On November 5, I cast my vote in the U.S., where the resurgence of a retrograde brand of nationalism didn’t make me particularly dreamy-eyed about the coming years. In fact, the election felt like a funeral for an idea of progress I had held so dear for much of the past, having grown up middle-class and progressive in 1980s Germany.

In Dubai, at “the world’s largest gathering of futurists”

Two weeks after the U.S. election, I took part in the Dubai Future Forum, then traveled to Venice for the Planetary Summit hosted by the Berggruen Institute. The future was still very much alive in Dubai and Venice, unlike in the U.S. and, for that matter, in today’s inert, crisis-stricken Germany.

The government of the UAE invited 3,000 experts and practitioners from various disciplines to the Dubai Future Forum, dubbed the “world’s largest gathering of futurists.” Taking place at the grandly named Museum of the Future, the forum showcased how much the practice of “futuring” still believes in itself, despite some ridicule for the futurist thought leader jet-setting the conference circuit, bleak forecasts for stability and peace, and not the least, exponential change at breakneck speed that would make even the most futuristic of the futurists dizzy. The CEO of the Dubai Future Foundation, His Excellency Khalfan Belhoul, in his opening remarks, underscored that sentiment by predicting seven “era-defining” events for the coming year alone.

1. The world will move beyond GDP.

2. The world will double its energy from the sun.

3. Humans will return to the moon.

4. A genome bank will reach one million samples.

5. The number of students learning outside school will reach five million.

6. The first brain-computer chip will be implanted in a healthy person.

7. A first Fortune 500 company will add an AI as a board member.

I left the Forum with more questions than answers. I was struck by how much the agenda projected a concept of the future that was still deeply rooted in the belief in human agency and the type of human-centered technological, social, and economic progress to which we are so wed.

The “world’s largest gathering of futurists” raised a bigger question: Do we improve the future by anticipating it? Between data, prediction markets, scenarios, foresight, strategic planning, speculative design, imagination, and science fiction, there are countless ways to envision what comes next. But does the future get any better if we humans believe we can anticipate or even create it? How positive—or even innocuous—is our interference in the first place? Sometimes the future just shrugs its shoulders in light of our hubris.

The future is already here—we just haven’t listened to it yet

On the eve of the Forum, the House of Beautiful Business explored a humbler and often overlooked source of futuring: hope. “The hopeful expect the incalculable, possibilities beyond all likelihood,” writes the philosopher Byung-Chul Han. In close partnership with the Dubai Future Foundation and the Jameel Arts Centre, we hosted “The Hopeful Dinner,” gathering 75 guests under the stunning outdoor dome of the centre, designed by architect Adib Dada.

It wasn’t your typical dinner, but a “listening experience,” a journey that took place over three delicious courses and three audio “acts.” The journey’s progression mirrored the arc of a human life, from birth to what’s beyond—be that transhumanism, Mars, aliens, AI, or a new consciousness. We assembled a diverse set of voices from both the past and the present, creating a medley of poems, speeches, interviews, movies, and songs that culminated in a composition co-created by the guests and our musical director Mark Aanderud.

It was a moving experience to listen together, eyes closed—in this case to a playlist that stood in stark contrast to the typical podcast chatter. Listening, I realized, is a way of connecting with the world rather than attempting to master it. It represents a form of understanding through undivided attention, a way of being present that transcends active intervention.

Off to the planetary, in Venice

A few days later, I attended the Planetary Summit in Venice, an event that achieved the seemingly impossible; it was both humble and ambitious. It was humble in its understanding of humanity's modest role in the “grand scheme of things,” yet ambitious in its intellectual determination to articulate a new paradigm of the “planetary.”

Three hundred thinkers, policymakers, and artists convened to explore a radical new paradigm for humanity’s relationship with known and unknown species: the “condition of planetarity.” This concept represents an intellectual development rooted in our growing awareness of our embeddedness in the Earth system, marking an ontological transformation and a decisive epistemic break from modernity.

As the Berggruen Institute’s Jonathan Blake and Nils Gilman noted in the program’s foreword, the planetary represents a political project that candidly recognizes the limits of human control, emerging as a successor to the human-centered “global,” which was effectively a gentle envelope that covered the systemic violence of globalization and capitalism, as Christine Winter, a scholar of environmental, multispecies, and Indigenous politics, argued. She said that “the idea of the individual has become destructive.” Physicist and astronomer Adam Frank amplified this perspective, proclaiming the planetary as a new cosmology—an alternative to the social, cultural, and political-economic orders of global modernity, a fresh cultural framework matching scientific cosmologies.

