The present lives obsessed with the new. Announcements of “revolutionary” technologies, “smart” products, “transformative” platforms appear every moment. The language of innovation dominates culture, the economy and everyday life — it is inscribed in the objects we use, the interfaces we touch, the promises they sell to us. And yet there remains an unsettling, almost subterranean sensation: despite all this, the world seems strangely the same as itself.
Where is the future we were promised? Where are the aerial cities, the domestic robots, the clean and abundant energy, the liberation from work, the life reorganized around creativity and free time? Instead, we have thinner screens, faster applications, more discreet algorithms — and worsening structural problems: climate crisis, precariousness, surveillance, inequality, collective exhaustion.
This reflection starts from this dissonance. It is proposed to explore the hypothesis that what we today call “innovation” actually operates as a containment mechanism: a technology of the present to prevent the emergence of truly different futures. More than progress, perhaps what we experience is a sophisticated form of immobilism with the appearance of movement — a continuous management of expectations and desires, carefully calibrated to keep dominant structures intact.
By interrogating this condition — between technological euphoria and civilizational stagnation — we seek to understand not only how we got here, but also whether it is still possible to rescue the future as a horizon of transformation and not just updating.
The future as a simulation
Despite being in radically different political camps, David Graeber — anthropologist and anarchist activist — and Peter Thiel — libertarian businessman and technology investor — share a basic perplexity: something has gone wrong with the future. Both detect, although from different diagnoses, a structural stagnation disguised as progress. And both wonder what prevented once-plausible promises from being realized — space colonization, unlimited energy, profound civilizational transformations.
Graeber (2012) argues that, since the 1970s, we have seen a withdrawal of investment in disruptive technologies in favor of forms of innovation that reproduce what exists: surveillance systems, management networks, digital simulations. The promise of the future has been replaced by a maintenance regime. His hypothesis is that neoliberalism — despite the rhetoric of market freedom — ushered in an era of technocratic bureaucracy, where the function of innovation is not to liberate, but to reinforce social control. Most contemporary technologies, according to Graeber, are for managing, monitoring and regulating — not for radically imagining. This is how “flying to Mars” gave way to “formulating a visa application online”.
Thiel (2011), in a diametrically opposite reading on an ideological level, maintains that the blockage of the future is due to democratic medocracy and institutional conformism. From their perspective, progress is held back by a political and academic culture that avoids risk, penalizes individual genius, and promotes regulated security over creative disruption. For Thiel, innovation depends on the existence of visionary founders — figures capable of breaking with the consensus — and the current liberal system tends to extinguish them in the name of stability.
Interestingly, where Graeber sees the problem in an alliance between financial capital and state bureaucracy, Thiel sees the main obstacle in democratic governmentality itself. But the convergence is remarkable: both denounce a technocracy of the present that manages but does not transform; both recognize that contemporary society gives up visionary ambition in exchange for comfort, vigilance and predictability.
The fundamental divergence is in the answer. Graeber proposes a renewal of collective imagination, based on values of social justice and self-management. Thiel bets on the individual exception — the solitary founder, the rebel who circumvents the system. But at the heart of both is a common question: how did such a technologically advanced civilization become so timid about the future?
Capitalist realism and the crisis of the imaginary
If technological innovation today seems to operate within a narrow spectrum — updating, but rarely revolutionizing — this is, in part, due to what could be called a blockage of the collective imagination. The ability to project alternative futures, radically different from the present, has been profoundly weakened. The very idea of utopia has become laughable or suspect, confined to science fiction or dystopian entertainment. This cultural mutation was accurately described by Fredric Jameson, when he stated that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Jameson, 2005, p. xii).
Jameson interprets this condition as a consequence of the cultural hegemony of late capitalism. Market logic not only dominates economic systems, it colonizes the imagination itself, reducing creativity to forms of symbolic consumption. Even cultural products that claim to be visionary tend to reproduce the structures of the present, projecting only expanded or collapsed versions of what already exists. Thus, the future becomes an extension of now — faster, more connected, more catastrophic — but rarely anything else.
