Bernardo Jurema and Elias König at Protean Magazine:
The future used to be better, too. For the younger generation, it seems to have little to offer but economic and ecological crisis, war, genocide, and AI psychosis. No wonder, then, that stormy clouds of Gen Z discontent are breaking across the globe, most recently in France, India, Spain, Brazil and Albania. Timothy Mitchell, a professor at Columbia University, has witnessed firsthand the escalation of state violence of the second Trump presidency and the growing storm clouds—not quite yet ready to burst—of Gen-Z discontent in New York. Mitchell’s colleague Adam Tooze recently observed in his latest class of students a sense of “gathering anxiety, of truly radical uncertainty” that he had not felt in a classroom before. At the same time, New York has been home to some of the world’s most inspiring recent political movements, driven by a new generation desperate for radical change—from the student intifada movement to electoral successes like the Zohran Mamdani mayoral campaign.
What better time and place, then, to publish a book about the politics of the future? In his new The Alibi of Capital: How We Broke the Earth to Steal the Future on the Promise of a Better Tomorrow (Verso 2026), Mitchell argues that the foreclosure of the future is not accidental.
More here.