Bright futurism: Who’s in charge of imagining a better future for humanity?

We were promised hoverboards, flying cars, and unparalleled abundance. Just a few decades ago, popular films, artworks, books and TV shows offered bright, enticing visions of the future, channelling the ‘New Frontier’ optimism that swept the US in the early 60s. Lots of it was science fiction. The Jetsons. Star Trek. Even 2001: A Space Odyssey gave us an alluring glimpse of advancements in science and technology, including moon bases and plush space planes, although humans continued to wield them like violent apes. And in the years that followed, some of these wild sci-fi predictions would actually come true – like flip phones, FaceTime, and flatscreen TVs – while others remained beyond our wildest dreams, just a utopian fantasy.

When you try to picture the future today, though, what comes to mind? A better, brighter world? Gleaming spires, a two-day work week, the rewilding of Earth’s landscapes – a society if meme, where the ‘if’ part has actually come true? More humans living in harmony with nature, eradicating diseases, and enjoying healthy lives long past 100? Luxury space travel? Or do those two little words – “The Future” – conjure up a collection of darker, doom-filled images: a vast, violent, Terminator-style warzone where we battle it out against killer robots? Rising water levels, forest fires, droughts? Billionaires retreating to their bunkers in Hawaii – or maybe Mars – while the rest of the world falls apart? 

There’s a good chance that you imagine one of the bleaker scenarios if you’re reading this in the mid-2020s. Bright futures have all but disappeared from contemporary (Western) culture. The rare exceptions tend to fly under the radar – remember Francis Ford Coppola spending his family fortune to make Megalopolis, only for the film to bomb upon arrival after 40 years in development hell? Meanwhile, we’ve seen an explosion in dystopian fiction and films: fungal zombie outbreaks, civil war, AI apocalypse and heartbreak, climate breakdown, an abandoned Earth piled with rubbish, teenagers fighting gladiator matches for the rich... the list goes on. TV shows and video games like Fallout explicitly contrast the optimism of decades gone by with humanity’s dramatic fall from grace, and IRL the public has also started to lose faith in the straightforward progress of humanity. New technologies like AI stoke existential fears as much as they lure us in with promises of comfort and convenience. Authoritarian chaos looms large on the horizon.

But does it even matter what we picture when we close our eyes and dream about the future? Won’t technocrats and their billionaire backers forge ahead with their own plans regardless? Well, it might feel like a pointless exercise, but we’d be wrong to dismiss it too quickly. Numerous studies have linked intentional positive thinking to individual wellbeing, better mental health, longer lifespans, and healthier relationships. And the benefits aren’t strictly personal: optimism also stimulates parts of the brain associated with problem-solving, is linked with more “togetherness” among individuals, and correlates with behaviour that benefits other people and society as a whole.

In other words, it might be in our best interests to cultivate a more positive outlook on the future, while still acknowledging all the bad stuff that’s going on in the present. It might not only make us happier and healthier, but help us to organise around new visions for the future – to help break us out of the doom spiral, imagine a better world, and collaborate with others to make it a reality. Kevin Kelly, the influential futurist who helped shape the culture of early Silicon Valley, put it this way: “Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.”

Of course, actually being optimistic is easier said than done.

PEAK PESSIMISM

In 2025, Ipsos reported a “striking” drop in worldwide optimism about people’s personal lives, families, and broader communities, while in the same year its Economic Optimism Index fell to a historic low. Similar polls conducted over the last few years show a pessimistic outlook toward many aspects of the future across Europe, the UK, and the USA. This is especially prevalent when it comes to national and global concerns – AKA the ‘big picture’ – and among young people. “When you ask many young people to close their eyes and imagine 10 years into the future, it’s similar to that line from 1984: ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever,’” says Rob Hopkins, an environmental activist and author of 2025’s How to Fall in Love with the Future. “But all they can imagine is Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute.” 

