Every week is like this. Perhaps we should be used to it by now: the weirdness began in earnest six years ago, when the first Covid cases were reported in Wuhan, China. In short order, this triggered the worldwide lockdowns that forced everyone online, with economies in freefall and cultures into a pervasive state of low-level derangement. 

Some of that first and loudest wave of Covid-era internet derangement seized upon the World Economic Foundation’s “Great Reset” program. The influential Davos talking-shop attracts an elite circle of businesspeople, financiers and their hangers-on (including in Labour), and has long been a bête noire for radicals across the political compass. The patrician “Great Reset” proposal to treat the pandemic as a social-engineering opportunity rapidly became a byword for every imaginable flavor of conspiracy. 

The program’s proponents, not least the Blofeld-esque WEF founder, German economist Klaus Schwab, celebrated it as an exciting new dawn for humanity. What was it really? And were the conspiracists right? As is often the way, the answer is: literally, no, but poetically: not far off.

The Great Reset called for coordinated global action by governments to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions”. On the face of it, that sounds utopian; but it proved, to say the least, unpopular. Why? Well, the WEF’s own website acknowledges that, to work, a Great Reset would call for a “level of cooperation and ambition” that “is unprecedented”, requiring “stronger and more effective governments” along with “private-sector engagement every step of the way”. 

And if Covid taught us anything, it’s that competence of this sort is not guaranteed. Quite the contrary: for most, the experience was both of a spike in high-tech control measures, such as drone surveillance and digital tracking, and a concurrent plunge in the quality of basic stuff, such as road surfaces or waiting times for a driving test or a GP appointment. Nor have things improved since. Labour may have been elected to restore competence after a string of hopeless Tory leaders, but even now the stories of state ineptitude come thick and fast, wreathed each time in a fog of cover-up and sometimes outright lying. We spend millions on fish discos and bat tunnels, while nothing gets built. There’s that Avanti train. And so much more! 

In the last year the number of prisoners released early by mistake has run into the hundreds, including very high-profile offenders such as the Epping sex attacker. The Home Office was recently forced to admit having lost track of 53,000 asylum seekers. The military emailed a spreadsheet of Afghan collaborators to half the planet, then tried to hide it by smuggling the list members into Britain under a super-injunction. I doubt the WEF actually are lizards in human suits or whatever. But given the manifest incompetence of our leadership class, the WEF haters are surely right to resist any further power-grabs (such as, for example, the recent return of Blair’s cherished digital ID scheme). Who in their right mind would entrust the kind of sensitive high-tech work envisaged by a “Great Reset” to the sort of clowns who make mistakes of this kind? They can’t even lie and manipulate effectively: their propaganda efforts and secretive “misinformation units” keep being spotted and denounced, only to resurface again with the next round of cock-up and cover-up.

But why is it like this? Why is everything now run by numpties? Nothing is ever monocausal, but the media theorist Marshall McLuhan might have argued that it’s not just falling birth rates, or MPs’ low pay (though this doubtless doesn’t help). It’s also the way our technologies are changing us. McLuhan argued, all the way back in the Sixties, that the objectivity, logical thinking, and technical wizardry that gave us the modern age was in important ways a byproduct of widespread print literacy. And this age had already been superseded by electricity. 

McLuhan claimed that this exit from the print to the electric age was driving a decline in rationality and technical competence, and return to tribalism and magical thinking. And perhaps we can point to the first use of “dumbing down” by Hollywood executives in the Thirties, to describe adjusting a film’s content for less intelligent people. Or we could note that especially beginning in the Sixties, when McLuhan wrote The Gutenberg Galaxy, electronic media were indeed competing ever more vigorously with books for public attention. Against this, though, international IQ scores went on rising over the 20th century. So for all that Starmer admits he doesn’t read, or at least doesn’t read novels, there is surely more to our now woefully thin political talent pool than just electric media dumbing everyone down.

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More recently, though, commentators have begun to warn that another factor accelerating this “more” may be the shift to digital reading. As Nicholas Carr warned in 2005, this activates the brain in ways quite different to reading things in print, with the effects including the degrading of concentration. And this, others argue, is driving our having apparently passed peak IQ in the early 21st century. Perhaps the culprit is our distracting smartphones, or — increasingly — the use of AI. (Labour MPs have been accused of reading out ChatGPT-generated speeches.) 

