Futures Are Formats

This is a reflective essay. It traces how the dream of a better place becomes immortality, then total experience, then a subject that can be rewritten, and asks who controls the formats a future self must stay legible inside.

From designing collective experience to engineering the biological shelf life of a single person, the seminar moved across scales. In contrast, the tension between "do subjects design futures" and "do futures format subjects" never settled. Every future is imagined by a self that will not be there when it arrives. This does not stop the imagining, it never has. Wagner, Harari, the metaverse: each projects a destination for a subject already in motion, already becoming someone else. These futures are not the inevitable output of human progress. They are configurations that crystallized.

The Dream of a Better Place

The dream of a better place began as a refuge from powerlessness. Its earliest traces appear in religion: a distant island, a realm beyond death, where those who lived well could exist forever without suffering. The first such visions were spatial, a good place somewhere else, not a reward for virtue. Zoroastrianism formalized this: the good place became something earned, sorted by an ethical ledger, with cosmic conflict built in between good and evil. The structure was theological, but the underlying logic was already one of mastery, the belief that if the right conditions are met, the right outcome can be secured (Freyermuth, 2019, pp. 24–26).

More wrote Utopia in 1516 at a specific hinge. The Church's monopoly on the afterlife was fracturing, the Reformation was already underway, and the humanist tradition was redirecting attention from divine providence to human capacity. More's move was to take the better place out of God's hands and put it into the hands of design: the right organization of education, economy, and politics could produce it here, now. This was not just a secularization of heaven. It was a transfer of mastery, from the divine to the human, from the given to the engineered. But the structural problem traveled with it. Every utopian vision is a border. One group's better place is necessarily another's constraint, and the question of whose requirements get built into the infrastructure is not peripheral to utopian thinking. It is its core problem. Once mastery transferred to the human, it scaled (Freyermuth, 2019, pp. 24–26).

The Enlightenment turned the better place into a better time, progress, machines, and liberation en masse. Verne, Star Trek: each projected a future in which technology resolves the present's problems. The dream became collective, directional, and inevitable-feeling. But that inevitability is precisely what produced the counter-imagination. Huxley and Orwell were not pessimists by temperament. They were responding to a specific condition: liberation narratives that produced their own forms of domination when the infrastructure of the liberated world was owned by a minority with no obligation to share it. Dystopia is not the opposite of utopia. It is utopia seen from the wrong side of the border (Freyermuth, 2019, pp. 40–41).

The Better Place Becomes Immortality

At some point, the better place stopped being elsewhere and started being here, but permanently. If the destination keeps receding, the next move is to stop needing to arrive. Immortality is what the dream of a better place becomes when spatial and political solutions have both proven insufficient. The sorcerer who promises the king immortality is not a recent figure. Mummification, alchemical tradition, the rituals surrounding death across every culture, heaven itself, these are all technical engagements with mortality. Tekhne, the organized application of craft and knowledge, has always been how humans managed the threshold between life and death. What shifts in modernity is not the desire but its proximity to execution. The toolkit changed. The ambition did not.

Harari makes an argumentative move worth pausing on. He links the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says "the right to life," not "the right to live until ninety", to the inference that there is no principled reason to accept any biological expiration date. But a document built to protect people from violence and oppression is being read as a mandate for a biological engineering project. Whether that is a logical extension or a quiet relocation of moral weight deserves scrutiny. The desire for immortality is old. The claim that it is now a human right is new, and that newness matters, because rights language carries institutional force. Once framed as a right, the project stops being a dream and becomes a demand. Who funds it, who accesses it, and who gets left behind are questions that the framing actively forecloses (Harari, 2016, pp. 33–36).

But immortality runs into a problem that no other utopian project does. Every other form of mastery, over nature, over politics, over infrastructure, assumes a subject that persists long enough to benefit from what it builds. Immortality is the attempt to guarantee that persistence. And it is precisely here that the project collapses into its own contradiction. Identity does not hold still even under ordinary biological conditions. A society where people die at forty and one where people die at eighty are not the same world stretched across a longer timeline. They produce different forms of experience, different relationships to risk, time, and meaning. A person who lives to eighty is structurally not the same person who was twenty. Memory, values, the texture of experience, and the relationships that constitute a self all transform continuously.

In Frankenstein, when the creature is assembled from the dead, what is created is not the restored original. It is something new, carrying traces of what came before, but irreducibly different. If a person's memory is uploaded to a new substrate, has that person's life been extended, or has a different entity been created, one that carries a copy of that person's history but is not that person? The question is ontological. We can design a future for a self that will not be there when it arrives.

Total Experience as Compensation

Wagner's total artwork was an attempt at exactly this, gathering all art forms toward a single purpose, trying to produce "the unconditioned, absolute portrayal of perfected human nature." Not a better place elsewhere, not a permanent self, but a moment of total presence. Bazin extended the same desire into film: a total and complete representation of reality. Gibson's cyberspace made it immaterial and networked. The holodeck made it spatial and embodied (Freyermuth, 2024, pp. 14–15, 21–23).

Each step in this arc is contingent; the metaverse is not the inevitable continuation of the holodeck. What persists across all of them is a logic: the more total the environment, the more it depends on shared protocols, interoperable interfaces, and legible subjects. Total experience and standardization pressure rise together. The promise of presence conceals a growing requirement for compatibility. When Wagner was building Bayreuth, each audience member arrived carrying a private inner world, and the performance tried to reach into it. In contemporary digital platforms, something has inverted. The individual arrives pre-formatted. The performance no longer reaches into the subject; the subject is shaped before it enters (Freyermuth, 2024, pp. 14–15, 82–83).

The Rewritable Subject

What this arc produces, at its current end, is a new kind of formatting. The human becomes a medium, a hybrid through which information passes, is processed, and returned. The more consequential version is already ordinary: we experience space through devices, maintain relationships through platforms that mediate what is expressible, and work inside systems that pre-parse our decisions before we make them. The body has not been replaced. It has been embedded in a network that partially constitutes its reality (Freyermuth, 2024, pp. 82–83).

In that network, identity is no longer something carried and expressed; it is something written, overwritten, and selectively rendered by the systems through which it must pass to remain actionable. The self that sought a better place, that imagined immortality, that pursued total experience, arrives rewritable and erasable. A down-ranked profile, a withdrawn trust score, and a discoverability penalty do not prohibit a subject. They simply make it unreachable. The body remains present while the self becomes functionally absent.

This is where the seminar's arc closes, and where it refuses to close cleanly. The dream of mastery did not disappear. It was encoded into infrastructure. And infrastructure, unlike ideology, does not need to declare its assumptions. We began with a species trying to escape powerlessness by imagining a better place. We arrive at a species that has built environments so total that the conditions for generating new meaning inside them are themselves being compressed. Futures are not destinations. They are formats. And the question of who controls the format is inseparable from the question of who gets to remain legible inside it, which is, finally, the same question More was asking, wearing different clothes.

References

• Freyermuth, G. S. (2019). Utopian futures. A brief history of their conception and representation in modern media–From literature to digital games. In B. Beil, G. S. Freyermuth, & H. C. Schmidt (Eds.), Playing utopia: Futures in digital games (pp. 9–65). transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839450505

• Freyermuth, G. S. (2024). Metaverse's modern prehistory: Utopian media from the total work of art and total cinema to cyberspace and holodeck. In B. Beil, G. S. Freyermuth, I. Hamm, & V. Ossa (Eds.), Gaming the metaverse (pp. 13–98). transcript Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839474624-002

• Harari, Y. N. (2016). Homo Deus: Yarının kısa bir tarihi (P. N. Taneli, Trans.). Kolektif Kitap.