This idea is taken up and deepened by Mark Fisher (2009), who coins the term “capitalist realism” to describe the widespread feeling that there is no viable alternative to the current system. For Fisher, capitalist realism infiltrates not only politics and economics, but also education, health, culture and — we might add — design and technology. Problems are no longer solved with structural imagination and are now “managed” with short-term solutions, often based on digital optimization.
This is, in fact, one of the great ironies of the present: the most technologically equipped era in history seems to have lost the ability to think on a large scale, to imagine civilizational transformations, to dream beyond the limits imposed by the market. In place of social utopias, dystopian and accelerationist visions emerge; in place of politics, algorithmic management; in place of the desire for the future, the fear of collapse. What remains of the imagination is often channeled into increasing the efficiency of what already exists, not into inventing radically new forms of life.
In this context, technological innovation acts as a staging of possibility: while devices multiply and screens are renewed, the horizons of social transformation contract. The future is no longer a symbolic and political battlefield — it has become a marketing product.
Lost Future Archives: Unfinished Inventions and Abandoned Promises
The future was not always so timid. There was a time — brief, but intensely visionary — when imagining the future was a gesture of audacity. During the central decades of the 20th century, technique and imagination seemed to be allies: aerial cities, interplanetary colonizations were being designed, machines designed not only to solve problems, but to reinvent the conditions of existence. The future was a shared cultural ambition, expressed in real objects, prototypes, infrastructures, design gestures. It was, above all, a space of symbolic excess and political risk. Today, many of these promises rest in museums or archival videos. They are fossils of what was once possible to think — traces of a time when innovation dared to break with the present, instead of improving it.
The Concorde supersonic plane is one of these remains. Launched in 1969, it connected Paris to New York in just over three hours, tearing through the sky at the speed of Mach 2. It wasn't just a means of transport: it was the incarnation of modern acceleration, of the conquest of time. But it was discontinued in 2003. The costs, the noise, the risks, the lack of profitability sealed its fate. Paradoxically, flying between continents today takes longer than it did thirty years ago. The Concorde became a symbol of a future that went back in time: a possible but abandoned future.
The same can be said of the Citroën DS, presented in 1955. With its aerodynamic design, hydraulic suspension and spatial aesthetics, it was described by Roland Barthes as a “cathedral on wheels”. It represented a rare fusion between technical avant-garde and symbolic language. It was an automobile that not only transported, but affirmed a worldview. Today, cars are digital platforms on wheels: silent, efficient, networked — but emptied of symbolic ambition. Automotive design has given way to interface. It no longer projects another time: it refines the present into mimetic replications of a single model.
The same logic applies to flying cars. A recurring figure in science fiction and modern urban imagination, they have been promised by engineers, magazines and advertisements since the 1940s. Always “ten years away”. However, they remain prototypes, confined to technological luxury, niche experiences or venture capital promises. What was once imagined as emancipated mobility has become a corporate spectacle — or worse: an extension of vertical inequality.
And what about space colonization? In the 1960s, permanent lunar bases were expected to be built in the 1990s. The space race, although motivated by geopolitical interests, outlined an epic narrative of humanity's expansion. Today, the presence in space is dominated by private corporations like SpaceX or Blue Origin. The interplanetary dream persists, but it has moved from the public domain to private capital. Space became a market. The cosmos, an extension of property.
Even the house of the future — modernist promise par excellence — underwent symbolic mutation. A sensitive, automated, liberating home was imagined. Today, what we have are voice assistants that listen to everything, household appliances that send data, sensors that don't turn off. The smart home has become the watched home. Instead of domestic freedom, we have behavioral logistics.
These cases should not be read with nostalgia, but as symptoms of a profound cultural shift. They show that the problem with contemporary innovation is not a lack of technology, but of collective imagination. They show that we have already been able to take risks, dream big, challenge limits. As Fredric Jameson states, what is at stake today is not the technique, but the symbolic and political capacity to project it outside the present (Jameson, 2005). These archives of the lost future thus function as monuments to a deactivated utopia — and as an invitation to reactivate it under different conditions.