So what does it mean for our technocratic overlords if the world is getting dumber? The strongest argument in favor of technocracy was always that modern states are too complex to be managed by elected non-specialists, and should be left in the hands of super-competent experts. But what if the technocrats are also doomscrolling, and it’s making them stupider too? 

If so, you might expect to see (for example) tribal thinking and emotional logic coming to infect even technocracy, resulting in large-scale, top-down social engineering programs that don’t work as expected, or at all. Imagine. In response, then, you might also see supporters of such programs beginning to question their value. You might, in fact, see even such high-profile figures breaking ranks as Nicole Shanahan, ex-wife of Google founder Sergey Brin and erstwhile powerhouse philanthropist. 

In an interview this week, Shanahan lifted the lid on the clique of Silicon Valley “tech wives” whose money was, in her words, “used to set the groundwork” for “The Great Reset”. Shanahan no longer considers this a good use of philanthropic money. She admits: “I really believed I was giving black communities a chance to rise up out of oppression”. Now, though, she’s reviewed how those grants are performing and has concluded in fact “the problems of the community have gotten worse”. But nor can we hold out hope that the Right will save us from motivated reasoning, corruption or numpties. Remember literally everything the Tories ever did, in their 14 years in power. Are there really enough ultra-competent Reform-aligned people out there to form a government, should Farage win next time? I hope so; but I worry.

The central problem with the “Great Reset” was essentially the same as Reform’s, but on an even greater scale: the fact that there aren’t enough technocrats who are as detached, ethical, and competent as such a program would have needed for it work as intended. So does this mean the end of technocracy? Perhaps; but that should raise two cheers, at the most. It’s true that Schwab has left the WEF, and quit shilling the Great Reset. Indeed, the circumstances of his departure make him a vivid illustration of precisely that central problem. Schwab didn’t just retire; he resigned, following whistleblower allegations that he embezzled money, manipulated WEF reports, and booked “private massages” in hotel rooms. 

Now, he’s launching something called the “Schwab Academy” from what appears to be a garden shed. He’s also published a new book, titled Thriving and Leading in the Intelligent Age. But when you map the shift from “Great Reset” to “Intelligent Age” onto Shanahan’s loss of faith in top-down social engineering, something worrying emerges: a sense that the technocrats have given up on the public, and are now quietly building an ark.

For the unspoken small print to Schwab’s “Intelligent Age” is how we define “intelligence”. Schwab tends to oscillate between the human and machine kind, as if these needn’t be distinguished sharply from one another. And were this right, we might say: a new “intelligent age” in public life would make a nice change, so bring it on. But Emily Bender and Alex Hanna have recently argued that this isn’t right. So-called “Artificial Intelligence” is a con: it is not, and will never be, intelligent in the human sense. It’s far more accurately described not as “intelligence” but “automation”.

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And one of the side-effects of automation is de-skilling. The more shoe factories, for example, the fewer skilled cobblers. So if AI automates at least some aspects of thought, it follows that in embracing it we’ll de-skill ourselves. I suspect that Schwab sees this, and is carefully leaving it unstated, on the basis that the much smaller group of people he considers worth trying to save already know. He and his buddies are just planning for their own survival in a future of universal post-literacy.

The real vibe shift, then, may not be a swing Left, or Right, at all. Rather, I suspect it’s a swing within the class that endorsed the first Great Reset, away from even trying to make things better for everyone. Silicon Valley’s “tech wives mafia” has fallen out of love with progressive social engineering, for the simple reason that it doesn’t work. We can likewise expect the utopian justification for other tech-authoritarian policies to fall by the wayside too. The last great wealth transfer happened in the name of “flattening the curve”, drowning small businesses as Amazon boomed. Perhaps the next won’t even bother with a justification.

The real Great Reset, then, was always the post-literate collapse in intelligence. It’s already rendered large-scale technocracy unworkable. Now, the class that not so long ago dreamed of a global transformation are retreating to their bunkers instead, sometimes literally. The rest of us had better hold onto our loved ones; there is no one else coming to save us.

Flying cars are a great example. They’re anything but new; US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss built and tested the first flying car in 1917. There have been many others since then, and some of them worked, after a fashion. The problem is that the engineering compromises needed to make a vehicle that’s both roadworthy and airworthy guarantee that your flying car will have lousy performance in either role. It will also cost so much that for the same price, you could buy a good car, a good plane, and put a down payment on a midsized yacht. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. They’ve been tried, they’ve failed, and only the fact that people won’t let go of the fantasy keeps engineers perpetually pushing on a door marked “Pull”.

