CADS, villains and mountebanks at the helm of the world’s most powerful countries. Climate scientists trying not to scream at us. Scotland still motionless under a giant, Starmer-shaped teddy bear.
Jings, do we need some optimistic prospects for 2025.
So luxuriate, if you can, in the prospectus for Japan’s World Expo, stretching from April to October. “Designing Future Society For Our Lives” is its insanely optimistic headline. They’ve built a ring that’s one of the world’s biggest ever wooden structures, on an artificial “Dream Island” in Osaka lake.
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Their happy, amorphous mascot has five eyes. Go for it, Japan (and the 161 nations/regions taking part)!
Though I wonder if the 80th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 2025 will be reflected on, in any of their “designs on a future society”.
And even though it can seem increasingly tense and contestive out there, global cooperation still continues. You may be pleased to hear that 2025 will finalise (Trump willing) a WHO-led global treaty on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.
Copyright sharing on vaccines is still a stumbling block. But as the next plague is inevitable, be thankful for these moves, at least.
Despite the Orange One cutting a deal with fossil-fuel producers during the last election, the momentum towards renewables will hardly be dented in 2025. Towards the end of the year, even Saudi Arabia – while pumping out 15 million barrels of oil daily – will launch the world’s largest single-site solar array, contributing to their goal of 40 gigawatts of sun-sourced electricity by 2030.
The great tilting of development and progress eastwards and southwards looks like steadily accelerating in 2025.
Our media channels may be currently clogged up with Muskian ambitions around electric cars and satellite networks.
The Chinese state, however, just keeps building alternatives. Chinese EVs (electric vehicles), while doubtless suffering tariffs in 2025, sparkle and startle. Some cars have modes that enable floating through floods, or can become a games console. Meanwhile, China’s “Thousand Sails” initiative will have 648 internet satellites in low orbit by the end of 2025, with 14,000 intended for 2030.
Elon Musk’s (above) Starlink is not the only digital infrastructure for the planet. Digitality, computation and automation will continue to cascade across the earth next year, equally empowering and disempowering as it goes. The extremes it generates continue to bedazzle (and exhaust) us.
For example, drones may be the terrifying, miasmic future of war zones all over the world. But in March 2025, they’ll also be assisting Everest climbers by carrying up their supplies (and taking down their rubbish).
Next year, Uber will be deploying “robotaxis”, as long promised, in a deal with General Motors. But the same pattern-recognising smarts will enable Russia’s “pay-by-face” system in the Moscow subway, where Vladimir Putin’s nightmare of a totally surveilled society begins to be realised.
Is this science fiction become everyday reality? It’s perhaps all too appropriate that 2025 sees two great returns of speculative media. First is Grand Theft Auto (GTA), its sixth version (always partly developed in Edinburgh) out in the autumn.
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Last year’s trailer showed the city of Los Santos in all its sumptuously grimy detail. It still looks like it’s about serving gamers’ appetites for criminality, bad driving and endlessly available violence. If you want to rehearse a dystopian future, GTA is there to help.
As will the seventh series of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror, also out in the autumn. The six episodes he describes this way: “Some of them are deeply unpleasant, some are quite funny, and some are emotional.”
The only detail we know (other than that Peter Capaldi is on the cast list) is that there’s a sequel to an episode in the last series. The one where an employee tortures his workmates, as they play in a Star Trek-like parallel metaverse. Our weapons of mass distraction aren’t getting any less potent…
Though perhaps our halls of intimate edification, in reaction to all this simulation media, are about to revive themselves. Glaswegian aesthetes will cheer the fact that the Citizens’ Theatre, after seven years of reconstruction, will be fully re-opening in 2025.
Their opening production, Small Acts Of Love, with music by Ricky Ross (above), maps the relationships between the victims’ families and the residents of Lockerbie after the Pan Am crash there in 1988. Could there be a more humanist response to all this post-human artifice?
Indeed, Scottish theatre seems to be leading the charge for full humanity in 2025. March sees the Traverse Theatre, in Edinburgh, adapt James Robertson’s The Testament Of Gideon Mack for the stage: small-town Scotland grapples with a minister who confesses he has supped with the devil. In the same city, The Lyceum in May is putting on Katori Hall’s The Mountaintop. Martin Luther King encounters a room maid with a life force, in the hours before his assassination in Memphis.
Moving from the stage to the screen (whether domestic or theatrical), there is a familiar splatter-gun of topics and characters. Again, if you want dystopia amidst broken relationships, event TV will serve you in spades.
There’s a final series of The Handmaid’s Tale, painfully relevant as the Trump regime tightens its controls over women’s bodies. Or perhaps you’d like series two of The Last Of Us, staging a zombie apocalypse by fungal infection?
Reality TV hardly provides much uplift, as The Traitors returns in January 2025, allowing us to indulge the worst of our social motivations (with Scotland’s Alan Cumming as the elegant host of the American version).
Although this is also the year when the British state’s heavy hand interferes with TV: in October, they’re banning junk food ads till after the 9pm watershed, in a bid to tackle childhood obesity.
Movies in 2025 are the usual cycle – tentpole blockbusters, quirky indies and attempts to bridge the two. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein – partly shot in Edinburgh and Aberdeen – is right on that bridge. Del Toro aims it to be a “faithful Miltonian tragedy version”. (Frankensteinian warnings are well-taken at the moment. See the coming conjunction of artificial intelligence and CRISPR (or gene editing), enabling worrisome customisations of our bodies).
If you want big galumphing film drama, then there’s everything from a new Superman movie, the next in James Cameron’s Avatar franchise, Fire And Ash. And – perhaps with a more convincing monster – a Michael Jackson biopic in April.
And if you want things at a microscopic scale, keep an eye out for firebrand Scottish director Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love. It’s a horror-comedy about a mother suffering post-partum depression, with A-list stars Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson.
Book publishers are keeping their titles close to their chest at the time of writing, though it’s worth noting a few obvious highlights. March sees one of Nicola Sturgeon’s favourite authors, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, bring out her first novel for several years, titled Dream Count.
Non-fiction also shows early promise. They’re starting to write about the 2000s now as if it were a nostalgic age away, with Colette Shade’s social history Y2K. And personally, I’ll be eagerly reaching for Micheal Sandel’s and Thomas Piketty’s forthcoming dialogue on Equality: What It Means And Why It Matters.
All of the foregoing, I humbly suggest, is a better use of your attention than listening to the deafening public drumbeat towards war. Although it’s possible that all of us, peaceniks and warriors alike, could be subject to the ultimate temperamental flare-up – one we simply can’t avoid.
Astrophysicists are estimating that the likelihood of a “Carrington event” – a giant eruption in the surface of the sun – is about one in 10 for the 2020s. The geomagnetic radiation this generates would bust up power grids, fry out satellites, and disrupt our intricate supply chains.
And perhaps, also, provide a Covid-like reset? A pause on our endless interactions, polarisations and hot takes? Careful what you wish for, sunshine.
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