I’ve seen multiple teachers say that their projects focusing on kids’ hopes and dreams have gone from a wide variety of things into things like winning the lottery, being an influencer, or just being rich in general. If I had to guess, I’d say that a lot more students are seeing economic stress at home. Or maybe the culture that kids consume has genuinely gotten more materialistic. I don’t know.
I’ll go out on a limb and say it has to do with the demise of the USSR and the type of futurism that is only possible with a major socialist project in the world. We are only barely now starting to see a revival since the 2010s with the rise of China.
Capitalist futurism, at its root, is about domination over nature. “We” go to the Moon or to Mars, not for any humanistic objective but to claim it, as if to say to the universe, “nothing for me is off-limits.” For the bulk of humanity, for animals, for the environment — there is no future under capitalism.
The futurism of socialist countries has the capacity for humanism, and I think that is reflected in the imagination of society.
I’ve seen multiple teachers say that their projects focusing on kids’ hopes and dreams have gone from a wide variety of things into things like winning the lottery, being an influencer, or just being rich in general. If I had to guess, I’d say that a lot more students are seeing economic stress at home. Or maybe the culture that kids consume has genuinely gotten more materialistic. I don’t know.
I’ll go out on a limb and say it has to do with the demise of the USSR and the type of futurism that is only possible with a major socialist project in the world. We are only barely now starting to see a revival since the 2010s with the rise of China.
Capitalist futurism, at its root, is about domination over nature. “We” go to the Moon or to Mars, not for any humanistic objective but to claim it, as if to say to the universe, “nothing for me is off-limits.” For the bulk of humanity, for animals, for the environment — there is no future under capitalism.
The futurism of socialist countries has the capacity for humanism, and I think that is reflected in the imagination of society.