The Future is Deja Vu

We’re not entering a new era. We’re looping back, faster, louder, and dumber.

Hi everyone,

I think it was about two years ago that it really hit me: much of what we call progress—especially in technology—isn’t new at all. It’s a return. Not in the nostalgic sense, but in the deeper, structural sense: we’re revisiting old patterns under new names, replaying ideas that already showed their teeth in the past.

I ended up writing an entire book proposal called The Return, where I tried to map out why our current moment isn’t a rocket ship ride to some shiny utopia (or even a plausible dystopia), but rather another chapter in an old saga. Our era was the retelling of a story, of centralized bureaucratic control, of consumerism dressed up as science, of freedom eroded in the name of convenience, and of surveillance tools that pretend to be personal assistants. (I shelved the project—oh, the irony—because something “new” came out: ChatGPT, in 2022.)