Elon Musk is often described as the man inventing tomorrow. In reality, it would be more accurate to say that he decides which of yesterday’s tomorrows finally gets built. His originality lies less in imagining new futures than in turning twentieth-century science fiction imaginaries into technological reality.

Over the past decade, a few thousand Westerners have relocated to Russia, convinced it has preserved what their own countries have abandoned: traditional families, public Christianity, clear gender roles, and a state willing to defend them. In 2024, the Kremlin turned that aspiration into policy with a visa aimed explicitly at foreigners who reject the “neoliberal” trajectory of their own societies.

The grammar of global politics has undergone a structural shift. The language of anticolonialism, that is the right of peoples to determine their own futures, is increasingly being wielded by political forces with very little in common with the anticolonial struggles of yesteryear. What is emerging, across these different contexts, is a coherent political formation that deserves its own name: illiberal anticolonialism.

The Chinese Communist Party increasingly presents ecological civilization and AI-driven governance not as separate policy domains but as parts of a single civilizational project: a political imaginary in which environmental sustainability and technological control are fused into a coherent vision of modernity. This imaginary extends further, incorporating an emerging robotized society framed as the long-delayed fulfillment of a socialist promise.It All Begins Here

For many thinkers on the American postliberal right, transhumanism represents the philosophical endpoint of liberalism: a world where human beings engineer themselves without limits. Yet if conservatives reject this future, they still face an unresolved problem—what kind of technological future should they imagine instead, and could the answer come from an unexpected place: Russian cosmism?

The CCP’s core assertion is that the gap between ecological aspiration and reality is, at bottom, an information problem. If the state can know the state of the environment in real time, the carbon level, and the cadre’s compliance with ecological norms through data collection and treatment, then the friction between intention and reality that democratic politics endlessly generates would simply resolve.