Introduction

What if publishing, far from being a stable industry of books and journals, were instead a fleeting adaptation—an evolutionary gesture that changes as humanity itself mutates?

What if the future of publishing had less to do with innovations in digital media and more to do with the transformation of human perception, memory, and imagination?

This essay invites a speculative journey through the distant horizons of publishing. Drawing inspiration from Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), a visionary account of human evolution across billions of years, we will explore how the act of making knowledge public could itself undergo profound mutations—becoming alien, collective, post-material, or even post-human.

In an era saturated with information yet paralyzed by short-term thinking, it becomes urgent to imagine editorial futures that are not mere extensions of the present. Between collapse and creativity, between resistance and adaptation, lies a shifting terrain where publishing could emerge as a radical practice of world-making.

Through a dialogue between speculative fiction and contemporary critical thought, this essay asks: How might publishing evolve—not just technologically, but civilizationally?

Extended Context: Last and First Men and the Evolution of Humanity

Last and First Men is a speculative fiction masterpiece that narrates the evolutionary saga of humanity over two billion years. Olaf Stapledon offers a vast, imaginative chronicle of the rise and fall of eighteen successive human species, each shaped by environmental changes, technological advancements, societal experiments, and existential crises. Written in the style of a future historian recounting humanity’s history, the novel departs from traditional narrative structures, adopting a philosophical and anthropological tone.

The work is not merely science fiction but a profound meditation on human potential, failure, and transformation. It addresses questions of civilization, ethics, intelligence, war, planetary stewardship, and ultimate meaning.

Stapledon portrays humanity’s early stages—the First Men—as technologically advanced yet spiritually immature, leading to political collapse, ecological devastation, and a long period of regression. Successive species embody diverse experiments in physical form, intelligence, culture, and ethics. Some civilizations prioritize philosophical inquiry, others aesthetic expression or collective mind-communication, but none escape the cycles of flourishing and decline.

Throughout the narrative, Stapledon emphasizes planetary fragility. Humanity faces not only its self-inflicted wounds but also cosmic threats that force migration to Venus and later to Neptune. Despite achieving profound intellectual and spiritual development, even the Last Men—inhabiting Neptune—must confront the inevitable extinction of their species.

“It is enough that we are, that we have seen, and that we have comprehended” (Stapledon, 1930, p. 342).

The novel’s major themes—evolution and mutation, the cyclical nature of civilization, the limits of intelligence, cosmic humility, and the enduring need for memory and legacy—form a powerful backdrop against which to speculate on the futures of publishing itself.

Publishing as a Civilizational Technique

Stapledon portrays humanity not as a static essence but as a sequence of evolutionary stages, each with its own forms of knowledge and communication. Publishing, from this perspective, must be seen as a contingent cultural technique—deeply embedded in the cognitive and social structures of each era.

Today, publishing is often narrowly associated with print and digital media. A Stapledonian lens encourages a broader historical and speculative imagination, recognizing publishing as a mutable practice that evolves alongside shifts in human cognition, social organization, and material culture.

“Each species had its special way of looking at the universe, a way both limited and penetrating” (Stapledon, 1930, p. 45).

Thus, the future of publishing may depend not on technological upgrades alone, but on transformations in the very structure of human (or post-human) perception and interaction.

Mark Fisher (2009) observes that under capitalism, “the future has been cancelled,” replaced by endless recycling of familiar forms. Publishing, trapped in this loop, risks becoming an echo chamber of exhausted imaginaries. A Stapledonian approach demands we recover the capacity to imagine radical alternatives.

Futures of Publishing: Persistence and Mutation

Inspired by Last and First Men, we can envision several radical trajectories for publishing:

Publishing Beyond Materiality

Stapledon describes civilizations that communicate through shared mental fields, bypassing physical artifacts:

“Communication became a direct interplay of minds, without the intervention of articulate speech” (Stapledon, 1930, p. 102).

In such futures, publishing could transcend material supports, becoming a modulation of shared consciousness or a distributed cognitive ecosystem.

This speculative possibility finds resonance in Benjamin Bratton’s (2016) The Stack, where he argues that we are evolving into an integrated planetary-scale computational system—what he calls “The Stack.” This new reality may see publishing not as an isolated, human activity but as part of a vast network of algorithmic and informational processes across human and non-human actors. Bratton contends that we will increasingly inhabit a post-material world of information flow, where physical boundaries of media and publication are replaced by layers of networked intelligence, interwoven with global infrastructure. In such a world, publishing might emerge as an ongoing process of creating, reconfiguring, and distributing meaning across multiple scales of existence:

“The Stack isn’t just a global infrastructure, but a new ontological formation for humans and nonhumans alike” (Bratton, 2016, p. 8).

This vision of publishing beyond materiality—fluid, distributed, and collective—opens new questions about authorship, memory, and creativity in a world where the boundaries between people, technology, and the environment are increasingly blurred.

The Dissolution of Authorship

In some Stapledonian civilizations, individuality merges into collective identities. Authorship, as a discrete category, dissolves:

“The distinction between self and others faded into a common pool of being” (Stapledon, 1930, p. 178).