Unsurprisingly, the Summit eschewed traditional formalities, beginning with a non-actor “ceremonial opening” in place of welcoming remarks. The performance, Pale Fluo Dot—a 20-minute, shock-inducing spectacle by Berlin-based artists Amnesia Scanner and Jenna Sutela—powerfully merged artificial intelligence with nature, setting an evocative tone for the proceedings. The subsequent two-day conversations explored life, reality, governance, currency, and citizenship through myriad lenses. At their most compelling—featuring brilliant speakers such as Benjamin H. Bratton, Michael L. Wong, Claire Webb, or Thomas Moynihan—these dialogues delivered rhapsodic articulations of a new language. The discourse fearlessly embraced misunderstanding, embarrassment, and conflict as apt instruments for imagining alternative world orders.

What I found particularly fresh was the perspective of viewing humans as participants in the planet’s “spheres,” starting with the geochemical foundations—the lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere—as concentric, interdependent layers. This framework expanded to include the geosphere (inanimate matter), biosphere (biological life), technosphere (technological creation), infosphere (digital data and information), and especially the “noosphere”—a concept popularized by Jesuit priest and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin in the 1960s. The noosphere represents an additional layer created by human mental activity, a sphere of ideas, intellect, and reason—the “thinking layer.” This understanding of “spheres” functions as a powerful, poetic description of technology, humanity, and nature converging into a new dawn driven by complex intelligence.

It was inspiring to observe how confidently the summit’s curators and hosts held the evident tension between lofty, extra-terrestrial, inter-species cosmologies—drawing from astrophysics, astrobiology, technology, and diverse philosophical traditions—and pragmatic political considerations rooted in climate science, political theory, and anthropology. They maintained this complexity without resorting to superficial synthesis.

From democracy to planetary authoritarianism?

The Planetary Summit was able to maintain a delicate balance between realism and utopia, oscillating between calls for hyperlocal engagement and more radical systemic change. In this latter regard, I felt that one aspect was missing: an exploration of alternative political systems. While the speakers were willing to question the position of the human species in the universe, they were reluctant to question the sacrosanctness of liberal democracy, as if there were no viable alternatives to enabling planetary mindsets and lives.

Democracy, however, is in free fall, not just in terms of the number of active democracies. There’s also less buy-in within nations still carrying the brand: A Harvard poll from 2021, for example, showed that more than half of Americans between the age of 18 and 29 considered democracy as either “in trouble” or already “failed.” These sentiments may do more long-term harm to the future of American democracy than any of Trump’s own attempts to undermine it.

The session on “planetary governance” felt almost nostalgic with post-human feminist Rosi Braidetti making a passionate case for the European Union as an imperfect but beautiful pioneer of transnational governance. And while the EU doesn’t instantly come to mind as a new planetary framework for our species, it was moving to have her remind us of the origins of the EU and its raison d’etre as a bulwark against nationalism and fascism in Europe (even without its own military). The EU is an idea whose time has come, she seemed to say, and she warned us not to sabotage it, from the far left or the far right, just because it had been around for a while and hollowed out.

And yet, the EU model of transnational governance is still based on democratic principles and the concept of the nation state. But if the planetary was supposed to assume any real authority, how would it be possible to do that without weakening or overcoming the nation state and, for that matter, current supranational or transnational organizations such as the EU? I wish the Summit had considered what The New Yorker writer Jill Lepore recently described as the “artificial state” (“the reduction of politics to the digital manipulations of attention-mining algorithms”), or that it had invited some right-wing conservative thinkers—as scornful as their ideas might be—to discuss the idea of the planetary with them. “Planetary authoritarianism,” anybody?

The threat of planetary appropriation by populist movements is real, as Boris Shoshitaishvili and Lisa H. Sideris examine. The language has already been co-opted by Trump-whisperer Steve Bannon. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he provocatively invoked Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere concept. A few days before beginning his federal prison sentence, Bannon claimed that the noosphere was “going to so overwhelm evolutionary biology that it will be everything.” De Chardin’s writing has been controversial (including accusations—and rebuttals—of racism by scholars evaluating his work), but the authors observe that Bannon’s appropriation may have been more driven by his belief in and desire for an “intersubjective reality” created by “narrative power”—cue “alternative facts” versus the idea of an objective truth made for humans by humans.

