The concepts · Entry

privatization of the futuren.

The process by which the capacity to define, build and steer collective futures becomes concentrated in the hands of a small number of private actors. In Asma Mhalla’s work, megacorps no longer control merely existing markets or infrastructures: they invest in and organise the material conditions of the world to come — artificial intelligence, computing power, cloud, semiconductors, space infrastructure, energy, cognitive interfaces. They thereby acquire an exceptional ability to determine which trajectories become possible, desirable or inevitable. The future gradually ceases to be a political horizon open to collective deliberation and becomes a space pre-empted by industrial, financial and technological choices already made. The privatization of the future names this political dispossession and, in Mhalla’s work, the very object of the political struggles to come: the collective capacity to decide what may still happen.

First public appearance — 28 November 2022, Cultures Monde — France Culture · Crise de la Tech : la fuite en avant (1/4) · De Twitter à l’espace : l’hubris d’Elon Musk ↗