WE CAN ALWAYS DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE FUTURE
The future is not a force of nature. It is a design project – and that means someone is always setting the brief. What are its unquestioned assumptions?
01 THE FUTURES WE INHERIT
In my part of the world, there is a saying that the future is fixed, while history is ever changing. But as a 5-year-old, I saw a future collapse first-hand. In an extremely compressed time, physical walls crumbled, digital space opened, and a life like mine – against all odds – became possible.
How we engage with the future is shaped by how we have experienced history. Growing up witnessing, close-up, a shift that transformed not just my little geographic corner, but set the chain of consequences across the world, gave me something no forecasting model ever could: a visceral understanding that the future is not a force of nature. It is a human design project. And just like every project humans design, it reflects the perspectives, values and priorities of whoever gets to control it while foreclosing futures for those excluded from its imagination.
As a child, I got a glimpse into a possibility that I did not have to inhabit someone else’s fantasy future. As an adult I made it my job to change the very narratives informing how it gets to be designed and with whom in mind.
02 THE PAST IS NOT A MANDATE
To break the status quo, we first need to fully acknowledge how it has been constructed.
History does not have to become the future, but only if we learn its lessons. I was born in a country that does not exist anymore – the USSR – and grew up in newly independent Lithuania. I now live in South Africa. The specific legacies shaping both of these countries’ futures are hundreds – really thousands, millennia – of years old, yet in their current conceptions of themselves, both are younger than I am. Their futures are just as in process and as unfinished as everywhere else – but more visibly, palpably so.
By chance and accident of my birth, and with roots spanning the opposite edges of Eurasia, I learned how futures can feel immovable right up until the moment they collapse. These lessons are reinforced by living in a place where the past remains in a tense argument with the present it should have been long banished from. What I see: no unblemished heroes are coming to save us from our own selves. No simple binaries to escape to. Only complex realities to negotiate with.
History never disappears. It persists, mutates, and keeps negotiating with every future we try to design.
That vividness of history being defined by people interrogating – and putting their bodies on the line against – a seemingly immutable system never left me. It may explain why I have spent so much of my life working with entertainment studios, technology companies, governments, and science institutions asking not only what future is being promised, but how we set out to deliver it. Not merely “what will happen?” but “what will these choices do to our bodies, all bodies, and the planetary body we depend on?”. The future is not about positive intentions or cool tech specs. It is about impact.
03 MANUFACTURED DESPAIR
Who wants you to give up on the future? In 2026 the sharper question to ask is not how to stay hopeful, but who benefits from your despair?
When the future is being designed by those that will have to live with it the least it is no surprise most of us feel like collateral damage to the designs we have never been consulted upon. Geopolitical fragmentation, ecological destabilisation, AI hype colliding with institutional fatigue, and a public sphere so saturated by fear and nihilism that many of us are no longer imagining futures at all – we are cynically trading the future for quarterly returns, or barely surviving the infinite doom scroll.
Demoralization warfare is the Cold War relic made the hottest thing in town. It was one of the KGB’s most refined instruments – not bombs, not gulags, but systematic manufacturing of apathy. The target was not even primarily political opposition – it was imagination. Its purpose – then and now – is to overwhelm and confuse us to a point of apathy, or push us toward extreme, rash, hopeless actions that in turn feed the narrative that nothing substantial can be done with genuine reason, foresight and strategy. This is a lie.
I have an (un)fortunate gift of knowledge within my very bones that this is by no means the cruellest moment in humanity’s history – though we should do all we can to avoid “rivaling” our past. When I am tempted to give up on changing the world, I just have to remember that my ancestors did not survive wars, gulags, and concentration camps for me to surrender space. Nor should you.
The future should not be defined by those most insulated from the consequences of their actions.
04 SYSTEMIC CHANGE CAN BE MADE BY PEOPLE LIKE US
“What we practice at the small scale sets the pattern for the whole system.” – Adrienne Maree Brown
It might seem discouraging for some of us that we cannot directly solve climate change, military conflicts or hunger. But the truth is that most of us have our greatest impact in our own personal and professional domains – where we have the most established expertise, community and influence.
