Thread by @corymassimino

A 90% increase in about 50 years. What 90% shifts might we see 50 years from now?

https://twitter.com/RiverTamYDN/status/1436318951080869889

I both expect and very much hope it's factory farming. Such evil should never have existed in the first place and the quicker it disappears the better. Our circles of moral concern and of viable alternatives to eating meat are both rapidly expanding and converging.

I could also see borders drawing more opposition (and resistance) the more porous they become. Nationalism is still powerful, but I often suspect it's increasingly brash and loud precisely because it can't really keep up with the unceasing free movement of ideas, goods, & people.

There's also something like incarceration, whose outright evil makes it a plausible candidate for something as unpredictable as this. But I'm more pessimistic about that one. Growing abolitionist movements bring me hope, but prisons are very good at keeping their evil hidden.

I'm somewhat optimistic about trans acceptance. Yes, reactionaries are sadly obsessing over and deeply harming trans people in this particular cultural moment. But I really hope it goes the way of gay acceptance and bigots just kind of run out of steam and lose interest soon.

I'm pessimistic about nation-states and capitalism in themselves. Both systems suffer internal contradictions slowly bringing about their demise, but they also involve some very entrenched ideologies and economic interests. I hope they will eventually decay, but likely not soon.

Nuclear weapons? Again, a monstrous evil seriously entrenched in modern institutions but whose evil goes on largely in the background and with not so much fuss. I worry the 24/7/365 threat of immediately blowing up the world will be with us for a long time.

It would be nice if causes like reparations and land back got more steam, but they really face some harsh opposition. I'm optimistic for at least some patchwork applications of those ideas, though.

Forced birth might be the single *most* ideologically entrenched evil of all these, but even there, technological advancements toward ending pregnancy while sustaining the life of fetuses are intriguing and hopeful-sounding. If we're lucky, the tech will crowd out the misogyny.

Compulsory schooling? I'm doubtful. Ageism is one of the most enduring forms of human domination whose effects (robbing children of avenues for self-advocacy) are, more than most forms, mutually reinforcing with their causes (children lacking avenues for self-advocacy).

Relatedly, male circumcision is sadly here to stay. And I think that one's far, far, FAR more entrenched than compulsory schooling.

Religion is obviously here to stay, and for far longer than anything I've mentioned so far. It's not only one of the best social technologies we've stumbled upon for solving collective action problems, it's really, really, appealing to the vast majority of human beings.

Football will probably be gone in 50 years. The sport is losing both demand (viewers) and supply (kids growing up playing and loving football).

There are so many economic interests bound up in the intellectual property regime but at some point the costs of enforcement might just be too much to bear. I'm not sure that will translate to any kind of explicit moral objection though, just the slow decline of those laws.

The non-abortion aspects of patriarchy seem like they're dying a slow death. It looks like it's really tough to sustain them in a remotely open society and the idea of turning back after so much obvious empirical support for feminist ideas strikes me as delightfully unthinkable.

Of course, 50 years from now "Marvel movies" will just mean "movies."