This is understandable: the last few years alone have brought us a global pandemic, missed climate deadlines, genocide, rising authoritarianism, and a perceived drop in living standards for hundreds of millions of people. According to the news headlines, we’re perpetually on the brink of World War 3. Plus, all of this is more visible than ever as it’s beamed directly into our phones, 24 hours a day. In fact, many young people have been living with this overwhelming sense of hopelessness – AKA what Mark Fisher called the “slow cancellation of the future” – their entire lives. This makes it difficult to imagine that the next few decades will see life get significantly better. 

When you ask many young people to close their eyes and imagine 10 years into the future... all they can imagine is Elon Musk doing a Nazi salute

When it comes to fixing many of the problems we’re facing today, though, this is a big part of the problem. Chaos and doomsaying make good headlines, and harnessing their emotional impact has been shown to influence public opinion over time (see the “guerilla protests” staged by groups like Just Stop Oil), but these narratives overwhelmingly focus on tearing down the current status quo. At a time of injustice, cruelty, and rampant disregard for the future of Earth, this isn’t a pointless aim – in fact, there’s a very clear argument for it. But then... what comes next? For change to stick, we also need a positive vision for the future, which galvanises people to bring that future into being.

In Hopkins’ words: the aim of activism can’t just be to make us “profoundly miserable” (which can actually discourage people from taking action). Instead, we need to see the dialogue opened up by activists as a “fantastic opportunity for storytelling about what the future could look like” – a kind of storytelling that we just aren’t seeing in mainstream discourse today.

OPTIMISM INEQUALITY

There’s a subset of people who are very willing to share their visions for the future in the mid-2020s. You might not agree with their ideas – in fact, if you’re reading this, you almost definitely don’t – but you’ve definitely heard about them. Elon Musk rolling out an army of humanoid robots to usher in a future of “abundance” and “universal high income”. Mark Zuckerberg remodelling reality behind a veil of screens – or VR glasses – so that we never have to touch grass again in our lives. Donald Trump sharing AI-generated promos for the ‘Gaza Riviera’ based on plans leaked from the White House in 2025. Jeff Bezos building rockets for “millions of people” to live in space in the next couple of decades, just because they want to. 

Many of these larger-than-life figures subscribe to the kinds of ideas expressed in the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a viral 2023 blog post by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. To sum it up, the core theory goes something like this: make more money, build more powerful technologies, and a better life will naturally follow. Conveniently, this means that their own business interests should be pursued at almost any cost, because these are what drive the evolution of human civilisation, Earth, and the wider universe. Others are slightly more cautious, like Bill Gates, who describes his outlook for 2026 as “optimism with footnotes”.

As the future feels like it’s being “cancelled” for many young people, Hopkins says, it’s simultaneously being “colonised” by the rich and powerful. But again, this isn’t just because billionaires and (largely) right-wing politicians are “flooding the zone” with their radical manifestos and sloptimist propaganda. It’s also because there’s a severe lack of competing visions to get excited about.

BRIGHT FUTURISM

The American artist and industrial designer Syd Mead is best known as the brains behind the sci-fi worlds of Blade Runner, Aliens, and Tron. Admittedly, these films don’t tell the most optimistic stories about humanity’s future (see: aliens bursting out of people’s ribcages) but they’re all shot through with a vivid sense of what could have been. As revealed in the landmark NYC exhibition Syd Mead: Future Pastime in 2025, this is mainly what Mead brought to the table. Building on the “bright futurism” that characterised his work from the late 1950s and early 60s – when as a fresh graduate he landed design commissions from car manufacturers like Ford, as well as a project with U.S. Steel that would inspire some iconic vehicles in Star Wars – his brain was bursting with images of a better world. These set the tone for a visual language we still see in sci-fi today: chrome cyborgs, neon-lit interiors and clean, towering infrastructure.

In many of Mead’s most famous artworks, you’ll also find diverse crowds of human beings enjoying themselves in the latest space age fashions. This human-centric approach to the future could have a lot to do with his background: trained as an industrial designer, his dad was a Baptist preacher and art teacher, and his mother was a lover of music. “Syd fully understood science and technology, but the humanities as well,” says Elon Solo, co-curator of Future Pastime. Today, he adds, “We don’t have many people that bridge the divide between those disciplines, and we have an education system that really discourages that.” As a result, when Mead died in 2019 – just too soon to see breakthroughs like modern AI and the renewed exploration of space – he didn’t leave behind many successors.