What has changed, therefore, is not our ability to invent, but the system that frames invention. From the 1980s onwards, a new grammar of innovation was consolidated: fewer disruptions, more optimization; less risk, more predictability. The future is no longer a territory of invention to become an exercise in continuous management. This change has multiple causes: the financialization of the economy, which began to favor technologies with quick returns and low risk (Morozov, 2013); the rise of neoliberal logic, which replaced politics with administration, and the dream with metrics (Graeber, 2012); the cultural disenchantment described by Jameson and Fisher, which inhibited the utopian imagination and naturalized the present as inevitable (Fisher, 2009); and finally, the role of design, which specializes in softening the existing rather than disrupting it — mediating interfaces rather than futures.
We do not give up on the future due to technical impossibility. We give up out of fear, out of calculation, out of too much realism. And perhaps because imagining the impossible is, deep down, more dangerous — and more revolutionary — than all the technologies we have ever created.
Innovation as illusion
We live surrounded by devices that present themselves as solutions: applications that promise to optimize time, platforms that offer convenience, systems that anticipate desires. The language of innovation has become inseparable from the language of efficiency. Everything is “smarter”: houses, cars, watches, even trash cans. But what does this intelligence mean, after all? And who does it serve?
Evgeny Morozov (2013) describes this phenomenon as technological solutionism — the belief that all social, political, and existential problems can (and should) be solved through technical interventions. Problems such as urban congestion, loneliness, obesity, corruption or energy consumption are converted into issues of design and engineering: algorithms, interfaces, sensors, dashboards. This conversion is ideological, as it depoliticizes problems and diverts attention from their structural causes, offering in exchange solutions that keep the systemic framework intact.
Design plays a strategic role here. Instead of problematizing context, solutionist design focuses on perfecting the user experience. The objective is no longer to question the functioning of platforms, but to make them more intuitive, “friendly” and attractive. An application to manage anxiety does not interrogate the structural sources of social stress — it simply alleviates the symptoms. A carbon points system does not question the extractive economic model — it transforms it into a game of personalized microdecisions. Thus, contemporary design often operates as a cushioning technique: it dampens shock, simulates response, avoids confrontation.
Zuboff (2019) deepens this criticism by revealing how, in the digital age, technology has become a mechanism of behavioral extraction. Innovation is no longer measured only by technical functionality, but above all by the ability to predict and modulate human behavior. “Smart” products are just the visible face of infrastructures that collect, process and sell data. In this context, interface design becomes the aesthetic veneer of surveillance. The “fluid” and “personalized” experience serves to hide the asymmetry: we tap, we swipe, we choose — but we are continually being translated into data, correlated, sold.
Even the field of speculative design, which presents itself as criticism and alternative, does not completely escape this regime. By presenting dystopian scenarios or provocative futures, it runs the risk of normalizing dystopia as an inevitable horizon, or of transforming the speculative gesture into a gallery aesthetic, harmless to the system it seeks to challenge. By simulating possible futures without intervening in the material logics of the present, speculative design can become a kind of conceptual relief — a safe space to imagine without transforming.
In this context, what is design? Not just the shape of objects, but the shape of experience and relationship. Design structures the way we interact with the world and, above all, with time: it accelerates, replaces, dissolves. By presenting the future as a sequence of updates — versions 2.0, 3.1.5, beta, pro — the design actively participates in the illusion of movement, while deep systems remain stable or even become more opaque.
The illusion of innovation lies, therefore, in the combination of three elements: technology that promises to solve, design that stages progress and narratives that avoid conflict. This combination sustains a managed present, where the future is no longer a horizon of dispute, but a continuous simulation of improvement — polished, intuitive, but deeply depoliticized.
What would be a liberating innovation?
If, as we have seen, contemporary innovation tends to reinforce the contours of the system rather than challenge them, the question that arises is: what could truly liberating innovation look like? What criteria, what guidelines, what grammars would be necessary to imagine the new not as an optimization of the existing order, but as an opening to radically different forms of life?
