New World Same Humans #35
Four futures for truth, democracy, and your life online.
Welcome to New World Same Humans, a weekly newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
If you’re reading this and you haven’t yet subscribed, then join 12,000+ curious souls on a journey to build a better shared future 🚀🔮
🎧 If you’d prefer to listen to this week’s instalment, go here for the audio version of New World Same Humans #35. 🎧
Back in New World Same Humans #21, I wrote about the Four Futures framework. That instalment became the most popular NWSH email ever. So this week, as long planned, I revisit the method.
A quick reminder:
Four Futures provides a structured framework for thinking about what lies ahead. At its heart is the idea that all the stories we tell about the future fall into one of four distinct categories:
Growth. The present order continues to develop along its current trajectory.
Collapse. Our current trajectory comes to a sudden halt; the present order falls apart.
Discipline. New restraints are imposed on the present order to prevent collapse.
Transformation. Entirely new systems are found; we transcend the present order.
You can take this framework and apply it to the future of anything, from your own life as we did in NWSH #21, to your industry or business.
This week, I’ve used the framework to create four scenarios around a NWSH obsession: the future of truth and democracy.
And this week also counts as the first ever interactive instalment, because I’ve created an online form where you can vote for the scenario you think is most likely to happen. See the ‘Let’s vote!’ section below for more. I’ll announce the results of this historic First Ever Poll of NWSH Readers in Wednesday’s New Week Same Humans.
As you’ll soon discover, there’s a spirit of playfulness about these scenarios. They owe more to speculative fiction than to formal scenario planning, which is a method I’ll be writing more about soon. But they do represent an authentic attempt to think about the trends, people and ideas reshaping the future of truth and democracy, and to glimpse how events may play out.
Enough preamble; let’s do this. Read, enjoy, and don’t forget to vote!
📥 Fast Download: Four Futures for Truth and Democracy
🔮 The Four Futures framework is a device for the structured imagining of what lies ahead. This week, I’ve applied the framework to a NWSH obsession: the future of truth and democracy.
📈 Growth: The Night is Still Young. After two terms of Biden, Ivanka Trump rides QAnon ideas to the White House in 2028. The border between two internets – one for China and one for the rest of the world – becomes hard to cross. The EU regulates social media; Facebook withdraws from Europe.
☠️ Collapse: All Hail the Protectorate. When Biden wins by a landslide in 2020, liberals become complacent. Meanwhile, QAnon ferments a new theory: Elon Musk is at the heart of a secret plot to hack the minds of ordinary citizens and install a hyperintelligent Martian squid as global dictator. Via a QAnon presidency, democracy is suspended and the US falls under the rule of a shadowy Big Tech coalition called the Protectorate.
💪 Discipline: Listen to Uncle Mark. Trump wins in 2020 but faces a backlash in his second term. In 2025 President Ocasio-Cortez fires the starting gun on massive regulation of Big Tech. As part of the deal struck with regulators, Zuckerberg steps down from Facebook and becomes the face of a global campaign to support online truthfulness.
🦋 Transformation: The Philosopher King.When Trump wins in 2020, liberals despair. But soon new forms of VR spiritual experience transform the consciousness of millions, and then billions worldwide. Peace breaks out on Twitter. The social media giants fade away, to be replaced by cooperative platforms. In 2037 the citizens of Earth agree to hand global governance to an AI philosopher king called Aurelius.
📈 Growth: The Night is Still Young
When the US Presidential election finally comes around in November 2020, polls show Biden with a clear lead. In the event, though, the result is impossibly close, hinging on a handful of contested votes in Florida. The constitutional crisis that ensues leaves US citizens without a president for five months across the winter and spring of 2021. QAnon believers make up a significant proportion of the rioters who pour into the streets each night.
In the aftermath of the riots, President Biden orders a new drive to reinvigorate truthfulness in public life. Under pressure from an alliance of politicians and celebrities, Facebook and other social giants target QAnon. But the movement always stays one step ahead of attempts to dismantle its online presence.
Meanwhile, President Xi’s ever more assertive China sends tanks into an unruly Hong Kong. Seeking to reassure Republican-leaning voters, Biden tightens controls on Chinese apps and online services. Western users desert TikTok for a US clone, FreeTok.
As the digital border between two internets – one for China and one for the rest of the world – becomes impenetrable, a new underground industry develops which sees hackers take ordinary citizens on digital tours of the Other Side. A new trend emerges for ‘splinternet romances’ in which young people in the US and China strike up long-distance relationships as a form of rebellion against the growing antipathy between their two countries.
