James Hughes on How Billionaires Ruined Futurism

We were promised a Star Trek future – a world of abundance, universal health, and the collective exploration of the stars. Instead, we got a subscription-model dystopia.

Somewhere between the first moon landing and the rise of the Silicon Valley ‘Founder-Gods’, the future stopped looking like it belonged to humanity and started belonging to a few dozen dudes with enough capital to treat the planet like a private beta test. From the enshittification of our digital commons to the quiet construction of billionaire escape hatches in the South Pacific, ‘the future’ has been rebranded as an exit strategy for the 1%.

At Future Day 2026, Dr. James Hughes, Executive Director of the IEET, argued that it’s time to stop waiting for billionaire charity and start reclaiming the machinery of tomorrow.

Synopsis

For decades, futurism promised a horizon of radical possibility—a Star Trek civilization of post-scarcity, longevity, and universal emancipation. But today, that horizon has been enclosed by a caste of tech-billionaires who have curdled the public’s hope for tomorrow into dread. From Musk’s erratic dismantling of the digital public sphere to Thiel’s surveillance capitalism and the generalized retreat into bunkers and seasteads, the oligarchs have rebranded “the future” as an escape hatch for the wealthy and a panopticon for the rest.

This talk argues that the concentration of technological power in the hands of a few erratic plutocrats is not just a moral failure, but an epistemological crisis; we can no longer predict the future because the “trends” of history have been hijacked by the whims of a few dozen men. Techno-optimism is dead so long as it remains a mascot for neo-feudalism. To save the transhumanist promise of liberation, we must move beyond asking billionaires for charity and proceed to the necessary conclusion: we must expropriate their platforms, democratize their firms, and reclaim the machinery of the future for the public good.

It’s time to talk about the expropriation of the future.

Also see James Hughes’ talk on ‘The Future Virtual You‘ at Future Day 2025.