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The Future in the Making: From Byung-Chul Han, Mark Fisher and Bifo to Deepfakes, SpaceX and Beyond

Lecturer: Vincent Lê

Originally Taught: Evening Sem 1 2025

“We are in need of a great debate about the future!”

– Adam Driver, Megalopolis

Questioning a prevailing contemporary view in philosophy and particularly art that “the future has been cancelled,” this course explores what a renewed philosophy of the future might look like through several case studies of techno-cultural artifacts. By considering cutting-edge developments in social media, virtual reality, deepfakes, robotics, space travel, AI, algorithmic governance and more, as well as their cultural and philosophical ramifications, this course offers a little glimpse of the future in the making, as oftentimes monstrous as it is sublime.

Weeks 1-3. Has the Future Really Been Cancelled?

Before looking forward to the future, the course begins by examining the popular claim—made by Byung-Chul Han, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds among others—which holds that the days of the future are numbered, soon to leave nothing in its wake but a monotonous and immobile present without novelty or surprise.

Suggested readings:

  •   Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 1-34.
  •   Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Futurism and the Reversal of the Future,” https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo8.htm.
  •   Mark Fisher, “‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future,’” in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), pp. 2-29.

Suggested songs:

  •   Arctic Monkeys, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor”
  •   Goldie, “Terminator”
  •   Olivia Rodrigo, “déjà vu”
  •   Drake, “Marvin’s Room”
  •   Burial, “Pre Dawn”

Weeks 4-5. Simulation Hypotheses

As Han, Bifo, Fisher and Reynolds all identify the internet as one of the leading culprits for why the once heart-racing pulse of the future has become so faint, weeks four to seven will both critically investigate this claim and perform emergency CPR on the future by exploring the current state of cyberspace. Our fourth and fifth weeks will trace a select history of thought experiments claiming we live in a simulation, from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, and particularly Kant’s discovery of the phenomena/noumena distinction as the difference between the way things appear to us and the way they are independently of ourselves. We will explore how recent developments on the internet and social media—along with virtual reality, synthetic drugs, biotechnology and artificial intelligence—turn Kant’s transcendental deduction that we are living in a simulation into a technical proof through the experimental production of alien conditions of life.

Suggested readings:

  •   Byung-Chul Han, “Infocracy,” in Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), eBook.
  •   Tom Wheeler, “Connections Have Consequences,” in From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2019), pp. 11-24.
  •   Tom Wheeler, “The History We are Making,” in From Gutenberg to Google, pp. 181-219.

Weeks 6-7. The Deepfakes to Come

The sixth and seventh weeks consider deepfakes, artificial neural nets generating realistic audiovisual simulations of public figures, and their success in passing Turing’s imitation game by deceiving us into believing they are human. Deepfakes are exemplary of a more general technological trend—encompassing social media, sex robots and the blockchain—which see our gadgets and tools only pretending to satisfy our desires so as to lure us into pursuing their own ulterior motives.

Suggested readings:

Suggested film:

  • Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014)

Weeks 8 - 9. The Dionysus Space Program

Bifo has argued that the future is not only a question of exploring the unknown through time, but also across space. This is why space colonization is so often associated with the future: “As long as spatial colonization was underway, as long as the external machine headed toward new territories, a future was conceivable, because the future is not only a dimension of time, but also of space.” In trying to trace such a future, in the eighth and ninth weeks we turn to critically examining the prevailing Hegelian conception of technics as both extensions of man and tools for our self-assertion by hitching a ride with ever more autonomous robots capable of venturing beyond the bounds of our possible experience in uninhabitable disaster zones, battlefields and particularly the cold and hostile void of outer space. In place of the Apollo space program’s archetype of manned spaceflight that defined 20th century space exploration, we shall see that advances in unmanned spaceflight and privatized space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX amount to a Dionysus space program capable of accelerating well beyond the earth’s center of gravity.

Suggested readings:

  •   Byung-Chul Han, “Heidegger’s Hand,” in Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), pp. 70-72.
  •   Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, “Introduction: A False Dichotomy,” in Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution and Interplanetary Travel (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. xi-xviii.
  •   Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, “The Human/Robot Debate,” in Robots in Space, pp. 1-31.

Suggested film:

  • Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013)

Week 10. Patient AlphaGo Zero

This week looks at how the AI company DeepMind’s Go-playing computer programs were able to defeat the world’s greatest human champions through unprecedented strategies which subvert our dogmatic beliefs that our knowledge exhausts the upper bounds of cunning, imagination and conquest. As we shall see, DeepMind are well on their way to disillusioning our delusions of grandeur in other domains through their AIs’ automation of scientific discovery and superhuman success at war games.

Suggested readings:

  •   Byung-Chul Han, “Artificial Intelligence,” in Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), pp. 40-44.
  •   DeepMind, “Mastering the Game of Go Without Human Knowledge,” in Nature 550, 2017, pp. 354-359.

Suggested film:

Weeks 11-12. Seasteading, or How to Escape the Island of Reason

The last two weeks set off from Kant’s metaphor of the island of reason and the noumenal seas to show that, in a time of ecological catastrophe and rising sea levels, we are left with no choice but to abandon the island of reason and journey across the sea. In particular, we must consider the necessity of building ocean cities or “seasteads” that could very well provide the technological means for critiquing all existing forms of governance, as well as the ideas, beliefs and values that reinforce them, by experimenting with new conditions of life on the anarchic open seas.

Suggested readings:

The MSCP acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land — the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation — and pay respect to elders past and present.