Rejuvenated by new youth-giving treatments, President Biden squeaks reelection in 2024. But QAnon ideas are now getting daily air time on the Trump News Network. On her nightly TNN talk show, Ivanka stokes claims that Biden’s new youthfulness is thanks to adrenochrome, a secret wonderdrug harvested from the blood of children. An ensuing moral panic leads to the closure of schools in some Republican states. The chaos helps swing the electoral pendulum back in 2028, when President Ivanka Trump becomes the first woman Commander in Chief.
The following year the EU impose far-reaching regulations on the digital space. Under the Vestager-Breton Act, Facebook and other social giants are held to be publishers with legal responsibility for the content they host. On the 20 September 2029, Europeans wake up to this message inside Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram: ‘This service is not available in your jurisdiction. Please contact your MEP’.
☠️ Collapse: All Hail the Protectorate
When Biden’s landslide 2020 victory coincides with the roll out of an effective coronavirus vaccine, the New York Times strikes a triumphant tone. In an Op-Ed shared around the world, a coalition of glitterati including Tony Blair, Emma Watson and Bono write: ‘out of their darkest hour since WWII, liberalism, science, and the rules-based world order have emerged supreme. Now, with the forces of reaction banished, the 2020s will be a New Age of Enlightenment’.
Amid the liberal self-congratulation, concerns over QAnon fade.
Left to spread unchecked, its numbers quietly swell. Believers now claim Elon Musk’s Neuralink is at the heart of a secret plot – hatched by the liberal elite in a new alliance with the Chinese government – to hack the minds of ordinary citizens. According to a growing mythology, Musk is the leader of a religious cult that worships a giant, ancient and hyperintelligent Martian squid called Credula. QAnon believers say Musk and Xi Jingping paid homage to the creature in 2020, when they used the cover of lockdown to fly secretly to Mars on a SpaceX rocket. Now, they plan to bring Credula to Earth, and install it as Communo-Liberal Galactic Overlord for All Eternity.
Musk’s increasingly bizarre behaviour does nothing to dispel the rumours. When Biden dies a few days into his second term, the conspiracy theory explodes. A QAnon party forms seemingly overnight, and in the midterms it takes control of the Senate. In the 2028 Presidential Election, President Harris loses to the QAnon candidate, an AI-generated hologram of Abraham Lincoln controlled by the movement’s shadowy high command.
Mainstream media outlets, including CNN and the New York Times, are closed. In 2032 President Lincoln suspends the general election, and declares the rule of the Protectorate. European media reports that Facebook, Google and Amazon have agreed to supply the Protectorate with data, and that Zuckerberg, Pichai and Bezos will sit on the secretive Council of Nine that now runs the executive branch.
Amid rising unemployment, opposition to the Protectorate grows. Autonomous robot soldiers are deployed against a 1 million strong crowd in Washington DC in 2034. An underground Resistance takes shape, but, bedevilled by arguments over structures of privilege and their role in the appointment of the social media team, the movement fails to act.
In 2037 the Council of Nine launch New Lev (the name is short for New Leviathan), a neural implant that will be compulsory for all US citizens. Via this implant, real-time data on the thoughts and sentiments of every American will stream to the Protectorate’s AI, which will govern accordingly. Revised school textbooks teach that democratic representation as practised in the 20th and early 21st-centuries was a form of semi-feudal subjugation to an economic elite. Now, via New Lev, a true People’s Democracy has triumphed.
School children chant the Protectorate’s mantras each morning: ‘All are one, one are all, under New Lev, stand or fall’, and, ‘What the Council speaks, we have spoken’.
💪 Discipline: Listen to Uncle Mark
Fuelled by QAnon ideas, President Trump enjoys a surge in polling days before the 2020 election. He retains the White House.
When journalists reveal that key QAnon activists were funded by puppet charities established by the Russian government, Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley leaders promise to act against misinformation.
Embroiled in multiple corruption scandals, as his term advances Trump’s anger becomes unmanageable. Public opinion turns against him when during a Presidential photo-op at Washington DC’s first entirely automated McDonald’s, he pushes over an elderly woman who is taking too long to speak her order.
Via a massive backlash against Trumpism, President Ocasio-Cortez is inaugurated in January 2025. In her inauguration speech the new President, who met the minimum age requirement of 35 just three months before, commits to the end of ‘the online wild west’.
