The Future That Never Arrived is a powerful reflection by the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber on why the future we were promised never came to pass. Growing up in the 1960s, visions of flying cars, Mars colonies, immortality drugs, and robot helpers felt inevitable. Just as earlier generations had witnessed extraordinary breakthroughs—airplanes, radio, rockets, television—children of the space age were told that even more astonishing innovations were just around the corner. Yet decades later, we find ourselves asking: what happened?

Graeber argues that the second half of the 20th century marked a profound slowdown in technological progress. Instead of anti-gravity machines or radical breakthroughs in science, we got incremental advances in information technology, pharmaceuticals for social control, and military drones. The grand promises of the future gave way to a narrow focus on technologies that reinforced existing power structures rather than expanding human freedom and imagination.

At the heart of this stagnation, Graeber suggests, was a “ruling class freakout.” Faced with the social upheavals of the 1960s and the looming prospect of automation freeing workers from traditional jobs, elites redirected resources away from bold, world-changing innovation. Investment shifted toward technologies that managed populations, preserved hierarchies, and maximized profit—effectively stifling the possibility of radical breakthroughs.

This video challenges us to confront the question: what kind of system deliberately prevents progress? If true innovation arises when creative people are given freedom and support, why do we live under one that forces them to constantly compete and justify their ideas before they even begin? The Future That Never Arrived invites viewers to imagine not just the futures we were denied, but also the possibility of building a society where human creativity is no longer constrained by the interests of the powerful.

What happened to the second half of the 20th century? 

If you’re growing up in say 1900, and you’re reading H.G. Wells, and you’re imagining what the world would be like 50 years later, well you basically got it right. There were flying machines and submarines and rockets and talking boxes and tv, radio, so forth and so on. You didn’t get the time machine, but a lot of the basic gamut of inventions they expected to happen did in fact happen. 

Now here’s me growing up in the sixties, sort of imagining what the world is gonna be like, and we all kind of knew what was gonna happen too. There was a similar list of stuff. There were going to be anti-gravity sleds and teleportation devices and Mars bases and robot androids that could do chores for you and immortality drugs and it’s a basic standard list. And I don’t think any of us expected we’d get all of that stuff within our own lives, but I don’t think it occurred to any of us that we wouldn’t get any of them. 

And the thing that fascinated me is that I know that everybody who grew up then thought this stuff was gonna happen. If you were growing up at that time, it wasn’t just fantasy, it was authoritative voices. You go to the planetarium, you read National Geographic, watch those TV science shows, all your elders were supposed to know about this stuff assuring you this is what was gonna happen. That we actually believed that these things were going to happen has been wiped away as an embarrassment in our memory. 

So, okay. The question for me became why? There’s a kind of a ruling class freakout. It was a reaction to the unrest of the sixties. It was saying all this unrest – imagine what it’s gonna be like when the entire working class is replaced by robots. We are all gonna turn into hippies and dropouts, and it’s gonna be chaos.

There’s this idea that technological change is happening too quickly. All this space age stuff is endangering the social order. And around that time, there was indeed a shift in the direction of technological investment away from all that sort of space age stuff towards investment essentially in information technology, in medical technology, and military technology. And that’s where all the money’s been ever since. 

The first thought you have is alright, if they’ve been pouring money into that stuff, we still don’t have a cure for cancer, still don’t have the immortality drugs. I mean, we got Ritalin and Prozac and all this stuff that’s useful for social control, but the really good stuff we never got even there. And even military technology. Where’s Klaatu? You know, where’s the giant killer robot shooting death rays? We know they’ve been working on that, but even that stuff, they really haven’t got, you know, they got these model airplanes that can blow people up. Whoopty do.

If you want to maximize possibility, unexpected breakthroughs, it’s pretty obvious what the best policy is. You get a bunch of creative people, you give ’em the resources they need for a certain amount of time, but basically you leave them alone and most of them are gonna end up not coming up with anything at all, but a few of them will probably come up with something that’ll even surprise themselves. 

If you wanna minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, take those same people and then tell them they’re not gonna get any resources at all unless they spend the majority of their time competing with one another to prove to you they already know what they’re gonna create. Well, that’s the system we have and it’s incredibly effective in stifling any possibility of innovation.

I told a magazine once that I’ve been an anarchist since I was 16, so I guess that must be true, but I only really became active in any meaningful way after the beginning 2000, when I threw myself into the Alter-Globalization movement and it might be said that all my work since has been exploring the relation between anthropology as an intellectual pursuit, and practical attempts to create a free society, free, at least, of capitalism, patriarchy, and coercive state bureaucracies. As a result I sometimes feel I’ve had to pursue two full-time careers of research and writing, one peer-reviewed, the other not, since in my activist-oriented work I am interested in trying to ask the sort of question those actively engaged in trying to change the world find useful or important, rather than those of funders and those influenced by same. Still, the two strains intertwine and influence one another in endless, and, I hope, creative and mutually reinforcing ways.

For more about the speaker, visit his website.