this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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Where do you guys think the world will be in 30 years? I'm not optimistic. It's difficult to see how this mess of a world will improve for the better.
This but with a giant castle that says META on the side.
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My two cents:
There is going to be resource wars all over the globe plus lots of death because so many people in the world are easily manipulated to do horrible things via algorithm driven propaganda on social media. If we don’t stop social media from destroying human culture, then nothing will ever get done to fix the environment because we will be too divided.
The (consumer) Internet was supposed to open up communication across borders and expose everyone to the full wealth of human knowledge.
Instead it got taken over by a handful of nerds to rule the world by controlling the flow of memes.
Potato, Potato, I suppose.
I think this too, but also that most people won't know that they're resource wars because all of the news and information channels will be so heavily controlled that everything is going to be spun as ideological threats and moral imperatives. The world is going to be dying around us, and anyone who mentions it will get pushed to the top of the undesirable list.
Most of the world is in the middle of a baby bust. That generation will be middle aged in 30 years.
I think it's still or yet to be dawning on people that the past few decades have been time of social and economic boom. During these times, people think the party will never stop.
In other news, we're also in the middle of a space race. 30 years is well beyond the timelines for establishing permanent presence on the moon. People also don't seem to have noticed that the space industry is rapidly commercializing.
The tech industry has stagnated. It's a few ad tech companies that have achieved total surveillance capitalism and total capture of the tech industry to do their bidding. Namely to build glorified sensors and billboards which trap us in a feedback loop of spying and commercial consumption. Maybe the new space race will spur another technological revolution.
We are very much going in the wrong direction, and I don't see a pathway towards improvement for the average person. Civilization has already peaked.
Aside from medical progress, most technological advancements simply serve to extract wealth or consolidate/entrench power and are not to the benefit of the average person.
I think the difference between 2026 and 2056 will be about the same as the difference between 1996 and 2026.
And what difference was that? It doesn't sound promising..
It’s kind of night and day. 1996 was pre-9/11, pre-smartphones, pre-social media, and pre-surveillance-and-propaganda states. The internet was unrecognizable, and only a small groups of people outside certain settings like school or work had any access to it.
The two moments have similar threshold vibes: new technology is on the horizon, everyone knows it’s going to change the world, and nobody really knows where it ends. But the emotional tone is completely different. In 1996, that change felt hopeful. In 2026, it feels like incoming slavery.
Back then, the drivers of change still felt human. There were wealthy people and companies involved, but there were also stories of 13-year-old coders, hobbyists, weirdos, pirates, and people building world-changing software in dorm rooms and basements.
Now the future feels managed. Everything is being pushed, enclosed, monetized.
Fuck I'm tired.
the world will still be here, the question is, where will we be?
What comes after trillion? I mean, the game doesn’t end at a trillion dollars of course, these are rookie numbers.