Paleofuture

Jan 23, 2025 | paleofuture.com | Matt Novak

What will the future look like in the year 2025? It was a question about the distant future for those of us who were alive to remember the 20th century. But now that we’re a few weeks into that year, we know exactly what it looks like. And it’s a bit depressing, I’m not going to lie. I’ve long been obsessed with the predictions that kids made for the future. Here at Paleofuture we’ve examined predictions from the kids of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and even the decade of the 1900s.

Jan 23, 2025 | paleofuture.com | Matt Novak

Back in 2014, I gave a talk at UCLA about the future of money that’s funny to think about now. Well, technically it was about the paleo-future of money. But the topic was particularly relevant in the early 2010s, given the fact that bitcoin was starting to enter the public consciousness after being invented in late 2008 and released into the world the next year.

Jan 10, 2025 | paleofuture.com | Matt Novak

The future can be presented in a lot of ways. Sometimes we imagine it in the darkest of terms, a dystopian hellscape that shocks our sense of safety, making us fearful about what’s to come. Other times we imagine the future as utopian—joyful and wondrous with all of the things we could ever want at our fingertips any hour of the day. But every once in a while our predictions take a weird turn into the absurd. And there was a musical instrument from the 1910s that spoke to this absurdity quite well.

Jan 5, 2025 | paleofuture.com | Matt Novak

There are so many things I take for granted here on the verge of 2025. When I turn on the faucet, water comes out. When I flip the light switch, there’s illumination. And when I press one of countless buttons during the day, the thing that corresponds to that button generally happens. But there are times when I’m snapped out of this mindset. Oddly, this doesn’t happen when something fails to work.

Jan 5, 2025 | paleofuture.com | Matt Novak

Elon Musk spent at least $250 million to help re-elect Donald Trump as president this year, making him one of the most powerful oligarchs the U.S. has ever seen. Trump is a fascist and Musk unabashedly supports his fascist agenda. Musk even tweeted in support of Germany’s AfD political party this past week, which has ties to neo-Nazis. But there was a time in the very recent past when people tried to pretend like Musk’s politics were hard to pin down.