This is a loss that we feel all too keenly, at a time when we’re severely lacking in tangible, tantalising articulations of what the future could look like, at least in the cultural mainstream. Yes, Elon Musk’s companies draw inspiration for their products from various creative sources – like Hajime Sorayama and, controversially, I, Robot – but the overall aesthetic is ugly, wildly inconsistent, and rarely integrated into a world we’d actually want to live in. The rest of Silicon Valley is no more appetising, churning out bland corporate aesthetics or nostalgic odes to an idealised version of the past (often the Roman empire, sometimes the American Art Deco associated with Ayn Rand). 

“We don’t really have anybody with any sense of clarity painting a picture of what life is supposed to look like in 2060 or 2100,” says Solo, “or even 2032.”

OPTIMISM IS A KIND OF TIME TRAVEL

Utopian as they might seem today, Mead’s visions of the future were actually grounded in reality. In fact, many of his concepts, like AI-driven cars and the ubiquity of the (then emergent) internet, have already come to pass. “These aren’t totally far-fetched futures,” says Solo’s co-curator, William Corman. “They’re logical extensions of the now. Syd’s work shows us the present stretched gracefully forward. Every design, however speculative, operates as if it could truly function.”

Because they were built on logic and a keen sense of what was actually possible, Mead’s artworks weren’t just pie-in-the-sky fantasies, but laid the “blueprint” for a real future where technology was used for the betterment of humankind. “It’s not him saying that this is what the world will be, but he’s like: ‘This is what I think would be a great version of the future,’” Solo adds. As such, this future isn’t far removed from the kind of life we’d enjoy living today (as opposed to, say, contemporary techno-accelerationist ideas like having our brains uploaded to the metaverse, or merging with AI to enter a kind of heavenly digital afterlife). “There’s a lot of human sensations, bodies, interaction, parties, drinks. There’s also a great sense of commonality. Everyone’s been elevated together.”

Syd Mead’s work shows us the present stretched gracefully forward... These aren’t totally far-fetched futures

Mead’s future was tangible, tactile and actually feasible, so it offered people something exciting to work toward. Hopkins’s How to Fall in Love with the Future achieves something similar, casting the author as a time traveller who reports back from the 2030s. In this near future, humans have taken radical steps to mitigate climate change and built a new way of living and working, with a greater focus on sustainability and local communities. Urban rooftops are covered in vegetable gardens. Travel by car has reduced dramatically, and without the endless drone of traffic, city centres are filled with all kinds of different sounds: wind in the trees, birdsong, the buzzing of a thriving insect population, and the clanking of cutlery as people finish up a long lunch.

As a rule, Hopkins never ‘time travels’ beyond the year 2035, partly because he believes we need radical action before that date to avoid irreversible climate catastrophe, but also because it helps keep his imaginary future grounded in reality. In fact, many of the supposedly-futuristic snapshots in his book – and the accompanying newsletter, Time Traveller’s Gazette – are lifted from real-life projects and success stories, which he’s witnessed everywhere from São Paulo, to Freiburg, Germany, and Utrecht, as a co-founder of the Transition Network.

“I’m always looking for things that look like the future that already [exist] in the present,” Hopkins explains. “The future’s already here if we know where to look. And the more that we can make it familiar, the more people are likely to put in the effort to actually make it happen.”

The future’s already here if we know where to look. And the more that we can make it familiar, the more people are likely to put in the effort to actually make it happen

IS UTOPIA BORING AND CRINGE?

It’s difficult to imagine that anyone would actually want to live in a worse world – especially if they know what it feels like to live in precarious times like today. However, it’s also hard to deny that bright futures like the one in Hopkins’s book can sometimes feel naïve, idealistic, or even a little bit embarrassing to express. Why do we feel this way?