Publishing would no longer be an assertion of individuality, but an emergent phenomenon of collective articulation.

David Graeber (2018) critiques how capitalism has transformed creative work into “pointless tasks,” draining meaning from shared production. Future publishing practices might reclaim creativity as a convivial, non-alienated activity.

Temporal Reconfigurations

Stapledon imagines cultures where memory spans millions of years:

“Time, for these beings, was an ocean rather than a river” (Stapledon, 1930, p. 220).

Publishing futures might therefore embrace extremely slow or radically accelerated temporalities. Berardi (2017) encourages decoupling from “chronological frenzy” to foster new rhythms of cultural creation (p. 41).

Critique of Contemporary Publishing

In light of Stapledon’s cosmic timescale, contemporary publishing appears entangled in short-termism and capitalist acceleration. Publishing today often prioritizes visibility, profitability, and data extraction over care, diversity, or deep engagement.

A Stapledonian critique, reinforced by Fisher’s (2009) analysis of capitalist realism, would highlight how deeply the economic logic of commodification constrains the horizon of publishing imagination.

“Though this people had attained almost miraculous control of natural forces, they were infants in wisdom” (Stapledon, 1930, p. 67).

Similarly, our informational abundance risks masking a profound impoverishment of collective imagination.

Toward Post-Human Editorial Practices

Embracing Stapledon’s vision encourages the design of publishing futures that are not merely technological extensions of the present but qualitative shifts in modes of being and communicating.

Possible directions include:

• Editorial practices oriented towards planetary and multispecies perspectives.
• Publishing formats designed for extreme temporal durability or adaptability.
• New infrastructures for collective authorship and shared meaning-making beyond human language.

As Graeber (2018) reminds us, building truly alternative systems requires the invention of “practical utopias” rather than waiting for systemic collapse.

Dissonant Voices: Publishing Between Collapse and Progress

While critiques of late capitalism reveal profound constraints on the imagination, other perspectives highlight that historical progress, however uneven, has opened significant spaces for freedom, creativity, and communication.

Hans Rosling (2018), in Factfulness, argues that global indicators such as education, healthcare, and technological access have improved dramatically, suggesting that not all systemic trends lead toward collapse:

“The world is much better than we often think, even if far from perfect” (Rosling, 2018, p. 23).

Steven Pinker (2018) similarly defends the Enlightenment legacy, asserting that science, reason, and humanism have historically expanded the possibilities for expression and solidarity:

“The Enlightenment principle that knowledge can drive moral progress remains valid” (Pinker, 2018, p. 45).

In the domain of technology and networks, Kevin Kelly (2016) envisions a future where publishing becomes a ubiquitous activity embedded in everyday life, not a centralized industry:

“We are moving toward a world where publishing is not an industry but a default activity of being” (Kelly, 2016, p. 12).

Finally, Benjamin Bratton (2021), in The Revenge of the Real, argues that we are entering a new phase of planetary computation, where human actions and technological processes are no longer separable from the ecosystemic and social fabric they inhabit:

“The real is no longer external to the system. We have to make sense of it from within it” (Bratton, 2021, p. 38).

These dissonant voices remind us that publishing futures are not pre-determined by systemic inertia: they remain contested terrains, where collapse, resistance, adaptation, and progress coexist in dynamic tension.

Fragments for Future Archaeologists

Thinking with Olaf Stapledon invites us to reconsider publishing not as a fixed institution or industry, but as a living, unstable gesture—a gesture that mutates alongside the beings who produce, remember, and imagine worlds. If publishing today appears tightly bound to material forms and capitalist cycles of production, a future archaeology might uncover it as something else: a porous membrane between memory and invention, between survival and transformation.

Across cosmic time, what remains of publishing may not be books, servers, or archives, but traces of collective acts of meaning-making—gestures toward intelligibility in the face of entropy. Publishing could evolve into practices indistinguishable from ecosystems, neural fields, or planetary cognition, leaving behind fragments that future archaeologists—whether human, artificial, or otherwise—might one day decipher as the fossils of a civilization’s imagination.

To inhabit publishing as mutation is to accept that no form of mediation is permanent. Each editorial technology, each mode of transmission, each cultural technique is a provisional articulation—part of a larger choreography of persistence, forgetting, and reinvention. In this light, the contemporary obsession with innovation looks less like a forward march and more like an urgent improvisation amid the ruins and possibilities of the present.

Thus, imagining editorial futures is not about predicting technological gadgets or market trends. It is about cultivating conditions for new cognitive ecologies to emerge, where publishing becomes an act of relational care, speculative construction, and planetary memory.

As Stapledon reminds us, the future belongs not to the continuity of the present but to “strange and unexpected children of the mind” (Stapledon, 1930, p. 312).

References

Berardi, F. (2017). Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility (G. Mecchia, Trans.). Verso.

Bratton, B. H. (2016). The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press.

Bratton, B. H. (2021). The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Planetary Age. W. W. Norton & Company.

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.

Graeber, D. (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. Simon & Schuster.

Kelly, K. (2016). The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. Viking.

Pinker, S. (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Viking.

Rosling, H. (2018). Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. Flatiron Books.

Stapledon, O. (1930). Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. Methuen Publishing.