Often, we no longer feel we have a say over our futures. Instead, tech companies offer us glittery images of luxury and convenience — and prophesize about our fully optimized and automated destiny. Through their product launches, think pieces, and PR departments, tech companies exercise a powerful influence over our sense of what we can do as a society. But for all their talk of innovation and change, these companies present a very limited and static vision of how we could change our world.

We can have a new generation of tech products, but with all the current fundamental structures of power firmly in place. So long as you are still buying merch, you can be in whichever web, metaverse, or cinematic universe you like. Politics is, in part, a struggle over what can appear as possible, and tech companies have been very successful in defining the limits of our political imagination.

This control over the future is particularly important at key turning points in history. In certain moments of crisis and transition, radically different pathways are open to us and there is a struggle over which direction to take. We are arguably at just such a moment of a great realignment in global politics, with dramatic shifts occurring even in the tech sector. Legacy tech companies are rebranding, acquiring competitors, and attempting to fend off challenges from a new generation of companies and products.