In the 1970s, the rising filmmakers of New Hollywood channelled a spirit of cynicism and disillusionment. Against the bleak backdrop of the Vietnam war and Watergate, films got dark and gritty, narratives failed to resolve in happy endings, and fresh-faced heroes gave way to gnarly antiheroes. Film critics will often tell you that this era ended with blockbusters like Star Wars and Jaws toward the end of the decade, but we never really got over the idea that cynicism equals cool (and, by extension, optimism equals cringe). “We still have not recovered, culturally, from the cynicism of the 1970s that hardened into cool,” agrees Solo. Of course, this is partly because the late 60s and 70s brought us some of the best and most influential films of all time.

But it can’t all be Martin Scorsese’s fault, can it? The fact is, optimism involves putting more on the line than a cynical worldview does – it’s easy to prove someone wrong when they’re trying to come up with new ideas about the future, much harder when they’re simply complaining about what The Other Side is up to. See: the descent of UK politics into uninspired one-upmanship. This is a hurdle that any aspiring optimist is bound to face (but remember: to be cringe is to be free).

There’s another argument levelled at better, brighter futures: they’re just a bit boring. As humans, we crave compelling stories and conflict (Love Island still draws in millions of viewers per season). In a future where many of our problems have been solved, we might be left twiddling our thumbs, yearning for the killer robots that were supposed to tear us limb from limb. But this criticism is down to a bad framing of what it means to be optimistic, Hopkins says. For example, we shouldn’t think of the world he’s built in How to Fall in Love with the Future as a “utopia” as such. It’s just a world where we’ve done everything possible in the time available to us. “London still looks like London. People still fall out with each other. People still get sick. But the context in which we’re telling those stories is different.”

Unsurprisingly, Syd Mead also gave this issue a fair amount of consideration. He understood that even in an idyllic future of abundance and universal luxury we’d “still love the thrill of the battle, the thrill of the chase”, says Solo, and wouldn’t just want to sit around in a slop-addled stupor. As a result, races and competitions feature heavily in his artworks, as a way to address our evolutionary drives in a world where abundant resources have – in theory – made IRL conflict obsolete.

OPTIMISM DOESN’T MEAN TURNING A BLIND EYE

It’s easy to equate optimism with a blind disregard for the real problems that exist today, and the people most affected by them. Or maybe optimists are just selling “hopium” – the future-facing equivalent to “copium” – to profit off those problems while doing nothing to actually address them. Hopkins rejects this idea. Historically, optimistic visions of the future have flourished in some of the most difficult circumstances, he points out, from the French Resistance during WWII, to the American civil rights movement that gave rise to Afrofuturism. Far from turning a blind eye, he suggests, the “colourful, fantastical” work of artists like Sun Ra and George Clinton went hand-in-hand with the campaigning of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

“When the shit hits the fan, you really need optimists,” he concludes. “And the shit is absolutely hitting the fan right now. If all we have to deal with that is pessimism and resignation, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

Another writer whose work takes us on a time-travelling trip to the future is the historian Ilan Pappé, whose recently-published book Israel on the Brink contains a “fictional diary” from “post-Israel Palestine” in 2048 (100 years after the Nakba that violently displaced Palestinians). This imagined future aims to lay the blueprint for IRL change, but again, Pappé doesn’t present us with a utopian vision; residents’ smiles conceal the “tough life” they survived in refugee camps pre-liberation, and deep-rooted religious divides remain. “Our new reality remains precarious,” he writes, “but so far it survives.”

In September 2025, Pappé spoke at the annual conference for the Peace and Justice Project (PJP), an organisation founded and directed by Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn himself was a rare source of hope for many young people in the UK during his five-year Labour leadership, from 2015 to 2020, and the new left-wing party he founded with Zarah Sultana in 2025 offered another glimmer of optimism before it collapsed under the weight of political infighting. Speaking to Dazed about Pappé’s vision of 2048, following his PJP conference talk, Corbyn noted that the tradition of time travel goes way back, to texts like William Morris’s utopian socialist novel News From Nowhere. But it’s young people who are the most valuable bright futurists, he adds. “Young people always have a more vibrant imagination than anyone else, because they’re uninhibited and not bound by any norms in our society,” he explains. “They say lovely things like: ‘I want flowers, I want sunshine, I want Granny to be happy.” 

Unfortunately, if progressive, left-wing movements really want to entice the general public with their version of the future – and counter the vivid, glittering images coming from Silicon Valley and its largely right-wing backers – they’re going to need to get a bit more specific than that.