What if, instead of just doing “business as usual”, we truly explored how our actions (or apathy) within this specific terrain shape the possible future that we – and everyone else – will inhabit? This is not about individualism at the expense of structural change. So many of us are these very structures we talk about.
The future is shaped not just by our actions, but also our apathy.
05 CRISIS OF IMAGINATION
The future seems bad, but is it just as bad as fictions taught us to expect? Considering how thoroughly broken our futures imagination has been – ad nauseam sci-fi regurgitations of planetary, if not galactic, doom – our present moment is not as universally dystopian as we had projected. Which does not mean that the stakes are not higher than they ever have been.
But how can we do better if we cannot first imagine better? We rush from crisis to inaction to crisis in a déjà vu loop: patching cracks in the concrete with a plaster meant for a paper cut.
There is a lack of credible vision for a transition we need. Our strategies are failing to cohesively address the complex interaction of extraordinary scientific and technological advance coupled with what sometimes seems a truly logic-defying cultural, social, and political regress.
The future is more uniquely marvelous and stupid in its inescapable humanity than sci-fi movies ever suggested it could be.
06 LOVE AND GRIEF TO THE MOON AND BACK
Capture this moment, April 2026: Humans are circling the Moon. As a pointed rebuke to the Manosphere/Techbro sterile fantasies of space colonialism, the most memorable moments are not about conquest at all. They are about love, grief and camaraderie – humans hugging, holding each other, in space.
We watch on the stream as Reid Wiseman honors his late wife Carroll, naming a moon crater in her memory. Victor Glover writes poetry aboard the Orion and sends love to his family (from the far side of the Moon!). Christina Koch’s intelligence does not threaten the 3-to-1 male-female crew.
The future has arrived – irreducibly, inescapably human.
This moment is not about the triumph of engineering as so much of 20th C futurist mythology imagined it would be. Even at the ultimate bleeding edge of technical achievement, our future path never unfolds through technical logic alone – any futurism that fails to account for that is unfit for purpose.
On their brief journey farther from Earth than any human has ever been, the astronauts were also obliged to take a call from the American President – placed between posting social media threats to erase humanity’s longest civilization from the face of the Earth. The astronauts flew as far from their home planet as any earthling ever has, and still could not escape a man looping endlessly about past greatness that – if fact-checked – never was, and future greatness that – if fact-checked – simply cannot be.
07 WHAT STILL MATTERS WHEN FORESIGHT BECOMES AUTOMATED
It is untenable that the most rewarded players in the game of strategy continue to deliver us a reality where some of the least qualified individuals get to decide the rules of the future for the rest of us.
AI is positioned as a technological panacea to human ignorance, and yet by now we should know that machine learning, just like most previously “groundbreaking” tech, is not a changemaker. Machine learning does not correct weak judgement – it amplifies it. Mediocrity in, mediocrity out. Nothing new.
AI tools are commoditising the synthesis of signals and scenarios. Much of the work previously most highly rewarded is becoming obsolete fast. Generic insights have lost the little value they had – automation does not make shallow foresight deeper. It just makes it cheaper. The premium on underindexed expertise is IN.
The foresight industry will bifurcate. The practices that can be automated will be. What remains strategically valuable is harder to automate and harder to fake.
The deepest challenge remains: experts with the most mission-critical insights are those who will offer the most uncomfortable truths. As James Baldwin observed: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”. Yet neither corporate nor government clients want to budge from the comfort zone, because doing so implies the collapse of the worldviews their legacies were built upon. Instead of reckoning with the urgency for change, it is easier to pay someone to validate a “normalcy” that no longer exists, if it ever even did.
This is not a moral argument for “doing good”. It is about transforming to be fit for the challenge, or to be left behind as the world transforms without you.
08 FUTURES WE’D LIKE TO LIVE IN
The outdated map of the future is not its territory.
Since its inception, futurism as a field has been mired in the delusions of technological salvation and oblivious to the global, complex human realities that are the real substrate where the futures actually happen.
