All Tomorrow’s Parties.
(Who’s Building the Future You’ve Been Told Is Inevitable?)
‘Language is to the mind more than light is to the eye.’ – William Gibson
The future arrives in conference rooms first, announced in the conditional tense, migrating gradually toward certainty. What begins as “might reshape” becomes “will transform” becomes “is transforming” before the transformation has occurred. By the time reality catches up to language, the outcome already feels inevitable-not because it was determined by material conditions, but because the grammar left no other possibility visible.
Consider a sentence that has circulated through three World Economic Forum white papers, appeared in a Fortune 500 CEO keynote, and resurfaced verbatim at Davos six weeks later: “Artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape the nature of work within the next decade.” It has the quality of prophecy – authoritative, sealed, already written into the architecture of what comes next.
Watch what the sentence accomplishes. Work isn’t being reshaped by anyone in particular. Capital allocation isn’t mentioned. Policy choices remain invisible. The passive construction removes all agency from the frame, replacing institutional decisions with something that feels like weather, like continental drift, like forces beyond negotiation or democratic input.
This is not a rhetorical accident. This is infrastructure.
The language through which technological transformation is described has become a sophisticated apparatus for manufacturing consensus before reality catches up. Examine the grammar closely: passive voice dominates the discourse. “Jobs will be displaced.” By whom? “Industries will be disrupted.” By what specific decisions? “Society will adapt.” Or be compelled to? The linguistic architecture systematically erases decision-makers from every frame, replacing institutional choice with something that feels like natural law.
Future tense operates as destiny rather than probability. The language defaults to “will”- -reating one possible outcome among many as the only outcome that exists. Modal verbs of necessity proliferate: technological change “must” happen, organizations “need to” transform, workers “have to” reskill. What might otherwise be understood as choices become compulsions, framed as responses to external forces beyond anyone’s control.
Year
2026
Industry
Language
The metaphors do additional work. Transformation arrives in “waves.” Change flows like “tides.” Markets “evolve.” Each borrows authority from natural processes-phenomena that operate independent of human will, that cannot be negotiated with or redirected. The effect is totalizing: capital allocation decisions are reframed as technological determinism, policy choices disguised as historical forces, deliberate institutional strategies naturalized as the inevitable progression of civilization itself.
Consider two ways of describing the same economic reality. First: “Gig economy platforms will replace traditional employment structures.” Second: “Venture capital has funded the systematic reclassification of employees as independent contractors to externalize labour costs and eliminate regulatory obligations.” Same material outcome. Radically different stories about who is doing what to whom, and why.
The distinction matters because inevitability discourse serves specific interests. When transformation is framed as inevitable, resistance becomes irrational. You cannot negotiate with gravity. You cannot organize a protest against the weather. The only “reasonable” response to inevitability is adaptation-which conveniently means accepting whatever trajectory those driving the transformation have already decided upon.
This linguistic architecture forecloses political questions before they can be properly formed. The debate shifts from whether to how-from fundamental contestation to technical management. Should we automate this category of work? becomes: How do we manage the automation that’s coming? Should platform monopolies control entire market sectors? becomes:How do we compete in a platform-dominated world? Should algorithmic systems make consequential decisions about human lives? becomes: How do we deploy AI ethically?
The framing shift is subtle but comprehensive. It moves society from a posture of democratic deliberation about the future we want to build toward a posture of adaptive management of the future that’s already been decided. Political economy becomes change management. Collective choice becomes individual resilience.
Return for a moment to the question of digital infrastructure; the geography of connectivity, the deliberate patterns of investment and abandonment that determine which communities have access to the economic and social infrastructure of contemporary life. When broadband deployment is described through the language of “market forces determining optimal distribution,” rural populations have no grounds for grievance. Markets, after all, are supposed to be efficient. Resistance to market outcomes is inefficient, irrational, nostalgic.