The future of control/The control of the future: Global (dis)order and the weaponisation of everywhere in 2074

Abstract

In this article, I am going to suggest that questions of societal and political control will be fundamental to the challenges humanity faces in the next 50 years, a continuation of the political and social problems of modernity but playing out in a range of political contexts and with a range of technological ‘tools’. Technicians of security will attempt to manage the disorder and insecurity that results from the potential weaponisation of everything, to use a phrase from Mark Galeotti, and the weaponisation of everywhere, a condition where the state will be seeking to control a range of emerging terrains and domains. But at the same time, while societies in 2074 might be confronting conditions that are an intensification of modern political problems, there is the possibility that the impact of climate emergencies and other ecological/technological dangers might produce global disorder unlike anything experienced in modernity, radically transforming (or mutilating) the ‘material’ foundations of international politics, presenting us with problems unlike anything encountered before. At this point, as Bruno Latour suggested, we might have to depart (for our own survival and the survival of others) from the ideas about politics and economy that we have ‘inherited’ from modernity.