Take any other iconic technogimmick that popular culture assigns to the future and you’ll find that it was a familiar notion a century ago. Fusion power? Jules Verne wrote about that in 1869. Replacement of human labour by robots? Introduced in 1921 by Karel Capek, the writer who invented the word “robot”. 24/7 internet connectivity for all? It’s a major plot point in E.M. Forster’s 1909 tale The Machine Stops. Space travel? Already done to death before the pulp magazines of the Twenties got to it. All of them, interestingly enough, turned out to have the same problem that doomed the flying car: sure, they’re possible — well, except for fusion power; the jury’s still out on whether that can be done on a scale smaller than a star — but the limited benefits don’t begin to cover the sky-high costs.

Yet the same old futures, grey with decades of dust, remain stuck in place in the popular imagination. Take Star Trek, the show that still defines the future for an embarrassingly large number of people. It premiered in 1966. In that year cars still had tailfins, surfer movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were all the rage, books on space travel had chapters beginning “When man lands on the Moon,” and slide rules were the standard calculating device because computers were fragile contraptions the size of warehouses. That was the year when Ronald Reagan began his political career. Star Trek isn’t our future. It’s the embalmed corpse of a future that fell over dead a long time ago.

There’s an ugly political subtext behind this act of mummification. The rebels of the 1960s and 1970s framed their challenges to the status quo in visionary terms, portraying futures dramatically different from the present. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1978) were among the most widely read of the literature that resulted. Those challenges caused stark panic among the comfortable classes. When the backlash hit in the 1980s, the corporate establishment set out to erase the idea that the future could differ from the present in any way that mattered.

Those who lived through those years will recall how environmental action groups were bought out and neutered, the scruffy radicals who founded them abruptly replaced by slick corporate enablers. The same thing happened to every other movement that threatened the existing order of things: that’s when feminism gave up on changing society, for example, and settled instead for giving middle-class women prestige jobs within the system. Stuffing the visionary futures of the previous decades down the nearest available memory hole was part of the same process.

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That’s how we spent forty years spent parading around the crumbling mummy of a failed future under the delusion that we were doing something innovative. At this point even true believers are beginning to have doubts. Every year we get told by the lab-coated cheerleaders of progress as usual that fusion power is only twenty more years in the future, that we’ll be going back to the Moon sometime soon, and so on through a litany of broken promises. Meanwhile creeping dysfunction spreads through the world’s industrial nations, marked by the accelerating decay of the built environment and the ongoing crapification of everyday life.

The result has been a paralysis of the imagination with dismal political consequences. Have you noticed how many of the political crusades of the last forty years have been against something rather than for something? It’s all about fighting this or stopping that, not about envisioning constructive change and then setting out to make it happen. Political parties pitch themselves to their captive constituencies by insisting that the other side will make things worse, without offering a scrap of hope that things might get better. It’s no wonder that so many people cherish apocalyptic fantasies. Compared to a future that’s never any better than the wretched mess of the present, global annihilation has a certain charm.

Anyone who wants a future different from the present thus needs to start by ditching the faux-future we’ve been sold by the corporate media for the last forty years, and envisioning something genuinely different. That’s harder than it looks. Most of the supposedly innovative futures these days abandon the Star Trek future in order to chase something even more antiquated.

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Consider Klaus Schwab and his loudly ballyhooed “Great Reset.” In the future Schwab and his fellow plutocrats are promoting, you will own nothing, vast intrusive bureaucracies will monitor every detail of your life, and you will be happy. You’d better be happy, because it’s clear what will happen to you if you’re not: the future Schwab is proposing, after all, is a carbon copy of the Soviet Union under Stalin with a few technology upgrades, and the only question he hasn’t discussed in print is where he plans on putting the gulags and mass graves. That sort of future was fresh and new in the late nineteenth century. At this point it’s roughly as fresh as Lenin’s corpse, and we all know how well it worked in practice.

How about the future that begins with young enthusiastic people moving out to communes in the countryside to lay the foundations of a new society? That’s even older than the futures we’ve already discussed. Nathaniel Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter fame wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, which was published in 1852; it’s set on a commune in rural Massachusetts, with a cast of characters you could have found in rural northern California just after the Summer of Love. By the time Hawthorne penned that story, communes had been a familiar presence in the United States since colonial times. Nor did the communes of early nineteenth century America last longer or accomplish more than their lineal descendants in the 1920s or the 1960s.

