An Old, Restless Wish

We do not know what is going to happen. This is a hard truth; we desperately want to believe the opposite. And so the most successful corners of the modern internet have been organized, very deliberately, around that desire to convince you that someone, somewhere, knows what is coming next, and that we should all look to them. The category includes astrologers and channelers, futurists and political analysts, sociologists writing op-eds and foresight professionals working by the hour. Across every register, mystical and analytical, the assumption is the same: that not knowing the future is a solvable problem. Never mind, of course, how they know what they say they know; modern epistemology is as social as it is slight. This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon, of course. Soothsaying is as old as we are. Its spotty track-record has always kept it in something of an intellectual quarantine, though — considered, even believed, privately; dismissed publicly. But in recent years, it seems as if…