By Christian Schneider
Thursday, September 17, 2026
Dear American resident in the year 2051:
I don’t know how you’ve come upon this missive a quarter
century after it was written. Maybe it’s still alive in text form on what we
once called the “internet,” or perhaps it’s being read to you by an artificial-intelligence-powered simulacrum of me. (I just
assume I won’t make it 25 more years once someone inevitably invents a drone
that can deliver Chick-fil-A directly to my mouth.)
I want to apologize to you, denizen of the future, for
the decisions that we, the people of 2026, made that determined how you live.
In America today, drastic societal changes over a small period of time have had
immense impact on our lives — they’ve come faster than our minds can grasp
them. You likely have had time to reflect on our poor choices.
“It is pleasant to observe, how free the present age is
in laying taxes on the next,” wrote the second-most-famous Swift in world
history (Jonathan, not Taylor). And you are now no doubt paying the taxes
levied by our generation.
When you ponder the era in which I’m writing this, I hope
you see it as a ridiculous anomaly. In the space of two weeks, the president of
the United States suggested that New Mexico be renamed “New America,” posted a
computer-generated video of himself cosplaying
as the Green Lantern, called a New York Times reporter by the name
of Maggie “Maggot,” posted a graphic ranking himself as the greatest president in U.S.
history, and moved to mothball the Kennedy Center because courts blocked his
effort to add his name to the building. To cap this all off, he offered
American voters a $5,000 bribe to elect Republicans in the upcoming midterm
elections.
If all this sounds like America was an open-air asylum
for a few years, then congratulations — your generation has righted the course
of the nation and returned to sanity. On the other hand, if none of what I have
just said seems out of place, then we have foisted on you a perpetual cycle of
politics-as-entertainment, where only self-aggrandizing hucksters rise to
power.
Yet the 2020s were a time when we decided that many of
humanity’s imperfections were too much to handle, so we looked to technology to
sand down the rough edges, making personal tasks smooth and effortless. We
outsourced our knowledge to AI, making smart people dumb and dumb people think
they were smart. Whereas knowledge was once a valuable commodity, earned by
those who worked hard to gain it, every fact in the universe — subject to
editing by the owners of AI companies — became publicly accessible, with insights
deriving from that information easily plagiarized and passed off as one’s own.
If you’re reading this, it means that AI didn’t kill off
humanity, as some techno-geeks are currently warning could happen. (As of this
writing, leaders of the largest AI companies are pleading for a
type of regulatory capture that would shut out potential competitors — the
“stop us before we end the world again” strategy.) So we survived, but
constrained by an algorithm that prevents learning from mistakes and
unpredictable happenings. Everything taken care of by the cloud. We knew the
risks, but we wanted it anyway.
Presumably, in 2051, AI will have fixed every problem,
allowing you to lead an easier, conflict-free life. Or was it the opposite?
Profit often follows controversy, so settled facts will be muddled by those
selling their own vapid expertise, casting many Americans into information
holes from which they will never escape.
As the Beatles sang in 1967, “Nothing is real, and
nothing to get hung about.” Everything is entertainment. In our time,
politicians became influencers. Actual influencers taught young people that in
order to gain attention, you have to behave in such a way that nobody could
stand to be with you in a room for more than 15 seconds. Actors strove to be
politicians, while politicians strove to be actors — with each side
demonstrating a manifest unfitness for the other job.
And yet while tech bros concocted ways to drain the world
of its humanity, society decided that it was best to spend its time on
manufactured controversies, such as whether using pretty women to sell products sets women back. Or breathlessly covering a 22-year-old quarterback’s dumb joke
about a viral video. AI is supposed to give us all more free time, which we now
choose to spend pretending to be outraged at mundane, predictable cultural
happenings.
Are you annoyed by the tiny drone the government uses to
follow you around, so it knows your location and activities at all times? Are
you sick of strangers wearing glasses with cameras in them, so they immediately
know your life history as they peer at you walking down the street? Well, back
in the mid-2020s, a lot of people thought full surveillance of all our
movements was a great idea. Are the people of your time familiar with the word
“privacy,” or is it as foreign to you as the word “blatherskite” was to the
people of mine?
Surveillance of individuals will likely have gotten
easier, as there will be fewer people inhabiting our country. Interpersonal
relationships, which produce offspring, have been losing their appeal, given
that basic needs can be delivered by a Wi-Fi connection.
What else did we mess up? Thanks to us, the great college
sports rivalries are gone, replaced by a bloodless conference money machine.
Speaking of money, thanks to the 2020ers, you can now bet on anything via
prediction markets, as once purely enjoyable activities came to be seen as
gambling opportunities.
If the future goes well, I hope none of this column makes
any sense to you. Here’s hoping that somewhere down the line, we all wise up
and realize that while humans are often inconvenient, loud, inconsistent,
unpredictable, and complicated, they make the world a place worth living in. I
hope you can all have a hearty laugh at the mid-2020s and that America is made
great once again with President Sydney Sweeney at the helm.
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