I Hate Cybertrucks and I'm Going to Live Forever

Pluto Rennie 

The future has started to feel strangely empty. 

Not empty in the literal sense. If anything, we are surrounded by “future” constantly. AI-generated images flood social media feeds, every second Netflix show is dystopian, and climate apocalypse has become both a political reality and an aesthetic. Even trends feel posthumous now. Y2K revival. Indie sleaze revival. We recycle the past while acting like the future has already been cancelled. 

I started thinking about this after Future Perfect by Ellen Van Neerven was discussed in one of my education lectures. Around the same time, one of my friends was interning on Qua Nullius: Toe Fai! And Talaucaka, a Pasifika sci-fi theatre production. They ended up weirdly connected in my head because both made me think about futurity: not just the future itself, but the ability to imagine yourself existing within it. 

A lot of queer theory talks about this. José Esteban Muñoz describes queerness as future-oriented because queer people are often forced to imagine worlds beyond the limitations of the present. But queer futurity is complicated by the fact that queer people have also historically been denied stable visions of adulthood and permanence. There is a reason so many queer people talk about never imagining themselves growing old. For a long time, queer life was culturally framed as temporary, tragic, or impossible. Even now, queer narratives are still often built around suffering, rejection, or crisis. The future becomes something you survive day by day rather than something you confidently picture yourself inhabiting. 

What struck me most about Future Perfect, though, was that it refuses that idea entirely. The poem’s vision of the future is incredibly intimate and quietly optimistic. It does not imagine futurity through technological progress or some sleek sci-fi utopia. Instead, it imagines a future through domesticity, friendship, routine, and love. “My future love,” it begins. Friends come over and pick olives from the tree, the speaker imagines being remembered, and the future feels unstable at times, “opening, and then it’s shutting,” but it still exists. Queer futurity in the poem is not presented as impossible. It is cautious, vulnerable, and deeply human. 

I think that is part of why it stayed with me. In a cultural moment obsessed with apocalypse, there is something surprisingly radical about imagining yourself growing older with other people. About imagining community at all. 

The future in the poem is not grand or spectacular. It is protective circles made from string, a house that “knows” you, a heart as a T-shirt “ripping under the arms.” It feels fragile and makeshift, but alive. The poem treats futurity less as certainty and more as an act of care, something built and maintained collectively rather than promised automatically. 

Qua Nullius approaches futurity differently, through Indigenous and Pasifika speculative storytelling. Indigenous futurism pushes back against colonial narratives that position indigenous people as belonging only to the past. Colonialism constantly frames Indigenous cultures as disappearing or pre-modern, so imagining indigenous futures becomes political in itself. A title like Qua Nullius immediately plays on terra nullius, the colonial idea that land was “empty” before colonisation. Reworking that language through sci-fi feels intentional. It takes a genre that has holistically centered Western empires and technological domination and instead imagines futures grounded in kinship, ancestry, survival, and sovereignty. 

What interests me is that both queer futurity and Indigenous futurism are fundamentally concerned with continuation. They ask what it means to imagine yourself surviving, loving, and existing in a world that has historically expected your disappearance. 

And honestly, I think that is part of why mainstream futurism feels so bleak right now. Most contemporary visions of the future feel emotionally vacant. AI-generated “future” aesthetics look imaginative without actually imagining anything. They recycle the same cyberpunk skylines, chrome bodies, neon cities, and dystopian wastelands over and over again. It is futurism stripped of politics, memory, or humanity. Just endless content feeding back into itself. 

At the same time, the apocalypse feels easier for people to imagine than collective survival. Mark Fisher famously wrote that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, and honestly that feels visible everywhere now. We can imagine burning cities, environmental collapse, mass extinction, AI takeover, nuclear fallout. Entire genres are built around it. But imaging futures organised around care, interdependence, social justice, indigenous sovereignty, or collective wellbeing somehow feels unrealistic to the general population. Hope sounds naive while dystopia sounds intellectually serious. 

That has to be psychologically damaging over time. When every imaginable future is framed through collapse, optimisation, or survival, it becomes harder to picture ordinary happiness. Harder to imagine yourself aging, building a life, existing softly and continuously in the world. Capitalism demands constant productivity while simultaneously convincing young people there may not even be a future waiting for them. No wonder so much contemporary culture feels suspended between nihilism and nostalgia. 

This is why these smaller, more personal futurisms are so important. They are not trying to predict what the world will look like in two hundred years; they are trying to reclaim futurity from hopelessness. They insist that the future is not just technology or catastrophe, but also friendship, memory, intimacy, routine, and survival. 

And maybe that is what makes works like Future Perfect and Qua Nullius feel genuinely futuristic. Not because they offer polished visions of tomorrow, but because they still believe in the possibility of people being there to reach it together. Despite everything, we are still allowed to imagine ourselves alive, loved, and old.