I have spent the past decade developing a methodology to address that gap – and to embrace overlooked opportunities. What will follow on this Substack is the public dimension of that work: not a summary of client engagements but the praxis to ask better questions – moving innovation inquiry from values to test to world-changing adoption.
In the weeks to come: the legacies of sci-fi world-building and why our fictional futures became broken design briefs. The anatomy of techno-fascism dressed as innovation. The case for strategic foresight that is culturally literate rather than culturally ignorant. And the full introduction of three frameworks — Protopia Futures, Embodied Futures, Storyworld Design — that together form a methodology for designing futures worth actually inhabiting.
The assumptions shaping the future are too consequential to remain unexamined. Let’s interrogate the brief before it hardens into infrastructure.
09 PROTOPIAN, EMBODIED STORYWORLDS
Direction without embodiment becomes abstraction. Embodiment without world logic becomes local insight. World logic without values becomes spectacle.
As a hint of what is to come:
Protopia Futures asks what kind of future is worth designing.
Embodied Futures tests that future where it matters: lived, bodily, biological reality.
Storyworld Design makes the result shareable, believable, and worth participating in.
These three frameworks are not a way to imagine a better future in the abstract. They form a methodology – and a different future mythology – for refusing misguided decisions before they become infrastructure, and for designing blueprints specific enough to be tested, credible enough to be adopted, and inspiring enough to make the change worth it.
Protopian World Stack is not a fixed destination, but a more informed process and an energizing direction – designed to be fit for the actual complexity of the present, rather than the comfortable fictions of the past.
10 NEW BRIEFS FOR NEW FUTURES
If you are in the room where futures are being decided – and you are reading this – you already know that some of the most crucial questions are not being asked. This series is an attempt to ask them out loud. Let’s ask them in the room and outside it, together.
“Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but a certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” – Václav Havel, Disturbing the Peace, 1986
Hope is not the refusal to see the crisis. It prevents the crisis from hardening into a permanent condition. It is what becomes possible when a future stops feeling like someone else’s script and becomes something you interrogate, design, and learn your way into.
This series is my attempt to shake us – and truly first of all myself – out of the doomscroll, towards the future as something we proactively – collaboratively – engage with, rather than just react to. If I pull you back from ambient nihilism, I hope you can help me not to get ground down by it too.
The future is not fixed. But it will be shaped by whoever shows up to write it.
About the Author:
Monika Bielskyte is the founder of Protopia Futures and Nike’s first Futurist in Residence.
As a foresight practitioner she develops resilient future strategies informed not only by emerging science and technologies, but by embodiment, lived reality, and narrative systems. Her field research spans more than 100 countries, with a deliberate focus on Global Majority realities and disability and neurodivergence as the highest-yield innovation frontiers.
Monika’s clients include Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther, BBC, McKinsey, Google, Microsoft, Huawei, WEF, Universal and L’Oreal. She has also lectured at scientific and academic bodies including CERN, Royal Society and Rockefeller University. Alongside Protopia Futures, her other roles include Luminary at EY, futurist advisor to Climate Spring and the Inclusive AI Lab and founding partner of African Life-Centric Design.
The methodology introduced in this series was developed over a decade through work across entertainment, technology, consumer innovation, government, and science — and continues to evolve through active practice across these domains. For enquiries reach out via linkedin.
Contributing editors:
Pumla Maswanganyi, Sofija Elzbieta Adomenaite
The manufactured despair section is the sharpest part of this for me. Naming apathy as an engineered output rather than a natural response to bad conditions reframes a conversation that's been stuck for years. And the bifurcation point about foresight is right on time. The practices that can be automated will be. What remains valuable is whether institutions will actually fund the slower, harder expertise they claim to want. Looking forward to the frameworks.
I appreciate your thoughts and writing so much. For those of us who have seen the old oppressions shift and dismantle, we own the future a better story of possibility and the creative iteration of hope. Your "stack" provides a framework to identify the aspects of our liberation that we can collectively work on manifesting. I reject the "bosses of bytes" futures.