The Minimum Viable Future (Or How We Ended Up Here)

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new readers, and many thanks to all (plus here’s a big hug from Snowy!)

Today we’re going to discuss an idea that I’ve come to call the Minimum Viable Future.

There’s this idea in business, management, called the Minimum Viable Product. It means a product that’s just barely functional enough.

This is kind of where we are…as a world. When it comes to the future.

Our leaders and institutions don’t appear to be very interested, or at least not interested enough, in solving our big problems.

And the result is that they keep trotting out versions of the Minimum Viable Future.

Which is where we are now. In the Minimum Viable Future.

Have the feeling that everything’s hanging on by a thread? That maybe you are? We all, or at least so many of us, feel that way.

Feel like our societies are on a knife edge? That we’re sort of just perpetually dangling at the edge of the abyss?

Here we are. In the Minimum Viable Future. Just enough of one to barely hang on. One that’s barely worthy of the word.

But let me explain a bit.

(The Construction of) The Minimum Viable Future

I don’t like being critical these days. It makes people upset. They feel bad, worried, scared enough. Who am I to add to their burdens and amplify their fears. So mostly, I keep my trap shut.

I look at the Democrats. And while I like Coach Tim, and I share the enthusiasm for Kamala, even if mine’s been tempered a bit over time, I recognize in the Democrats the the Minimum Viable Future.

They’re offering a society that’s as deeply troubled as America…sort of…the least possible they can get away with. And still say, hey, we’re reinventing this and that, we care about you, we’re going to turn things around, your life will get better. To say all that, you have to offer something.

But what happens time and again in this age is that that “something” is the littlest, least, and most threadbare possible.

Kamala and Tim’s ideas aren’t bad ones. Per se. I’m not saying that. But they’re not remotely anywhere close to enough. And baby steps, too, are fine, but here, there’s beginning to emerge a lack of larger vision.

OK, we’re going to give people a little bit of a credit towards buying homes. But barely enough, really, to make a dent. We’re going to give people a tax break for having a kid. But not enough of one to even cover a year’s childcare costs. See? You might already be getting angry at me. Hey, stop being so critical, man. I get it. I don’t want to have say these things. They’re terrible and wicked things. I regret them. I wonder if I should say them.

That’s a little example of the Minimum Viable Future. The Democrats have learned over time that they can offer as little as possible, and get away with it, because the other side, of course, is offering less than nothing, an absence, of democracy, rights, freedoms, and so forth. In that total vacuum, anything at all looks immense, significant, and pretty wonderful. Hey, something exists, you can imagine someone saying, in the middle of all the nothing.

But this isn’t enough. And I think in our hearts of hearts we all know that. At least those of us literate even a little bit with history. It’s not exactly the stuff of a New Deal. Or a Great Society. Of the kind of reinvention that swept Canada and made it a social democracy. Of a Marshall Plan. I could go on with examples of genuine reinventions, but you get the point.

That point isn’t that baby steps, again, are bad. They’re not. But in this case, one gets the sense that Democrats have learned, all too well, that they have to offer just the barest minimum possible, of a future, of a functional politics, of a stable society, of a social contract, and that’s it. That’s the job. That’s the task. Because like I said, the other side is offering nothing but self-destruction.

And so we’re all trapped in this game of lesser evils, if you want to put it that way.

I think about it a little differently, which is: these days, leaders and institutions have learned that they can offer the Minimum Viable Future, and they think, maybe even honestly think, that’s their job. That’s all it is.

But is it?

The World the Minimum Viable Future Made

Where else do you see shades of the Minimum Viable Future? Once you think about the world this way, you can see it everywhere, or at least I can.

I don’t have to tell you stories about climate catastrophe these days. The effects of climate change are all too real, felt in disaster after disaster.

So what are we doing about it, as a world? We’re doing something, the proponents of the sustainability industry will cry. And they’re right, we are doing something. We’re not doing absolutely nothing, true.