A possible answer begins by refusing the idea of progress as a continuous and unidirectional line — faster, more efficient, more productive. Authors such as Ivan Illich (1973) and Lewis Mumford (1934/1963) had already identified, back in the 20th century, the dangers of a model of innovation based on the unlimited expansion of technology. Illich, in particular, proposed the concept of convivial technologies: tools designed to enhance the autonomy and interdependence of human communities, rather than making them dependent on technical systems that they do not understand or control. A user-friendly technology does not aim to scale, but to root; it doesn’t extract, it strengthens bonds; it doesn't simulate autonomy, it cultivates it.
Mumford, in turn, distinguished between two technical trajectories: the megamachine — a centralized, technical and hierarchical system of power — and the organic technology, centered on human needs and ecological integration. For Mumford, true progress lies in the ethical and political reorientation of technique, not in its quantitative development.
These ideas gain new life in the contemporary proposals of authors such as Donna Haraway (2016), who reject both the apocalypse and the classic technological utopia. Haraway proposes another type of relationship with the future: not the future as destiny or salvation, but as a space of care, recomposition and shared responsibility. Innovation, here, stops being a vertical vector of dominance and becomes a horizontal practice of coexistence — with other species, with the planet, with the ghosts of the past and the risks of the present.
In this horizon, design does not disappear — it transforms. It stops being just a mediation instrument between user and system, and becomes a worldbuilding tool. Liberating design does not aim to convince or seduce, but to open possibilities, produce strangeness, cultivate new imaginaries. Instead of designing to “improve the experience”, design to expose the conditions of the experience; instead of simplifying, it creatively complicates. It can be modest — a community solar oven, an interface that reveals the hidden energy flows of an app — or speculative — a fictional device that reconfigures relationships between species. Its value is not in its effectiveness, but in its ability to shift thinking.
It is, in short, about returning design and innovation to their political and poetic potential. Remove them from the closed field of managing expectations and reinsert them into the open terrain of transformation — where imagining is also intervening. Where creating is not just about building objects, but about reopening time.
The urgency to repoliticize the future
Throughout this text, we have sought to dismantle the contemporary illusion that we live in permanent technological acceleration. What was revealed was a paradox: despite the omnipresence of innovation — in devices, in speeches, in design — our collective horizon seems to be shortening. The future no longer calls us; it is limited to updating itself. And what was once projected as an emancipatory possibility now appears as a disguised maintenance of the current order.
Despite the multiplication of interfaces, devices and algorithms, something remains suspended: the very idea of the future as a possibility of rupture. The present has become impervious to structural transformation, as if all creative energy has been channeled into simulating movement, while the structure remains immobile. This sense of paralysis is not just material — it is, first and foremost, imaginative (Fisher, 2009; Jameson, 2005). Our time no longer dares to think beyond itself; prefers to optimize what exists rather than risk what is unknown.
Criticism becomes vital here. Several authors have shown how this stagnation operates through subtle forms of control and resignation — through the aestheticization of management, through the language of efficiency, through the normativity of interfaces (Morozov, 2013; Zuboff, 2019). The world is redesigned to seem faster, more convenient, more interconnected — but rarely freer, more equal or more livable. And yet, other voices persist that refuse this spell. Who defend technologies rooted in common life, not in accumulation (Illich, 1973; Mumford, 1963). That propose composite, intertwined, interdependent futures — where innovating means caring, deprogramming, remaking bonds (Haraway, 2016).
We also live under the spell of another fantasy: that our structural ills — the slowness of justice, hospital inefficiency, the overload of public services — will be corrected not by social reform or human investment, but by a layer of code. Digitization presents itself as a magical solution to the complexity of the world: dashboards instead of doctors, chatbots instead of caregivers, algorithms instead of judgment. Bureaucracy, which was once a symbol of rigidity and opacity, has become a utopia of mechanical efficiency, where the promise of agility hides the corrosion of otherness.
Examples abound. In the United Kingdom, an automated Social Security system used opaque criteria to suspend benefits to people with disabilities — many of whom died without being able to appeal the algorithmic decision. In the Netherlands, an AI system for detecting fraud among social beneficiaries disproportionately classified families of migrant origin, leading to deportations, fines and destruction of lives — until it was considered illegal by the government itself. In Canada, an application called ArriveCAN, supposedly designed to speed up entry during the pandemic, prevented hundreds of travelers from leaving the airport after detecting (wrongly) that they had not completed quarantine, even when they had never traveled. In Portugal, it is not uncommon for SNS users to register online to schedule face-to-face appointments — in a system that completely excludes those who need it most: the elderly, those without internet access, the technically vulnerable.