This, it seems, is the dark side, the great danger lurking underneath all the gushing about the planetary: “In its sweep towards a divinized planet, or divinized politics, the grand narrative risks losing sight of material bodies and their suffering, and, in Bannon’s case, of the materialities of facts themselves,” as Shoshitaishvili and Sideris warn us.

This might also be the point of convergence between the planetary and the visions of techno-oligarchs like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel who seek to build a world order that propagates extra-human and extra-terrestrial regimes and consider democracy a relic from a gone-by era that must be overcome.

Appropriation by populist movements is a real threat to the crypto-community, too. For its more progressive protagonists, crypto’s decentralized power and decision-making is the most radical form of democracy. In Venice, Venkatesh Rao touted crypto-currencies as quasi-political systems already modeling a form of post-national governance. “If you have access to encrypted communities, you have access to the planetary,” he contended, and left attendees with three suggested, very down-to-earth action items:

1. Quit Twitter and create a BlueSky account

2. Buy bitcoin or find other ways to engage with crypto

3. Quit WhatsApp and open a Signal account

Reclaiming the Zeitgeist

At the Venice Art Biennale, whose closing weekend coincided with the Planetary Summit, the German techno-club-style pavilion both ironicized and celebrated intergalactic redemption through an alien space ship that’s coming to Earth in the shape of a Jewish mysticist kabbalah.

In the arts, philosophy, and governance something novel has entered the zeitgeist—a new cosmology, a metaphysical economy, a merger of the divine and the digital, of spirituality, nature, and tech. The battle over its narrative and politics has begun. We should not shy away from it, and not surrender its terrain to an unholy alliance of populists, fascists, and techno-oligarchs.

This is why we have launched The PolyOpportunity, an initiative that the House of Beautiful Business is hosting together with the Acosta Institute and the Holon Institute, as well as many other partners. In some way, it is a kindred sibling, albeit with a more narrow focus, of the discourse in Venice: a new aesthetic, a new ethics, a new metaphysics for and through business, catalyzed by an interconnected web of life-changing forces (“how everything is interrelated for the better”) that marks a pivotal shift toward a new philosophical, cultural, and economic paradigm.

Call it the planetary, post-human, more-than-human, or life-centered era—in any case, it has begun.

Tim Leberecht

15 Must-Reads on the Future

1. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

Good to start with Huxley’s classic, a novel that set the standard for dystopian fiction.

2. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood

With reproductive rights in America under attack, Atwood’s classic is more relevant than ever.

3. The Ministry of the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

This acclaimed work of climate fiction is a must-read for anyone worried about the planet.

4. Nexus, by Yuval Noah Harari

Both entertaining and unsettling, Harari’s latest addresses some of the most urgent choices about information that we must make today.

5. Manifesto of Futurism, by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

It’s easy to forget that futurism dates back to interwar Italy, where it began as an artistic movement that became associated with fascism.

6. “Machines of Loving Grace,” by Dario Amodei

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s comprehensive manifesto is the most persuasive of the optimistic AI outlooks.

7, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna J. Haraway

An early multispecies feminist vision for what comes after the Anthropocene

8. Posthuman Feminism, by Rosi Braidetti

A seminal read on the implications of the posthuman turn for feminist theory and practice

9. “Calling for a More-Than-Human-Politics,” by Anab Jain, in: Superflux Blog

One of today’s most influential speculative designers makes the case for a new interspecies form of governance.

10. Afrotopia, by Felwine Sarr

A vibrant, poetic call for an African utopia by one of the continent’s most exciting new thinkers

11. The Planetary Reading List, by Noema Magazine

A stimulating, multi-disciplinary collection of essays on the “condition of planetarity”

12. Future Focused, by Dev Patnaik

This newsletter and podcast by Jump Associates’ CEO provides bullshit-free perspectives on the future for business leaders.

13. Exponential View, by Azeem Azhar

Azhar’s weekly missive examines how tech is driving exponential change, and what it means for business and society.

14. “What Don’t We Know?”, by Joshua Rothman

Rothman explores the relationship between ignorance and the future in this compelling article in The New Yorker.

15. What's Next Is Now: How to Live Future Ready, by Frederik G. Pferdt

And, finally, here’s a practical guide by the former Google chief innovation evangelist.