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The moral of the story? If you’re going to borrow a future from the past, find one that worked. If you’re going to invent one from scratch, don’t repeat the failed gimmicks of futures that are already long past their pull date. Don’t make your future depend on some infinitely abundant source of energy that doesn’t happen to exist: that was the fatal flaw of the Star Trek future. Don’t hand unchecked power to a bureaucratic system under the fond illusion that it won’t be abused: that was the problem with the allegedly glorious socialist future that turned Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia into abattoirs. Don’t assume that you can run away from society and create a utopia on fifty acres in the country: it’s been tried countless times, with a success rate best counted in imaginary numbers.

The futures that matter at this point are those that don’t simply rehash the failures of the past. They don’t extrapolate from the failed present in a straight line, for that matter. A glance back at the visionary futures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s might be useful; a glance at the strange alternative histories being dreamed up on the fringes right now might also help.

The exotic visions of past and present being promoted in conspiracy culture these days show that there is still a collective imagination out there. It’s just that the people involved in creating and circulating those visions have somehow managed to convince themselves that the bumbling stooges who run our political and economic institutions are monomaniacal masterminds obsessed with conquering the world they already mismanage. If the conspiracy-minded can shake themselves out of that dysfunctional notion, they can put their imaginative gifts to better use and start conspiring to bring about more interesting futures.

It’s a challenge that all of us would be well advised to face. One great lesson that can be learned from the total failure of the Tomorrowland future is that the world ahead of us won’t look like anything churned out by today’s corporate media. Nor, it probably needs to be said, will it follow any of the various linear extrapolations being hawked about by the single-minded these days. We need to be prepared to deal with technological progress and technological unraveling, sudden jolts and slow transitions, new opportunities and hard limits — all of these, all at once. That’s the way history happens. The sooner we grasp that, and ditch the outdated futures that clutter up the collective imagination these days like so much Victorian bric-a-brac, the more likely we will be to imagine a future worth having — and then to go out there and create it.

There are times when asking questions is more useful than offering answers, and this is one of them. Set aside the decrepit futures pushed at you by the corporate media, and ask yourself what you want in a future.

Put simply, the bugman is slang for a default, normie consumer, who imbibes uncritically the great narratives of today’s power structures: the kind of person who mistakes the basic bitch hedonism that Western society offers in abundance for a source of deep meaning.

Accordingly, the bugman enjoys Netflix and Deliveroo; Marvel franchises and Blue Apron. The bugman probably thought The Last Jedi was pretty cool for its feminist messages. It is an article of faith for him that Beyoncé is a queen who slays. In fact, the bugman’s opinions are so tediously orthodox they can be widely shared on social media without any fear of payback.

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The bugman’s original etymology (and entomology) refers to how he lives in a kind of honeycomb of similarly indistinct humans — a block of flats, say, probably in a major metropolis. But in recent years, the bugman has taken on another origin story. It can now mean ‘he who would gladly eat the bugs’. A global citizen, primed for the coming age of deep ecology proposed by XR and Greta, in which cows are banned, and protein is dispensed from reconstituted insect matter with far lower carbon footprints.

It’s the future in which we no longer own cars but merely rent space in self-driving taxis; the one in which we have to apply for our annual flight credits from the National Carbon Register. In its most extreme version, it’s the world of pod people — where the joyous citizen takes on the awesome planet-saving responsibility of limiting his housing to the necessary few square metres of dormitory space. After all, the bugman is instinctively a globalist, deeply trustful of international institutions, and their high-level plans for his future.

Which brings us neatly to an international institution, and its high-level plan for our future. It takes us into the heart of a conspiracy that isn’t, but a tendency that most certainly is. It is in the spaces between this non-existent conspiracy and the thriving tendency that a new war to control meaning is now raging.

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In June of this year, the World Economic Forum hosted a video seminar called The Great Reset, to promote a book, also called The Great Reset. It was a crushingly tedious time for all concerned. Bookended with the mitherings of Prince Charles, the event mainly involved a panel of worthies — who all had that NGO tan that comes from endlessly staring at discussion documents about third world poverty from a luxurious Alpine apartment — sharing their thoughts on ‘sustainability’, ‘green jobs’ and ‘the global south’.

