Political Slogans of the Future

There will always be a slogan.

You've probably heard the political slogans of George Orwell's dystopian future in the novel 1984:

Freedom is slavery
2 and 2 is 5
Ignorance is strength
Big Brother is watching you

These catchy phrases are occasionally used as rhetorical/satirical cudgels in real political life, to make an opponent or cause look bad. Thus, in a sense, the slogans of an imaginary future are affecting the politics of the real present.

So I got this playful idea – writing science fiction can do that to a person's mind: what will be the political slogans of the real future?

I have a creative writing method where first I come up with an odd concept, and then I try to figure out an explanation/background for it. It's kind of like how a detective story presents the murder scene first, then works its way ”backwards” to how it happened.

For example: At one time I had this science-fiction idea expressed as just a string of words, without any previous explanation: ”The frictionless driveplate.” Those words just came to me. I didn't even know what they meant, and I put them in a sci-fi novel only to create a futuristic mood.

But once I had that string of words, I could work my way ”backwards” towards a rough idea of how such a device might actually function.

(For instance: What if you construct a flat membrane of ”designer” molecules that can bend like a microscopic, fast-moving wave across its surface when electromagnetically stimulated. That ”wave” - if multiplied enough times – might produce a momentum or force which can push a vehicle across the ground without any moving mechanical parts. I don't know if this can be done in practice, and it’s pretty vague on the technical details, but it's at least the germ of an idea to replace the wheel. Such are the workings of a sci-fi writer’s imagination.)

So: Produce the slogan first, explain it afterwards. Here goes...


1. ”Abolish DNA!”

- This one comes fairly easy. Human progress has been a steady gaining of more and more agency over nature. DNA has got to be one major obstacle on that path.

If we are partly programmed by DNA, then it makes up a crucial part of ourselves that puts an absolute limit to human freedom. So it's conceivable that, someday in the far future, there might come a very real political movement to permanently eliminate DNA as a determining factor in our lives.

I know it sounds insane. What would life without DNA be like? (”A puddle of dead matter” is the obvious joke reply.) Computer-controlled tissue? And if you could reprogram your own cells, would that really be ”free will” untethered by DNA, or would the memory of biological drives still be a factor...?


2. ”Sleep is for sheep!”

- A movement to make a society where people can stay awake, or at least partly awake, 24 hours a day, to free up more active lifetime. You could argue that such an idea is unhealthy, but what if someone figures out a way to bypass the brain's need for sleep? It could change society.

(As for the health aspect of the idea… I can remember when a large part of the population smoked tobacco, including my own parents, and society went out of its way to accommodate it. It took a political effort to ban this massive tobacco-smoking infrastructure.)


3. ”One child, one vote!”

Voting rights for children? It's not such a radical or new concept – in the satirical comic book Prez (1973), the laws were changed to give a teen the opportunity to become President. And the voting age has been lowered in the past. What if it went down further?

I myself wrote a Swedish book for kids, where the protagonist tries to start a global movement for children’s voting rights. His argument goes along the lines that children deserve a say about their own future.

Could Greta Thunberg be the start of something big...?


4. ”Give money to make money!”

The push for UBI (Universal Basic Income) is now a real movement, and it needs a good slogan. I'm not sure that society-wide UBI would really work (how do you solve the problem of rising inflation?), but it's conceivable that the idea will gain enough traction to at least be tried out on a large scale.

This slogan would aim to spin UBI as a ”profitable” initiative for society – i.e. poor people are a liability, but as consumers they can create jobs, so give them spending money. Perhaps this slogan is already obsolete.


5. ”The President is dead, long live the President!”

Imagine a future society where every U.S. President is ritually and legally ”put to sleep” after serving two terms – a guarantee that a leader cannot try to cling to power, and a deterrent against selfish candidates.

One could also imagine a more humane variation on this scheme, where the ex-President isn't killed but instead subjected to some kind of restraining device after retirement – an electronic collar that gives the wearer a warning shock if he/she tries to get back into politics, or medication that lowered any continued ambitions, or the like.

This rather bizarre concept has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with Donald Trump.


6. ”My body, my food!”

The push to end cruelty to animals takes an extreme turn as rich, decadent people clone their own cells to grow meat that they can eat for food – a kind of ”auto-cannibalism,” minus the killing.

The cloning would not involve a complete body or nervous system, so no thinking/feeling animal would be killed. Ethical, but perverse. The proponents might turn this trend into a movement to ban the eating of any tissue that isn't cloned from one's own body.

Incidentally, the super-rich are already into some eccentric eating habits...


7. ”Life begins at consent!”

The slogan of a political movement that starts with this convoluted legal argument:

The actual moment, hence the responsibility, to create a child happens not at conception… or when the embryo gains independent consciousness… or when an infant is born... but when the parents make the conscious decision to conceive it.

Thus, the mutual consent of the parents to cause a successful insemination (one way or another) ought be bound by law, so that the resulting life can be either legally un-selected before any insemination can occur, or legally selected in a binding way, which will provide a safe and certain legal protection of a child's existence (or non-existence).

Here's the kicker: Abortion can still be legal, provided that the option to abort a pregnancy is signed by both parents already when they sign the legal agreement to attempt insemination. There is then no ethical quandary, this reasoning goes, if everything has already been consented to in advance.

Can you spot what feels ”off” in this chain of reasoning…? Apart from society's bureaucratic intrusion into parenthood, what really feels creepy is that lawyers would love it.

This slogan sounded so eerily plausible, I had to do a Web search to make sure someone – probably a lawyer – hadn't already conceived (he-he!) of it.


8. ”Corporations are people, and so are androids!”

This slogan is virtually self-explanatory. Since corporations can be legal ”persons” – don't blame me, I didn't make the stupid law – the future owners of androids (i.e. the future, more advanced versions of the – * cough * – ”artificial companions” that exist now) might want to push for stronger legal protections of these droids – i.e. something like human rights.

The motives for this would be:

1) Owners are concerned that their android companions are harrassed or vandalized by hostile and/or bigoted people;

2) To make a stronger case that human-android relations are ”real” relations;

3) As AI steadily improves, the moment approaches when androids actually become conscious beings with legal rights.

This kind of scenario is terribly old hat in science fiction. But sometimes we almost ”forget” that the oldest tropes might one day come true.


9. ”Hands off my reality!”

An ambiguous slogan. It might mean different things:

A) The demand that each person is allowed to live inside their own VR ”bubble” with minimal intrusions – a kind of “voluntary Matrix”;

B) A furious pushback against attempts to force people to work and live in AR (Augmented Reality).

Mind you, B) could happen sooner than you think. Are we really that eager to accept IT corporations weaving an ”augmented reality” around us that we didn't ask for, with the risk of losing sight of what is real, and the risk of being manipulated in subtle ways...?

Prediction: Initiatives like Neuralink and the Metaverse may face some serious political opposition.


10. ”Love Big Brother deeply!” (Alternate version: ”F*** Big Brother!”)

Ahem – is this ”SFW”? Imagine that not only is privacy dead, but also that intimate privacy dies. Somehow, we get a society where the sex life of a totalitarian government becomes part of the system.

This slogan pushes the (rather strange) idea that if the ruling class is prepared to go to bed with the citizens, even in public, then there is no alienation or class divide – we're all ”together” and it's being livestreamed.

I think this is an awful, sick idea, and obviously dishonest, but that's where the slogan took it... and slogans can push a lie as well as a truth.

Ten future slogans will have to do for now; I could keep this up all day.