Dystopia 2055

Decades ago, songwriter Barry McQuire recorded the hit protest song, The Eve of Destruction.

It started this way:

The eastern world it is exploding

Violence flarin, bullets loadin

You’re old enough to kill but not for voting

You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin?

And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin

But you tell me

Over and over again my friend

Ah, you don’t believe

We’re on the eve of destruction.

Let me take you on a ride — not fantasy, not scenario planning, not really “foresight.” Not even prophecy, only a kind of grief, rehearsed in advance. Just a set of possibilities, offered by someone who’s been to 147 countries and counting and has seen most of what there is to see and over a lifetime met most of the world’s leaders and captains of industry. My memoir, Davos, Aspen, & Yale, covered a lot of ground. This isn’t science. It is more a Delphi cast from an Oracle. Take note anyway: the future will be radically dissimilar from anything we know today.

In the year 2055 — if man is still alive, and the odds run both ways if you listen to the AI oligarchs — believe me, things will look nothing like today. Count the ways with me. Tell me where you disagree and some alternatives, you deem more plausible.

The Doomsday Clock has run past midnight, if it hasn’t simply been retired as redundant. The first limited nuclear exchange — China and the U.S., over Taiwan — reshaped the world, and the fallout, literal and political, never really cleared. Other proliferators followed: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Germany a handful more. Nukes and hypersonics, mega-yield and precision alike, are simply part of the furniture now, as is space warfare. Life runs on a trigger hair, always half pulled. The Golden Dome never fully worked. Oil stopped mattering once fusion arrived in 2045 — no more drilling, even as Super Intelligence/AI eats every watt the grid can produce. And yes, there are data centers just about everywhere.

Agentic AI runs more of the universe than we do, including the human colonies on Mars and the routine runs to the Moon and beyond. There isn’t much left for humans to decide. The singularity came and went quietly: the machines got smarter than us and nobody agreed on the exact date. We travel by air more than by road — the automobile has gone the way of the horse and buggy, a curiosity you point at laughing. People live astonishingly long, long enough that every system built on the old actuarial tables — Social Security chief among them — simply broke.

One hundred and fifty years is a normal lifespan now. Cancer is history. Biotech cures have rewired how we think, work, and exist. Organs print on demand. Peak Wellness is the new religion — transplants, infusions, replacement parts, all of it on tap. Cryogenics is no longer fringe. The transhumanists won the argument — by default. Yet it turned out that our longevity without meaning is its own kind of sentence.

Work, too, is unrecognizable — manual labor is optional, a hobby at best. Machines, robots, and quantum systems handle the lifting and the routine. What’s left of life is a strange blend of meditation, wellness ritual, and leisure — endless leisure, chased with drugs both legal and psychedelic. Assisted death is normalized; you choose your own exit date. And the gap between the wealthy and everyone else has widened past anything feudalism ever managed — a divide closer to the Dark Ages than to any promise of equality. Red and Blue states are a memory; the elite cluster in a handful of glittering cities while everyone else scrapes by, in what’s now simply called the beyond. The Matrix, it turns out, was actually quite prophetic.

The search for meaning ended the way most searches end when nobody’s looking anymore: nihilism won by forfeit. Materialism is the water everyone swims in; religion has been reduced to a handful of holdouts running their own ‘Benedict Options’ in Montana, Borneo, Papua New Guinea — wherever’s left remote enough to hide. No priesthood, no philosopher-kings, no dictators even. Just nothing, humming along…

Nation-states dissolved too, replaced by fortified city-states that guard their food, water, land, and capital with everything they’ve got. Everyone’s armed to the teeth, a highly upgraded techno version of Game of Thrones.

Families are optional and polygamy is unremarkable. Marriage runs on short-term contracts; more lease than covenant. Children are rare — too expensive, too little return, people say out loud now without flinching. Sterility is common, sex increasingly beside the point, and the real question nobody wants to answer is whether the species still replaces itself. At current rates: no. A the scare of climate change never materialized either even though factions kept declaring we have less than a decade to live.

Governance is a subscription service (GAAS). Polyarchy replaced elections — people pick their policies off a menu, weekly or monthly, and there’s no permanent political class left to grift or pretend otherwise. Term limits did what fifty years of reform promises couldn’t: they killed the career politician outright. Cash is gone; crypto runs the worldwide digital economy, and abundance is now the problem — disinflation, everywhere, all the time.

Socialism was voted in back in 2028 and hardened into a participatory big government system through the 2030s: confiscatory level taxation, universal healthcare, a floor basic income for everyone, the Supreme Court packed, the map redrawn Blue. Trump and his circle were impeached seven more times before the third term ran out early, and the opposition simply stopped opposing. After the 250th-birthday blowout, it was all downhill for MAGA, and everything called conservatism — no one could even say anymore what exactly was worth conserving. A hundred-plus genders, a mosaic of ethnicities without end — pluribus triumphant, unum nowhere to be found. Western Civilization itself simply ran out of gas.

The universities that survived the free-online-everything purge and indoctrination became something closer to finishing schools for ideology, kept alive by elite families paying full freight to keep their kids networked and out of trouble — not that trouble means much anymore, since crime itself barely exists as a category. People genuinely ask now: what is a crime? What’s right or wrong, seriously? Is there still such a thing as beauty, or truth, or are those just preferences we used to enforce? Relativism didn’t just win the argument — it became the de facto operating system.

Borders reopened, but unevenly. Red territories sealed themselves off; Blue ones threw the doors wide open and rebranded millions of new arrivals visitor-citizens, sanctuary made permanent and total. There were no mediating structures to resist.

In Europe, demographics did what politics couldn’t: birthrates carried Islam to a majority across the continent, and Sharia followed the numbers. The no-go zones didn’t need to persist — entire nations simply became them.

The world in 2055 is closer, more closed, at war in every sense of the word, teetering on the edge of what that older song called “the eve of destruction.” That eve this time, wasn’t a bang. It was a long, quiet exhale nobody quite noticed until the entire room had gone dark and cold.

If that’s more disturbing than Huxleyesque Brave New World ever managed — good. Here’s the actual hard question: what are we going to do about it? And when?

Could it be that it’s not too late to shape our destiny. Maybe even to invent something else entirely, called our future or back to the future.