Their Great Reset, as unveiled in their seminar, proposes a generational shifting of the track-lines of our economic development. It calls for de-carbonising, with the help of massive government stimulus; it wants an internationalist approach that clamps down on tax-dodging companies, paid for by new taxes on the wealthy. Lame, perhaps. But on the face of it, hardly sinister.

The stronger thesis of The Great Reset was best stated by the former Vatican ambassador to the US, Archbishop Carlo Vagano, who in November of this year wrote an open letter to President Trump:

Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. 

This is the Great Reset as it now exists within the conspiracy world: the premise that life as we knew it is being flattened so as to be re-forged into the bugman’s paradise — with special emphasis on Covid-19 being essentially fake, or at least wildly overstated.

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Clearly, these two Great Resets — the lame version and the conspiracy version — are very different propositions. Yet there is also a sense in which they talk to each other, feed off each other. Above all, each provides an excellent strawman for the opposing team to attack.

Take the case of Justin Trudeau, who became a viral sensation in Great Reset (lame version) circles in September, when he used his speech to the UN General Assembly to talk about using Covid to pursue more of the politics he already enjoys:

“Building back better means getting support to the most vulnerable while maintaining our momentum on reaching the 2030 Agenda for sustainable development”

Agenda 2030, often spoken of in the same breath as the Great Reset, is the UN’s “sustainable development goals”, a long list of platitudes about the environment and inequality of such aching tedium that it makes The Great Reset (lame version) look like The 120 Days Of Sodom.

In the moment, Trudeau was saying no more than what the Trudeaus of this world tend to say. But then, the beauty of the Great Reset is that it has become a framework for connecting the dots between all the world’s Trudeaus and their mandarin class. These are all the people Steve Bannon used to call The Party Of Davos. And in the battle to define what comes after the Jahr Null of Covid, so far, it’s this Davos crowd and these ideas that are winning every skirmish.

For the very online Right, it hasn’t escaped notice that, whether it’s voiced by Biden, Trudeau or Johnson, ‘building back better’ always seems to mean pinning the individual under the state, in service of an open-ended, easily-redefined ‘common good’. Boris Johnson’s great green reset is one of the more curious cases in point: a moment where a leader went over the heads of his working class, northern balance of power, to play to a gallery of internationalists. The Prime Minister has bet our future on untested heat pump technology and expensive electric cars.

Of course, Klaus Schwab’s annual talking shop is hardly the only organisation vying to turn the crisis towards their agenda. The problem, it seems, was that they were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off; the title was just too good, too on-the-nose, to be ignored. The Great Reset was accidental over-sell, but only in the way that lighting striking the highest conductive point is ‘accidental’. By November, when the phrase really took off, societal disquiet was already rumbling, looking for an obvious point-of-contact with reality. Suddenly, a vague unease had a name.

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But at the same time, both sides also refuse to concede that the term has multiple meanings. For the WEF and its allies, any opposition to their policies must therefore come from wackos. This kind of queasy duality is a standard part of the modern playbook. By 2017, the term ‘alt-Right’ had come to mean both ‘card-carrying Neo-Nazi’ and ‘young people slightly to the right of Douglas Carswell who own a modem’. In debate, the distinction was deliberately elided to de-platform and defame. Ever more, the term ‘climate denier’ performs a similar function.

On the other side of the fence, those who deal in the fantasies can deploy their own motte and bailey. They point to the WEF’s actual plan as a safe harbour in reality — a stout Christmas tree of genuine fact, on which they can then hang their madder baubles. As one YouTube commenter beneath the WEF video had it: “When we warned of a reset, we’re [sic] were called conspiracists. Now what idiots?”

Between them lies the real argument, unloved and untackled. The crisis has already put down several waymarkers towards a world few of us signed up for: from the steamrollering of mom-’n’-pops in favour of Amazon, to the truly cashless society, to credit scores based on your Google history to the oft-floated ‘vaccine passport’. The bugman is always figurative: a kind of platonic ideal pointing towards the dangers of a technocratic 2020s. To take it literally is always to miss the point.

The WEF case rests precisely on explaining why we won’t end up in that future. But tackling the unease fuelling The Great Reset’s wide spectrum of critics would also mean addressing the sentiment underlying both strands of opposition: that however buttery the buzzwords, human beings are rightly suspicious of those who make abstruse high-level plans for their ‘welfare’. Especially if they’re designed by pointy-heads from Davos with no skin in the game — whether they come bearing a thought, a plan, a scheme, or an outright conspiracy.