cached feelings

Many books about the future carry an unspoken assumption: that progress is a force rather than a choice, and that humanity will simply be carried along by it.

Homo Deus leans heavily on this assumption.

The future presented here is not one shaped by politics, care, or collective struggle, but by optimisation—of bodies, of minds, of systems. Human experience is framed as something inefficient, already on the way to being surpassed. Meaning is treated as a placeholder until data arrives.

What is striking is not the ambition of this vision, but its narrowness. The future belongs to those with access: to technology, to capital, to the infrastructures that make enhancement possible. Everyone else appears only as a demographic trend, a statistical remainder.

There is very little curiosity here about refusal. About slowness. About the possibility that people might choose continuity over transcendence, maintenance over mastery. Care work, disability, ageing, and dependence—central facts of human life—are present mostly as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be lived with dignity.

Books like this often claim neutrality by appealing to inevitability. But inevitability is a story we tell when we do not want to talk about power. Futures do not arrive fully formed; they are built, unevenly, by people with names, interests, and blind spots.

I am less interested in predicting tomorrow than in asking who is allowed to imagine it—and who is expected to adapt quietly once it arrives.