A dark foreshadowing

We know, whether we want to or not, that lots of bad things are happening. We know this because we can see them, either in our own lives or through screens that inform us, in great and gruesome detail, of the bad things that are currently happening, all over the world.

You’d think that this was enough. That the knowledge of all the bad things, all of the time, easily filled our daily quota of existential dread.

Unfortunately not. Because we also have to endure the increasingly popular genre of foreshadowing. 

The most obvious recent example is Donald Trump’s calm and presidential proclamation that “a whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again." The infamous Truth Social post about Iran thankfully didn’t come to pass, but is a prime example of news, economies, and societies being moved by the possibility of what comes next.

The journey of Artemis II has demonstrated the best of humanity. But former NASA engineer and astronaut Charlie Camarda this week foreshadowed the terrifying possibility that the capsule’s heat shield could fail on reentry - a reentry that’s never been attempted before. 

Or take Anthropic, who this week announced a new AI model by banning the public from using it for fear of widespread hacking. Claude Mythos, it turns out, can identify fundamental flaws in software that underpins basically everything we rely on today. 

Foreshadowing has become a key tool, not of expectation management, but of defining narratives ahead of events. Words now shape actions, rather than actions shaping the words used to describe them. And that, to use some foreshadowing of our own, probably won’t turn out well.