We’re doing as little as possible.

As little as we can get away with, and still say, pointing proudly, hey, look, we’re doing something.

You know the harsh truths by now, and like I said, I don’t talk about them much these days because it gets me in trouble. We’re racing past the target we once set—1.5 degrees, etcetera. The world’s scientists expect heating of maybe 3 to 4 degrees, at which point, of course, tipping points are hit, which already appears to be happening, perhaps.

So what we’re doing, while it’s not nothing, is certainly not enough. To make a dent in this dire picture before us. If your hearts breaks for a city leveled by climate change today, imagine what happens five years from now. A decade.

And yet here we are, in the Minimum Viable Future. We all know we’re not acting fast enough or seriously enough on climate, or at least anyone vaguely thoughtful days, surveying the calamities unfolding. And still, our institutions and leaders are there, talking about what they’re doing, as if it were enough.

Here, again, I’ll be, reluctantly, critical of Kamala and Tim, to make the point. Emissions are still rising. They don’t have a serious plan to stop them, and a serious one would include accounting for the emissions in all the junk America imports from China and so forth. Not enough. Talking about clean or green this or that? Minimum Viable.

What do you want, dude, people often ask me at this point. Jesus, grow up.

I don’t like writing system-level criticisms now. I barely do it. It’s a thankless task, and a fool’s errand. Nobody wants to know about how bad the future’s going to be. Everybody wants to know how bad the future’s going to be. People beg me for optimism, and I look at them, wondering, do you think I’m being critical because I think this all we’re capable of?

We as a civilization have a global housing crisis.

Think for a moment how absurd that is. Housing? We might not be a perfect, or even advanced civilization. But surely we can build enough houses. Find ways to endow people with them. How long ago was it that we mastered modern infrastructure? A house these days isn’t exactly mud and clay.

How is it possible that in the 21st century, we have a global housing crisis? Climate change, one can understand—centuries of industry, which did raise living standards. But something as basic, as primary, as elementary, as…housing?

We have a global housing crisis because we’re in the Minimum Viable Future.

You see, not so long ago, the “future” was going to be a place where everyone had a set of universal human rights, and among those was housing. But not just that. Education, income, dignity, peace, bodily autonomy. A long list of modern rights to give substance to this thing called “democracy.”

How many people around the globe enjoy all of those, or even many of them? Even in the richest countries, there’s…a housing crisis. In America, of course, the idea of bodily autonomy is contested by dudes who think they should own your body. Dignity and peace? We’re in a new era of conflict and dehumanization.

That’s the big picture of the Minimum Viable Future.

The Minimum Viable Future, and the Maximally Possible One

We didn’t end up in a future made of these wonderful things, these noble aspirations becoming real, universal freedoms, which might’ve ensured stability and progress. Instead, we have a Minimum Viable Future, so minimally viable that even housing didn’t end up in it as a sort of easily or universally attainable outcome.

Like a Minimum Viable Product, this Minimum Viable Future has barely enough features to be recognizable as one. It has weirdly useless technologies, it has a thing called politics, it has a democracy that sort of shambles along, it has economies that are always “booming” but never quite deliver. You can sort of recognize a thing called “the future” in it, but the closer you look, the more you begin to wonder, hey, what about this feature, and that feature, what about this promise, and that one? What happened to all those?

Sure, we can call a piece of rubber with a string a shoe. It can suffice. In the same way, we can call this a future. But only in the minimally viable sense.

We deserve better, my friends.

Our leaders and institutions? Their job is more than this. It isn’t just delivering the Minimum Viable Future. So as not to risk their own power, status, fortunes, and hides. It’s creating the Maximal Possible Future, which is the one we sort of gave up on along the way.

Until they rise to that challenge, I suppose I’ll be here. Being this thing I don’t want to be, critical, trying not to share my discomfiting thoughts with you, reluctantly wondering, as we all do, in these troubled times: how did it all go so wrong?

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