The World That's Coming

First, the news cycle is dead in the eyes of the consumers; they want news immediately on demand. They don’t want to wait for the 6 P.M. news or the next morning’s paper to be delivered to get the latest news; they want to look at the news on their phone at any hour of the day, while killing time in line at the grocery store or sitting on a city bus. This means that reporters are basically working 24/7, updating stories posted earlier, and writing new stories as soon as events dictate. Second, digital advertising—the revenue source for most media in the modern era—is a volume game. The more content you create, the more ads you can sell, and with declining print ad sales, you need to make up the difference somewhere.

This means we live in a never-ending, always accelerating news cycle, which makes the brutal White House lifestyle more brutal than it has ever been.

If love had changed to something else, something I did not recognise, the terrace at the front of the pensión with its tables and chairs placed under the olive trees looked exactly the same as it did when I last stayed here. Everything was the same. The ornate tiled floor. The heavy wooden doors that opened out onto the ancient palm tree in the courtyard. The polished grand piano that stood majestically in the hallway. The thick cold stone of the whitewashed walls. My room was exactly the same too, except this time when I opened the doors of the worm eaten wardrobe and saw the same four bent wire clothes hangers on the rail, they seemed to mimic the shape of forlorn human shoulders.

The best and worst advice I ever got about being powerful and having a successful career was fake it till you make it. So many of us, women especially, don’t feel confident or worthy or smart enough to be in the rooms that we worked hard to get to. So instead of letting that insecurity take over and showing the world just how vulnerable we feel, we’re supposed to act like we belong. Feign the entitlement that seems to come so easily to our male peers. I live this advice every day and hate myself for it most of the time. Fake it till you make it, but at what point are you just a fucking faker?

Starlings fill the sky. They circle a large whitewashed mansion with green shutters raised above the bay. Scarlet blooms grow in turquoise pots and trees bend in the breeze inside the walls of the garden. There is shade in that garden. And a hammock strung between lemon trees. There is health in that garden. Cool walls and birdsong. I’d get to look young in that place. I’d come home to rest in that place. I’d stop running, running through airports and railway stations, running through European cities looking for rooms and coffee and company and comfort. I would stop running away from this beast inside me. We would rest here and stop being frightened of each other.

Released in 2005 in the midst of the George W. era, Revenge of the Sith was perhaps the most overtly political of the entire saga. Nixon was no longer the emperor. As Lucas explained, “George Bush is Darth Vader. Cheney is the emperor.” Supreme Chancellor Palpatine manipulates fear to turn the Republic into the Empire. With eerie prescience, Lucas told the Chicago Tribune, “Democracies aren’t overthrown; they’re given away.”

As a strongman , T’Challa bears some resemblance to Kwame Nkrumah, the leftist president of Ghana who was overthrown by a coup allegedly aided by the CIA in 1966. There’s little about T’Challa that would suggest he’s a leftist, save for the fact that he rules over a country untouched by colonialism. If anything, he leans right. His beneficence does not extend beyond Wakanda’s borders, sealed against as they are against the povertystricken tribes on all sides by a ring of mountains. T’Challa believes that only by refusing to share its wealth and technology can his country protect its unique way of life. His Wakanda First isolationism flies in the face of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism, and even has a whiff of you-know-who about it. In fact, in this important way, he is more like Donald Trump than he is like Nkrumah.

An index of the pessimism that pervades these shows is that the dystopias they picture are not sited in the indeterminate future, but only a few years off. In 2017’ s Blade Runner 2049, a crisis occurred in 2022, the year after my driver’s license expires.