History is something you do
Not something that happens to you.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/27/tied-to-the-tracks/#parlay-flat
Prediction is hard. Especially about the future. That Yogi Berra gem proves that you don’t have to be a science fiction writer to get irritated with people insisting that you must know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but (as a sf writer), I can tell you that this is one of our main occupational hazards.
Obviously, this is a self-inflicted injury. Our genre is full of big names who self-mythologized as scientific Nostradamuses. From the “future history” bar-charts in Heinlein’s books (I was once on a panel with Robert Silverberg where he referred to RAH as “Robert A Timeline”) to the McGuffin of Asimov’s Foundation series: a “scientific” discipline that could predict the trajectory of human civilization for millennia into the future.
But me, I find the prospect of predicting the future incredibly dismal — even offensive. A predictable future is set in stone, immune to human agency. A predictable future runs on rails, and we’re the prisoners of history, tied to the tracks.
For me, the most exciting thing about sf is the idea that the future is contingent. Sf is a long, sharp pin that can prick inevitabilism’s bubble: that assertion by tech-bros and policymakers alike that the future is out of our hands and must be accommodated, not shaped. Inevitabilism is a form of vulgar Thatcherism, the assertion that “there is no alternative.”
If The Market won’t deliver an energy transition, and it leaves us to boil in our own skins, drown in the rising seas, and roast in wildfires, then tough shit humanity, there is no alternative. If there’s a tech company eavesdropping on all of our communications technologies and following us as we move through digital and physical space (and turning the juiciest tidbits over to ICE), that’s not the tech company’s fault: there is no alternative. If some broadly useful statistical tools are delivered in the most climate-destroying, economy-wrecking, job-killing, quality-vaporizing way possible, that’s just How It Is. It’s not Sam Altman or Dario Amodei’s fault: there is no alternative.
Science fiction can do more than imagine how “General AI” might change society: sf can imagine a society that doesn’t make the fanciful leap from a word-guessing sentence-extruder to a machine god. Sf can imagine a world that debuts “AI” as a joint supercomputing project between the IPCC and Sandia National Labs whose primary purpose is to improve the fidelity of climate models, and whose spinoffs are modest but interesting open source tools that people run on regular computers with normal energy footprints.
Considered as a predictive literature, sf is a colossal failure. If our books are to be taken as roadmaps to an inevitable future, we have all flunked out of cartography school. More than 99.9% of these maps describe a territory that never emerged. All claims of sf’s predictive value are just survivor bias, feats of Texas marksmanship in which we fire a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draw a target around the place where the holes cluster.
What’s more likely: that sf is 99.9% fake fortune-tellers and 0.1% seers and soothsayers; or that the “predictions that came true” in sf are just the inevitable bullseyes that you’d score if you threw enough darts?
Prediction is a weak and helpless activity, the obsession of people who don’t think they can change anything. It’s the superstitious dread that gives rise to astrology. Far better to be a Luddite who asserts that there is more than one way to introduce a technology to a society. To be a Luddite is to insist that humans are in charge of humanity, not the iron laws of economics, not the great forces of history, not the uncaring and illusory constellations. At its best, sf is a proudly Luddite literature:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/
The insistence that we can change things is an active posture. It’s an activist posture. At its radical best, sf is activist, because it engages with more than what the machine does, insisting on changing who the machine does it for and who the machine does it to.
Which is why I find demands to offer predictions for the future so irritating. People who think that sf writers can predict the future have the field’s role exactly backwards. My intention isn’t to demoralize you into tying yourself to history’s tracks — I’m here to show you how to grab the wheel and steer off the rails altogether.
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The reason this seems so implausible is that the “there is no alternative” people have convinced us that all change is the result of individuals. To change the world, you must fashion yourself into one of history’s mediocre Great Men, a Musk or Zuck. Our oligarchs are the avatars of the Great Forces of History. They have seen the predictable, inevitable future and have been allocated trillions by the capital markets to ensure that we arrive there on time, running straight down those shining rails, no matter how many people are tied to the tracks.
Another motif of Thatcherism (and hence inevitabilism) is that “there is no such thing as society,” which means that all change is the result of individuals, which means that only Great Men can hope to change anything. If there is no such thing as society, then it follows that there’s no such thing as mass movements, there’s no such thing as trade unions, and there’s no such thing as revolutions.
If there’s no such thing as society, then eruptions of students and workers in the streets must be nothing more than mob violence — it can’t possibly be a political eruption. If you’re an inevitabilist than Occupy was nothing more than millions of individual “virtue signallers” and #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were the individual follies of innumerable “social justice warriors.”
As an activist, I’m not interested in predicting the future, I’m interested in changing it. When I speak about “the post-American internet” that we could create by exploiting the policy space that has been opened by Trump’s incontinent belligerence, my intention is to get you to help build it, not to get you to prepare yourself for that inevitable outcome:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/#the-new-coalition
Obviously, some aspects of our future are locked in. The climate violence our political and business elites inflicted on the world locked in rising seas, extreme weather, habitat-loss driven zoonotic plagues and massive refugee crises. Those are inevitable. What’s entirely up to us is what we do about them.
Do we create full employment for every person who will live for the next 300 years, relocating our coastal cities inland, treating the sick, retrofitting our infrastructure, and accommodating our neighbors who are driven out of their homes? Or do we let the stupidest, worst people among us lead us into the ecofascism of border walls, drone warfare, and exterminationism? That’s our choice.
We’ve had generations of being told to “vote with our wallets” instead of organizing in political, labor and social movements. Voting with your wallet doesn’t work (billionaires’ wallets are thicker than yours, they win those votes), and if you lose enough of those wallet elections, it’s easy to fall into the despair of believing that the future is inevitable:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/13/consumption-choices/#marginal-benefits
I think this is why “prediction markets” have caught on so ferociously. While prediction markets are sold as a way for people to “inject information” into markets, they are actually a rigged system that transfers money from everyday “investors” to insiders:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/24/degenerated-gambling/#oracle-capture
Prediction markets are the perfect pastime for history’s prisoners. If you fancy yourself a plaything of the gods whose future is already written, then prediction markets are a way for you and your fellow prisoners to bet on what torments will come next. And of course oligarchs love prediction markets, because they’re the ones who can rig the odds, say, by placing a bet on a war and then leading the country to that war.
They are the gods, the only ones who get to make history, so a market for bets on what history will do next is a way to enrich history’s avatars at the expense of history’s victims.
In science fiction, we often meet powerful aliens who tell us “resistance is futile” as they conquer our world and set about exterminating us. But if resistance was truly futile, no one would have to say it.
When they tell us “there is no alternative,” what they mean is “stop trying to think of alternatives.” To imagine radically is to move beyond the helplessness of prediction: a radical imagination dares to insist that history is what we make, not what happens to us.
Image:
Ralf Roletschek (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13-02-27-spielbank-wiesbaden-by-RalfR-093.jpg
CC BY-SA 3.0
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