What did 2025 mean by that? Melting into an Afghan rug somewhere in East London at 4am, someone told me in paraphrase that Obama was the last president of the 20th century. Fitting, then, for 2008 to mark the fin-de-siècle, and for 2016 to begin the first decade of the new common era: Trump-Brexit, the unravelling of social media and intensifying culture war. 2022, at peak pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war, the tech crash and the CHIPS Act, called the decisive end of the Washington Consensus.
2025 shook off the old skin of that decade. Like thirty-somethings discovering new aches and twinges, we weren’t ready but we aged out anyway. The animating conflicts, outrages and idealisms of the 2016- era had simply stopped mattering. Its culture of authenticity, the discourses of identity, its lingering convictions in liberal democracy, its politics of protest and representation; its belief in technology as a source of social progress, rather than society as a consequence of technological power. It’s not that none of it matters any longer, but that the story which framed these skirmishes and commitments simply stopped making sense.
For one, they were largely Western malaises, occidental perils. 2025 was the year that China went mainstream in the caucasian consciousness, starting with TikTok refugees and the DeepSeek shock, tariff wars, widespread meme osmosis and the palpable contours of a freshly everted orientalism. I’ve lost count of the number of fresh-faced Silicon Valley cohorts on tours of first-tier Chinese cities in order to see it for themselves, drinking in scenery of Chongqing and Hangzhou like Yeltsins at the supermarket. The new orientalism is not like the last; Americans discovered that the alien empire on the other side of the ocean might be a lot like us after all—a technocapitalist society bent on growth, fed on slop, worked to the bone—except their OS seems to be functioning, at least by contrast. The exotic boomerang bounces back onto a Western hemisphere that looks far more capricious, mystical and native than its Other. Far from seeing eye to eye, China’s elevation as a going concern across U.S. elites has deepened the dialectic dividing between East and West, causing everyone to double down: Chinese involution, U.S. revanchism, European declinism. The petrocene and the electrosphere. Whatever multipolarity comes to settle, it will result from the forced choices and strange openings carved by these trajectories.
Then there is the tactical horseshoe where Trumpian policy follows the spirit of Luigi Mangione: shoot first. You can just do things, it turns out. International law is no match for a vibes-based impunity. The Gaza genocide ended the enlightened self-conception of the West, like an infant passing through some annihilative mirror stage, only to discover it was never human after all. From here, there is no floor.
Optimism is gone but futures are back, not as an ideology but a force. Perhaps that’s why the world 2025 left us feels more than ever like a casino. A Russian conscript stakes out a village in the Eastern Donbas, but not before staking half his wages on a prediction market tracking border incursions. Chinese “pig butchers” in the Cambodian Golden Triangle enslave unsuspecting IT workers to LARP as horny paramours for the world’s lonely middle class (not least fellow Chinese nationals). As the global arbitrage between language spheres, platform economies, energy infrastructures and slopstreams intensifies, we find a kind of negative cosmotechnics, in which market makers extract differential intensities between limitless localities into unheard-of sources of hemispheric motion. Already, the internet is more Chinese than it has ever been.
Between all the force and the friction, there is the body. The technocultures of the last decade played out on a mostly symbolic battleground, with mediated life effectively subsumed into the neural equivalent of high-frequency trading. Another taste that 2025 left behind was the chemotactic movement of collective anxiety and desire into the physical human substrate. On one end, immortality and the optimised self, but the billionaire class are mostly child-emperors. On the longer tail, the global volatility of human life amidst demographic pressures in the rich world has signalled an escalating demand for bodies—in whole, part, or population—as potentials to be hedged, whether at the scale of hormones, homeopathy, peptides, eugenics, surgery or surrogacy. Between exocapitalism and xenofeminism, nature finds a way.
nice post, gary. ‘exotic boomerang’ is a great line.