Futurama vs. Anthropolis
- Pete Ward
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
A Choice for the Future Denied by the Past
Imagine this. It is 1939. You stand in the midst of the New York World’s Fair, a monumental celebration of progress, industry, and the American promise. The air buzzes with certainty—certainty that technology will save us, that expansion is inevitable, that competition is the engine of civilization. You join a long line curling around a massive pavilion: Futurama, designed by Norman Bel Geddes and funded by General Motors.
Inside, you rise above a miniature continent re-engineered for cars and consumption. Highways slice across prairies. Suburbs swell around cities. Vehicles glide endlessly in disciplined lanes. The narrator assures you this is the “World of Tomorrow.”
What you are really witnessing is the physical manifestation of a worldview that has governed Western civilization for centuries:
Competition over collaboration
Manifest destiny over coexistence
Man’s dominion over nature rather than partnership with it
Colonial expansion over reciprocal relation
Growth over balance
Futurama distilled these principles into asphalt and steel. It presented a future in which humans conquer geography, reorganize ecosystems, and subordinate the planet to the desires of industry. It is the ideological prelude to what scientists now call The Great Acceleration—the post–World War II explosion of fossil fuel use, extraction, production, pollution, and global inequality.
The pavilion is not merely a vision of mobility; it is the sales pitch for an entire cosmology. A belief that the purpose of civilization is to out-compete, out-grow, out-produce—forever.
Now imagine wandering away from the crowds, away from the spectacle, to a quieter corner of the fair. There, a modest exhibit stands with a simple sign:
ANTHROPOLIS
A VILLAGE FOR THE FUTURE
Inside is a different kind of model—a future shaped not by dominion but by relationship.
Not by conquest but by community.
Not by acceleration but by equilibrium.
You see ecological villages scaled to human cognitive and social limits, food produced collaboratively in living greenhouses, biomimetic structures that follow the logic of forests and reefs, not factories and pipelines. Every element reflects the truth that humans evolved not as hyper-competitive consumers, but as collaborative, reciprocal beings embedded in ecosystems.
Futurama’s Legacy:
The World Built by Competition, Dominion, and Extraction
History—driven by corporate power, colonial ideology, and the machinery of capitalism—chose the GM pavilion. And the consequences have been immense:
1. The Great Acceleration
Fossil fuel use, material extraction, population, pollution, industrial output—all skyrocketed. Growth became the measure of success, even when life degraded in the process.
2. Colonial Extraction Deepened
The Global South became the perpetual sacrifice zone for the Global North—its minerals, forests, and labor feeding the machinery of “progress.” The ideology of manifest destiny became global: the Earth exists to be taken.
3. Outsourcing and the Loss of Purpose
As capitalism matured, competition among corporations drove manufacturing overseas. Entire industries vanished, hollowing out communities. Millions of working-class men lost meaningful, hands-on roles—replaced by gig work, precarious labor, and alienation. A system built on competition ultimately undermined the very people it depended on.
4. Billionaire Accumulation
As wealth follows power and power follows competition, capitalism once again concentrated resources upward. The billionaire class became planetary decision-makers—an unelected aristocracy of accumulation.
5. Ecological Collapse
Man’s “dominion over nature” manifested as habitat loss, mass extinction, soil depletion, and the destabilization of climate systems. What was framed as divine right or historical destiny became a blueprint for planetary unravelling.
6. Social Fragmentation
Suburbs and highways—born from the Futurama vision—fractured communities, undermined collaboration, and replaced civic life with private consumption. Competition became not just an economic ideology but a cultural one: neighbor vs. neighbor, nation vs. nation, corporation vs. community.
This is the world that competition built, the world dominion justified, and the world colonial extraction fueled.
The World Anthropolis Offers:
Collaboration, Reciprocity, Ecological Intelligence
Had we chosen the quieter pavilion—had we valued collaboration over competition, relationship over dominion—we might live in a far different world today:
Human-scale villages rooted in trust, empathy, and shared governance.
Localized production that preserves meaningful work, dignity, and contribution for all people.
Circular economies guided by the logic of ecosystems, not the logic of conquest.
Reciprocity with the Global South, replacing extraction with partnership.
Biomimetic design that heals rather than depletes, regenerates rather than accelerates.
A social fabric strengthened by collaboration, the trait that allowed humans to thrive long before capitalism taught us to compete.
This is not a utopia—it is a return to our evolutionary roots, guided by modern ecological intelligence.
Anthropolis Returns Us to the Moment of Choice
This introduction is not about criticizing the past; it is about understanding the ideology behind it. The fairgoers of 1939 were shown a future built on competition, dominion, and growth—and they were told it was inevitable.
We now know it was not.
Anthropolis invites us to revisit that pivotal moment—not with nostalgia, but with awareness. To understand that the fair did not show us the “World of Tomorrow,” but the world of capital, the world of extraction, the world of dominion. And to understand that another world—one rooted in collaboration, stewardship, and ecological intelligence—was always possible.
It still is.
Anthropolis asks us to choose, at last, the world we did not build in 1939:
a world where we collaborate rather than compete,
coexist rather than dominate,
and live as participants in nature rather than its conquerors.
