Who Plundered the Future?

We usually narrate the climate crisis through carbon. But carbon is only accounting. The deeper matter is the economics of time. Every ton of CO₂ released into the atmosphere writes today's prosperity as a debt against tomorrow — a line of credit drawn from the living space of people not yet born. That is why the climate crisis is not simply an environmental problem; it is a crisis in how a civilization governs its own future.

Artificial intelligence follows a strikingly similar logic. The trillions of dollars now flowing into AI are not really flowing into algorithms. They are flowing into a small set of future stories: artificial general intelligence, Mars colonies, longevity, virtual worlds, digital immortality. Technology companies are no longer merely building products; they are capitalizing scenarios. Climate and AI are not two disconnected headlines — they are two faces of the same economic regime. One encloses natural commons; the other encloses the commons of the future.

The economists' definition of a public good rests on two conditions: non-rivalry and non-excludability. The air I breathe does not diminish yours; no one can be barred from the light of a lighthouse. A society's imagination of tomorrow fits that definition with surprising precision. My imagining a more livable world takes nothing away from your capacity to imagine one, and no one can, in principle, forbid another person's private tomorrow. In that sense, the future is a streetlamp — it falls on everyone and enters no one's pocket. The future, in other words, is a commons.

But there is a trap. The capacity to imagine is unlimited; the ground on which imagination stands is not. A society constructs its future not in isolated minds but in shared narratives — in novels, films, political programs, investment theses, climate scenarios. That shared ground depends on a genuinely scarce resource: attention. Once attention becomes scarce, the public good quietly turns into a pasture. It is still open to everyone, but now there is rivalry. The more space one vision occupies, the less grass remains for every other.

And pastures, as history has taught us, can be fenced. In 18th-century England, common lands were converted, act by act of Parliament, into private property. That process — described by Karl Polanyi in *The Great Transformation* — tore peasants from the land and drove them into the labor market. The genius of the enclosure movement was that it rarely relied on open violence. Law, cadastre, and the vocabulary of efficiency were enough.

Something similar is now happening on the pastures of the imagination. No one is banning alternative futures. A handful of "visions" — Mars colonies, artificial general intelligence, transhumanism, digital immortality — are simply being amplified to occupy nearly all of the available capital, media, and attention. The fence is invisible, but there is no grazing land left.

So how does the enclosure actually operate? Not through prohibition, but through pricing. Markets cannot know the future, but they can buy convincing stories about it. A company's market capitalization is, more often than not, less a function of today's output than the price of the story it tells about tomorrow. The Mars narrative sustains SpaceX's valuation. The metaverse narrative turned a name change into tens of billions of dollars of investment decisions.

The problem begins the moment an imagination is priced. Its nature changes — a Goodhart's Law of the imagination. Once a future becomes a target for capital, it stops being an open horizon and becomes a specification. And every rival future is now measured against that specification.

There is a further mechanism worth naming: the monopoly on plausibility. In institutional life, real power is not the power to decide what is true; it is the power to decide what will be treated as reasonable. That monopoly rarely disproves the radical proposal. It smiles at it, calls it charming, and drops it from the agenda. Disproof is expensive. Declaring something "unserious" is free.

This is where the plunder of the future does its heaviest work. Building a million-person Mars colony is "visionary"; proposing a four-day work week is "romantic." Uploading consciousness to the cloud is a serious conference panel; a more livable civic fabric is "nostalgic optimism." The difference is not technical feasibility. The difference is that capital's chosen future is automatically granted the status of "reasonable," while every alternative is crushed under the burden of proof.

Ali Rıza Taşkale's work on how speculative narratives are weaponized by technology elites opens exactly this door. But the problem is more structural than the misuse of science fiction. Science fiction has no owner. Neither does the future. That is precisely why whoever fences first wins — because the most fragile commons is the one left ownerless. Elinor Ostrom's theory of the commons, then, is no longer just about water or forests. It is about the imagination. Her insight was that commons can be governed by a third path outside nationalization and privatization — polycentric rules set by their users. We can hand the future neither to the state nor to technology companies. Both produce mono-centric imaginings. What we need is a polycentric ecology of futures.

What might that look like? Imagine a Mediterranean city in 2040. Water is a commons governed by neighborhood councils. In drought months the quota decision is made not by a utility but by a citizen assembly chosen by lot. The workweek is four days. The fifth is a day of care — for children, elders, and the soil. If, as you read that paragraph, the word "naïve" surfaced in your mind, pause. The monopoly on plausibility just ran inside your head. The same mind that smiles at a Mars colony raised an eyebrow at a neighborhood council. That is the plunder of the future. The fence is not outside; it is inside.