Looking forward to abandonment

A vision for the post-industrial-capitalist, eco-socialist future

By Quinton Y. Zondervan February 2026

Oligarchs and imperial governments are actively orchestrating an artificially intelligent, robotic future, seeking to disenfranchise working class and professional wage earners through technological replacement. If they succeed in this endeavor, for the first time in the 10,000 year history of human imperialism, they will no longer need human bodies to build empires and extract wealth. The Trump administration, emboldened by Elon Musk’s promise of a humanoid robot workforce, is forcefully removing exploited, undocumented, low wage earning immigrants, and anyone else caught up in the sweep, and murdering any resistance from white American citizens, without apparent fear of any negative consequences to the billionaire class.

The rest of us are about to be abandoned, left, at best, to fend for ourselves, if we are not exterminated by imperial thugs, or their robodrone replacements. While this prospect is extremely frightening and unsettling, as it will leave most of us without an income, and with zero political leverage to advocate for ourselves with the emperor, since we will be utterly useless and irrelevant to him, it also represents a potential opportunity for emancipation and liberation from the industrial enslavement forced upon us and our ancestors by generations of violently psychopathic, primarily male rulers.

The seemingly inexorable, exponentially accelerating process of technological advancement and invention that apparently spells our doom is also yielding nearly magical tools that could be harnessed for liberation. Mass produced, low cost solar systems are rapidly flooding the market, and solid state sodium batteries promise to deliver nearly unlimited, cheap energy storage and mobility solutions. Wind turbines, thermal energy networks, water purification systems and small scale, semi-automated factories, combined with regenerative agricultural techniques rooted in indigenous knowledge and native species, enable an eco-socialist reimagination of democracy, operated at the municipal level, without the destabilizing forces of exploitation and extraction to feed an insatiably powerhungry emperor.

To arrive at this imagined destination, we will have to survive the ongoing climate and ecological crises, genocides and wars that have already begun and will continue to rage and expand, economic upheaval that promises to exceed the Great Depression in severity and reach, and the potential outbreaks of intelligence explosions, where rogue AI and their robots act in ways that are incomprehensible to our human minds, and may well endanger our survival in new and terrifying ways. But if we act with intention and purpose, we may yet be able to avoid some of these catastrophes and lay the groundwork for a human future that allows our descendants to survive and thrive in concert with nature, while harnessing the abundant energies of the sun and the earth that flow around and through us every day.

So how do we begin to create this future? We first have to imagine it. Next, we have to strengthen our local democracies and begin to systematically decouple them from corrupt state and national governments co-opted by the nightmare of empire. And last, but not least, we have to emancipate ourselves from exploitative and extractive economic systems by creating local independent farms and factories that do not rely on distant resources and global supply chains for survival. To be sure, this will be a messy and incomplete divorce at best, and how to limit the AI technologies’ ability to harm us while we leverage them to liberate ourselves is not entirely clear.

Of course the endeavor could fail, and we could be destroyed in the process of converting biology into silicon. That risk is very real and present. However, we lose nothing by seeking emancipation instead, and avoiding extinction. It’s the only game in town. And if we succeed, who knows, we may yet experience the pleasure of watching our tormentors ejecting into space, where they can live out their technofascist nightmares without bothering the rest of us!

Quinton Zondervan is the Policy Director at Run On Climate, co-owner of RadiQal Farms, served three terms as a City Councillor in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a 350 Mass member.