of the United States does not make a better future more likely. Just the opposite, in fact.

The point of pragmatism is, and always will be, to assert that the choices we make now, today have meaning. We build a better future by being clear eyed about the problems we face today, and by putting plans in motion that fix those problems.

The arc of history only bends toward justice if we, ourselves, bend it.

Ignoring the problems of the present, all while offering “positive reframes” of how it all will surely work itself out, is part of how we got ourselves into this mess. We spent the 1990s and 2000s placing faith in the tech billionaires, letting their wealth and power grow unchecked. The path to Elon and DOGE originated in too many people taking forecasts like The Long Boom seriously, and never bothering to critically assess what they got wrong along the way.

And look, pragmatically, I do not know how we resist and reject Trumpism. I do not have answers right now. My post-election take was

This is a disaster. … It’s going to be a long road to unwind the damage this second administration will cause. A very long road. Anyone who says “we’ll beat him at the midterms” isn’t taking this seriously. This will get very bad for a great many people, and many of the effects will be locked in for decades. But it won’t last forever. There will come a time when we can rebuild.

In the months since then, things have gone even worse than I expected. One reason I have been writing less frequently is I am so often dumbstruck by the news of the day.

But I am quite confident that we do not defeat Trumpism simply by asserting that everything is bound to turn out alright. Democracy is fragile. Our system of government is imperiled. The problems and the threats are very real. There are no guarantees that things are going to turn out very well for anyone.

That’s a sentiment that surely will put some restless minds in Silicon Valley at ease. But they should not rest easy. This is, in fact, a time for alarm.