By James McCabe
Out with the old optimistic rhetoric
In 2023, the old-school big tech liberal Bill Gates proclaimed that he was “very optimistic that it’d be much better to be born 20 years from now… than any time in the past.” Gates’s optimism about the future was based on the fact that, globally, infant mortality rates and extreme poverty had declined consistently for the first two decades of the 21st century. Gates’s New Year’s address was more muted in 2026 as he acknowledged that, tragically, deaths of children under the age of five had risen for the first time this century – from 4.6 million in 2024 to 4.8 million in 2025.
In with the new dystopian worldview
The masters of big tech are no longer arguing that society will progress. Some are actually embracing social and economic decline. Alex Karp, the cofounder and CEO of Palantir, an AI, surveillance and data analytics firm, proclaimed that “Bad times are incredibly good for Palantir, because our products are built for danger.”
Karp proudly proclaimed that Palantir is “the first company to be completely anti-woke”, and when confronted by protestors at a public forum about Palantir’s role in killing Palestinians in Gaza last year, his response was “mostly terrorists, that’s true”. The UN’s Francesca Albanese recently outlined how tech companies like Palantir see the Gaza genocide as “the ideal testing ground for their semi-autonomous weapons and drone technology.”
The 2020s – extreme poverty rising
In 2022, the World Bank announced that progress in reducing extreme poverty had stalled. A recent UN report found that in 2025, “808 million people are living in extreme poverty – up from the previous estimate of 677 million – representing 9.9% of the world’s population, or one in ten people.” In 2024, an estimated 28% of the global population – nearly 2.3 billion people – were moderately or severely food insecure.
In Sudan alone, 21 million people are facing acute hunger, while 13.6 million people are currently displaced due to conflict between factions armed with weapons produced in the Global North.
Obscene wealth hoarding
The wealthiest 0.001 per cent – around 60,000 multimillionaires – now control three times more wealth than half of humanity, 4 billion people. While living standards are stagnating for ordinary people worldwide, due to rising costs of food, energy and housing, the wealth gap between the Global North and Global South is widening. For example, education spending per child in Europe and North America is more than 40 times that in sub-Saharan Africa.
21st century colonialism
Donald Trump has bragged about his plan to take over Venezuela’s oil industry after he kidnapped President Maduro. Then his Deputy Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, declared that “Greenland should be part of the United States”. These instances are not the first examples of the US attacking other countries in pursuit of oil resources and geopolitical advantages. Now, the US, China and other imperialist states are competing to dominate the production of rare earth minerals used for renewable energy technology and the production of advanced semiconductor chips.
Venezuela, Greenland and impoverished countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo are in the sights of imperialist countries, hungry to extract their reserves of rare earth minerals, to the detriment of the ordinary people and the ecosystems there.
Warmongers of 2026
A system based on competition and exploitation will sometimes see wars hypocritically launched in the name of “democracy”, “freedom”, and “progress”. Other times, it will see thuggish brutes nakedly embrace war for the sake of “strength”, “power”, and “oil”. Since January 2025, the Trump administration has bombed seven countries, and Trump called for US military spending to be increased by 50% in 2027 – to $1.5 trillion!
All told, there’s not much evidence on the ground in 2026 to support Bill Gates’ optimistic predictions about the progress capitalism will supposedly bring in the coming years.
