This is going to sound a little silly at first, but bear with me.

Growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, I was taught that the world was becoming more “civilized,” that post-WW2, wars would only happen in backwards places, that the world was no longer safe for fascism, and that, with the end of the Cold War, a new millennium of peace was approaching. As a young adult in the 2000s, the narrative was that terrorism was the new threat, and I protested war in far-off places conducted on false pretenses. Even then, those unjust wars were more precise, more targeted, somehow more “civilized.” We were somewhat more disillusioned, but there was still the feeling that the horrors of the prior century were firmly in the past. The 2010s kicked off with the Arab Spring, and our hope-and-change administration won a major victory for domestic policy, and it seemed that technology and democracy were advancing the world over.

It feels like in the last 10 years all the hope and most of the progress of the prior century have evaporated. There is a protracted land war in Europe. Our most “civilized” ally in the Middle East has shown itself capable of bottomless barbarism. The technologists who seemed to be heroes ushering in utopia have proven themselves to be cartoonish villains who have brought us a cyberpunk dystopia – or not even that, because it isn’t even stylish in the way that fictional cyberpunk dystopias were. Neofascists (or something equally bad) have come to power in the US and in many other previously liberal democracies, and they are in the process of dismantling democracy, to replace it with autocracy and oligarchy. They are sending the military into American cities. The party of hope and change has shown itself to be instead the party of timid acquiescence.

I’m describing a sort of structure of feeling and how it has changed over the course of my life. It is, of course, told from my immensely privileged, relatively wealthy, white, American, male perspective. Many people around the world born the same time I was, from poor Black Americans to Afghani villagers to Chinese factory workers could tell you that from the beginning the story of the “civilized” age was a lie, thick with the ideology of capitalism and US supremacy. And yet… and yet, I still feel that something really important has been lost, not just for people like me, but for the entire future.