NOW IS THE TIME FOR HOPE

Hopkins isn’t joking when he says that “shit is hitting the fan” right now. The climate crisis continues, even if it no longer makes as many headlines, AI is poised to cause even more economic disruption, and the geopolitical landscape is more of a cliff edge. At Davos in January 2026, amid Trump’s threats to take over Greenland, Canadian prime minister and former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney (not exactly a political radical) told the world that we are witnessing the end of the current political order – “a rupture, not a transition”. In other words, he said: “The old order is not coming back.” This could be interpreted as a dire warning that we’re entering a new era of conflict between political strongmen. But then, there’s the optimistic take: if the old world order is crumbling, we get to build something different to replace it.

Already, some political leaders are harnessing this sense of possibility for the better. In the UK, Green Party leader Zack Polanski has propelled his party into the lead among under-30s, according to recent polling from YouGov. In the US, many are looking to NYC mayor Zohran Mamdani for inspiration, following his wildly successful campaign as a democratic socialist. Quoting the activist and trade unionist Eugene Debs in his victory speech late last year, Mamdani said: “I can see the dawn of a better day for humanity. The future is in our hands.”

But again, these politicians can’t just talk about the better future we could be living in – they need to show us what it might look like. In a January interview with NME, Polanski noted that this is a strong case for supporting art, music and culture, as “the most powerful ways” to show us the best (and worst) parts of our divided times. “If you don’t have art occupying that space,” he added, “then it does create this vacuum for demagogues and narcissists to be able to project an image of who we are that isn’t true; but then there’s no counterculture to be able to challenge that idea.”

In 2024, the UK-based Common Sense Policy Group (which counts Polanski as a member, alongside interdisciplinary experts and community representatives) released a book titled Act Now, which sheds light on the revolutionary potential of our current moment. “Crises... can also be opportunities,” reads its introduction. “They expose the inadequacy of the status quo, making people more receptive to bold, new solutions.” Just as the uncertain backdrop of the Cold War framed JFK’s “New Frontier” optimism, today’s crises could pave the way for bold and creative visions of the future.

BUILDING THE FUTURE OUT OF THE PAST

If there are still any doubts about our ability to convert imaginary futures into reality, we only have to look to the past to realise that things can actually get better when people come together around the right idea. “History, if it’s taught right, is extremely empowering and exciting, and it gives you inspiration for current times,” says Corbyn, pointing to slave revolts in Jamaica and the US, women’s suffrage, and the working class Chartist movement as historical examples of hard-won success.

Similarly, we have the widely popular Beveridge Report to thank for decades of improved living standards in the UK, including the founding of the NHS. Published at the height of World War II, this plan for radical reform was based on the idea that “a revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching”. We’re living through a similarly revolutionary moment today, and so we find ourselves in a similar situation. Just patching up the problems we face isn’t going to be sufficient in the long run, but history proves it’s possible to turn this into a positive, channelling the revolutionary energy of our times into a better future.

A revolutionary moment in the world’s history is a time for revolutions, not for patching

In the late 80s, Syd Mead delivered a lecture in Lugano, Switzerland that was subsequently buried in an archive and discovered decades later by Solo and Corman, in a continued effort to unearth “gold” from forgotten boxes of his drawings, writings, and other ephemera. Here’s an excerpt from the artist’s decades-old speech: “The exhilaration and challenge of creating the human future rises above national and cultural boundaries. Technology is not a panacea but an ever more elaborate tool to assist us in our mutual journey to the future. We are passengers on an ever more finite sphere, and in the technologically-advanced nations we are proportionately more responsible for solutions. We need not stumble into the future. We are collectively aware of the challenges and we have the combined expertise to design our way forward [...] Concept precedes technique, and the new generations of designers who help to orchestrate the future will be as successful as their ability to turn imagination into realised fact.”

If we’re in need of a new Bright Futurist movement today, to rekindle our optimism and wrestle the future from the hands of tech billionaires, this seems like a pretty good manifesto. A different version of the world is possible, but it requires us to believe in it first.