These examples are not exceptions: they are symptoms of a paradigm that shifts responsibility to unquestionable interfaces, replacing listening with protocol and ethical judgment with predictive statistics. The tragic thing is that all of this presents itself as progress. Hospitals without doctors, schools without teachers, relationships mediated by avatars — all of this is sold as optimization, when it is often just the automation of indifference. These are not just technical failures, but systemic effects that dehumanize error and make suffering an acceptable externality. More than solving problems, this compulsive automation neutralizes dissent, dissolves the unexpected and transforms the world into a more fluid place, yes — but also colder, more mute, more immune to exceptions.
Reopening the future, today, may not involve discovering more functionalities, but by relearning to imagine what does not fit into existing systems — and this is, in the deepest sense, a political and poetic gesture. It requires cultivating a dissident imagination, capable of confronting the hegemony of “technological realism” and solutionism with new forms of relationships, time, and scale. The innovation we need is no longer an application, but a civilizational repositioning.
It is equally important to recognize that, despite criticism of the superficiality of dominant innovation, there has been and continues to be significant progress in several areas of knowledge. Medicine has seen extraordinary advances in areas such as gene editing, pandemic response, cell therapies for rare diseases and personalized medicine. The use of artificial intelligence has opened up new possibilities in supporting diagnosis and clinical management, but its uncritical application, sometimes opaque and insensitive to the human context, has also revealed risks of error, exclusion and lack of professional responsibility. Climate and environmental sciences have developed complex forecasting models and sophisticated mitigation strategies. And even in the humanities, we are witnessing a profound epistemological revitalization, through feminist, ecological and multispecies perspectives. These signs demonstrate that innovation with transformative impact is possible — but often marginal, underfunded, or captured by the market before maturing into structural change.
In this scenario, design assumes an unavoidable responsibility. More than a technical or stylistic discipline, design is a cultural and political device: it shapes what can be imagined, desired and considered viable. It is a grammar of the possible. If design participated in the construction of this aesthetics of stagnation — creating smooth interfaces for opaque systems, desirable objects for unwanted infrastructures — it can, and should, also participate in its dismantling. It can stop being a management instrument and become a speculative practice, of dissent and care, capable of re-enchanting the world without surrendering it solely to the logic of the commodity.
Repoliticizing the future means returning it to its status as a field of dispute: a space where what does not yet exist can be thought, rehearsed, discussed — and not just simulated by algorithms or tested in corporate laboratories. It means breaking with the narrative of technical inevitability and reopening the possibility of other worlds, other forms of life, other relationships with technology — less focused on performance, more based on coexistence.
More than imagining new gadgets, we need to imagine new ways of inhabiting time. It is not enough to accelerate: it is necessary to slow down where necessary, delay where there is life, interrupt where there is damage, and compose where there is potential. This starts not with more innovation, but with another innovation idea — one that is capable of producing real, shareable, livable difference. Not just successive versions of the same, but futures that finally deserve that name again.
Perhaps the future begins in prose, in a community oven designed to last fifty years, in a school without bells, or in an operating system that refuses to notify. Small gestures of deviation, which redesign time and re-enchant the possible and desirable.
References
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Winchester: Zero Books.
Graeber, D. (2012). Of flying cars and the declining rate of profit. Retrieved from https://davidgraeber.org/articles/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit/
Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Illich, I. (1973). Tools for conviviality. New York: Harper & Row.
Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the future: The desire called utopia and other science fictions. London: Verso.
Morozov, E. (2013). To save everything, click here: The folly of technological solutionism. New York: PublicAffairs.
Mumford, L. (1963). Technics and civilization (Original work published 1934). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Thiel, P. (2011, October 3). The End of the Future. National Review. Retrieved from https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. New York: PublicAffairs.