Her administration works with the EU to devise new global rules that touch almost every aspect of life online. Facebook, Amazon and Google are broken up via new antitrust legislation; when she signs the bill Ocasio-Cortez quotes the 19th-century US Congressman John Sherman: ‘If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.’
New rules mean every citizen is issued a digital passport that identifies them with their behaviour in all online public spaces. A windfall tax on the profits of Big Tech companies funds the creation of new AI systems that identify deepfakes, downrate misinformation, and surface trustworthy content. Nicknamed ‘the God algorithm’, this system now governs content across Facebook, Google, YouTube and other platforms. A citizen council, comprised of 50 US and EU adults appointed at random and serving one-year terms, is established to oversee the algorithm; being called for council duty comes to be known informally as ‘meeting your maker’.
Meanwhile, as part of the anti-trust settlement that sees him keep 15% of his fortune, Zuckerberg agrees to be the face of a new global public information drive. The campaign likens online trolls to drink drivers and other legitimate targets of social shame. A new generation grows up knowing Zuckerberg only as the avuncular figure smiling down from a million school posters: ‘Lying online Zucks! Remember to be kind online’.
🦋 Transformation: The Philosopher King
When Trump retains the White House in 2020, the New York Times despairs. In an Op-Ed shared around the world, a coalition of downcast glitterati including Tony Blair, Emma Watson and Bono, write: ‘This second election victory, unlike the first, cannot be called an aberration. The citizens of the west are turning decisively away from liberalism, science, and the rules-based international order. A new dark age awaits.’
Though Bono and his associates don’t know it yet, even as they write the seeds of a remarkable transformation are being planted.
Facebook’s new Horizon shared virtual world has opened to the public and also to developers, who can create their own experiences inside it. On 5 January 2026, an anonymous developer from New Zealand releases a new experience called Nirvanaride. Early users speak of a series of immersive guided meditations that culminate in access to a sacred space called The Temple, where they undergo an overwhelming spiritual revelation. Afterwards, they say they are filled with a new and joyful empathy for their fellow humans.
As millions undergo Nirvanaride, the nature of online interactions begins to change. Twitter becomes a space of mutual emotional support, friendly disagreement, and sincere truth seeking.
By 2028, over 1.8 billion people have been transformed by Nirvanaride and the spate of VR spiritual experiences to which it gives rise. The creator of the original experience is eventually discovered; she explains the revolutionary experimental psychology techniques on which she based her work. Her wish to remain anonymous is respected.
Facebook’s claims to intellectual ownership of Nirvanaride are upheld by the Supreme Court. But the judgement turns out to be of little consequence. By 2029 the legacy social media giants are fading away, replaced by decentralised and wiki alternatives governed by crowds of editors. A new social media utility, Onebook, is held in public ownership and works on a Glass Box principle of total transparency; soon enough, it has 2.7 billion members.
For a new generation the noisy, combative electoral politics of the early 21st-century comes to be seen as old-fashioned, even barbaric. In 2037, after running billions of simulations to test its integrity, the nations of Earth agree to hand global governance to an AI Philosopher King called Aurelius.
At its inauguration ceremony, Aurelius’s first public declaration rings out through the hall: ‘Hello, World!’
🗳️ Let’s vote!
There we have it: four scenarios on the future of truth, democracy and the online space. Now I want to know what you think!
I’ve created a simple online form so that you can tell me which of the four futures you believe is most likely to happen. I’ll reveal the results – and which scenario I think we’ll see – in Wednesday’s New Week Same Humans.
***Voting will only take five seconds, and you can vote here***
Even better: if you want to explain your choice, just hit reply and drop me a line. I’d love to hear from you.
The power of now
Thanks for reading this week.
The Four Futures framework is a powerful device. As with all futures methods, its real power lies in the way it improves our thinking about the world as it is now.
At New World Same Humans, we’re building a community dedicated to understanding the big trends, forces and ideas reshaping the world we live in.
There’s one thing you can do to help make this community more useful. That is, invite more people inside!
So if you found today’s instalment engaging, why not take a second to forward this email to one person – a friend, family member or colleague – who shares our fascination with the future of truth and democracy? Or share New World Same Humans across one of your social networks, and let people know why you find this newsletter valuable. Just hit the share button!
Your membership of our community is valued. I’ll be back on Wednesday with the results of the poll and much more. Until then, be well.
David.