Meduza is 12! When we were just starting out in 2014, the world was a very different place — no COVID, no President Trump, no mass exodus of Russians. Russia’s war against Ukraine had already begun, though, and of course there was Putin (who had been in power long before that). What will the world and Russia be like in 12 years? And what would you like them to be like? We put these questions to 12 people we trust.
Galina Timchenko, Meduza co-founder and publisher
The honest answer to this question sounds pretty harsh, but what can you do: “I don’t know.” No, it’s worse than that: “Nobody knows.”
There are too many variables, too many forks in the road. We’re still managing a precarious balancing act, but the risk of tumbling into catastrophe is greater than ever. Some things are obvious, like the AI “big bang”; others are less so, like the “rightward turn” in many countries.
Making predictions is a thankless business. My only hope is that in 12 years, no one will remember them.
As for what I’d like the world to be like in 12 years, John Lennon put it best in his famous song “Imagine.”
Boris Grebenshchikov, musician
Fortunately, I cannot see the future at all, and I wouldn’t want to, because it depends on how we act now. We can only act authentically by listening to our hearts. Knowing the future would keep us from acting sincerely, as our hearts tell us to.
Lyubov Sobol, politician
I see Russia as a wonderful country. Without wars. Without restrictions. With leaders elected by its own citizens, working to make people’s lives better: so they can live happily, grow, work and earn a living, raise children, and think about the future, rather than struggle to survive in a toxic present. With advanced technology, high-quality healthcare and education, and a commitment to protecting the environment and ensuring everyone’s well-being.
A country that builds partnerships with its neighbors and with countries willing to work with us. Without coercion, blackmail, or threats, and to everyone’s benefit. Russia is neither an appendage of the West nor a colony of China. We can learn from other countries’ mistakes and successes while finding our own way. Right now, we’re falling behind in everything, from the AI race to human rights, but why can’t we succeed at both? Russia can be a wonderful country. That’s worth fighting for.
Maria Kolomychenko, journalist at The Bell who researches technology and internet restrictions
It’s hard for me to predict the future more than a decade ahead, but I’ll try. I’ll focus on a subject I’ve covered for years: how governments regulate the internet. I’ll be only too happy if this prediction doesn’t come true =)
Given current trends, I expect the line between how democracies and autocracies regulate the internet to blur by 2038. Experiments with “digital sovereignty,” partial restrictions on minors’ internet access, and surveillance through lawful interception (in other words, the same thing as Russia’s SORM surveillance system) — all of this is already happening in European and other democratic countries. The technologies used to exert control and the arguments for using them increasingly resemble those employed by authoritarian states such as Russia.
As a result, children growing up now and those born in the next few years will probably never know an anonymous, truly free internet — in Russia, and possibly in Europe and the U.S. as well. They’ll learn from books that people once used the internet without having to show ID every time they logged in, and without fearing that every action and every like could be traced back to them.
Artificial intelligence will bring many benefits, but also new problems — and we’re already seeing the first signs. Government agencies responsible for censorship and repression are already trying to incorporate AI into their work. Over the next decade, Russia will probably use it increasingly for mass surveillance of internet users, primarily to automate the analysis of the vast amounts of data collected by SORM and other government systems.
The question is whether Europe will use these technologies the same way Russia does, or whether it will manage to draw a line between security and total surveillance. I don’t have an answer.
Georgy Trishkin, rocket launch analyst and author of the Telegram channel Tekhassky Vestnik (The Texas Herald)
Predicting the future is a thankless task, but let’s assume that in 12 years, high-speed satellite internet will be commonplace and having no internet on a plane will be a thing of the past. Streams of tens of thousands of satellites will be visible in the night sky, and reusable rocket launches will happen daily, if not hourly. Several private and national space stations will replace the International Space Station, but the militarization of space will recall the frenzy of the 1980s.
By then, astronauts from the United States, China and Europe will have landed on the Moon, perhaps joined by Russians or Japanese astronauts taking part in other countries’ missions. And Mars? It will still be inhabited by robots, but scientists on Earth will already be studying samples of its soil. The world will see both the metallic core of a protoplanet and the methane glaciers of Titan, and witness Apophis’s close approach. Both Voyager probes will, sadly, fall silent after a half-century mission. Sightings of passing interstellar objects will become more common, and they’ll continue to fuel conspiracy theories. We’re unlikely to find traces of other life or discover the nature of our own, but as before, we’ll be one step closer. What matters, though, is that the next 12 years, like the last 12, pass without any loss of human life in orbit.
Anton Dolin, film critic
Probably David Lynch’s famous quote: “I’m wearing dark glasses today because I’m seeing the future, and it’s looking very bright.”
Asya Zolnikova, architecture journalist and art historian
According to the U.N., two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by the middle of the 21st century. Cities will be even bigger and more crowded, and competition for housing, education, and healthcare will intensify. Everyone has to decide for themselves what to do about that, but it’s certainly something to prepare for.
Now for the second part of the question — what I’d like Russia to be like.
I’ve lived in Moscow all my life and saw the city change for the better in the 2010s. But at the same time, restrictions and repression kept growing. I vividly remember the day in 2012 when members of Pussy Riot were sentenced — I was already working as a news reporter then. The two-year sentence completely threw the newsroom. It was a shock. After work, I went to the Oktyabrskaya subway station, near where I was living at the time, and saw that part of Muzeon Park had reopened after renovations, with landscaping and pavilions unlike anything we’d seen before. I don’t remember whether the ship Bryusov was there yet, but it certainly was a couple of years later, when things in Russia had gotten even worse. I walked along, thinking about that two-year sentence, unable to understand how all of this could exist side by side: the sentence was handed down at Moscow’s Khamovniki District Court, just a couple of kilometers from the park.
I’ve lost some of my idealism since then, but I’d really like beautiful parks and architecture to stop being a consolation or a smokescreen.
Maria Moskaleva, a student who left Russia after being persecuted over an antiwar drawing
Many readers may be hoping to find pure, childlike optimism here — touching visions of a happy future for Russia and a world that still has a chance at a decent, rational future.
But I had to take off my rose-colored glasses long ago. I had to face reality — its cruelty and uncomfortable truths, and the candor that people so rarely show.
It seems to me that Russia has no hope left. There are too few people who care about life itself — and I want to remind you how much that word means. And even that small percentage of people can’t truly change, or even shake, what has taken hold in the country. What hope there is lies with young people capable of clear thinking.
A fascist regime has seized control of Russia. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of shattered lives. Poverty. Wars. Illegally seized territories. But behind all of this, there is one cause that seems to me the most important. How people think.
Not everyone becomes truly human simply by being born. What makes us human is the path we take through life. A path toward the kind of thoughtful reasoning society badly needs. But while this problem has deep historical roots in Russia, things don’t look much better in the rest of the world. Just look around, read the international press, and see what’s happening.
It’s hard for me to imagine how many years, decades, or even centuries will have to pass before Russia can be called a free and democratic country, before tens of thousands of people finally wake up and rise up against the bloodstained regime. That takes a leader.
People no longer understand words whose meanings should be impossible to forget.
Love. Happiness. Goodness.
Without understanding what these words mean, people continue to support bloodshed, their own humiliation, and the destruction of their loved ones’ lives.
The world is changing in complicated ways, but certainly not for the better. Money dictates everything. Too many people in power don’t care about human lives, and that trend can only grow stronger.
I won’t make predictions or guess at the future. But there will never be heaven on earth. There will never be a time of perfect harmony, complete tranquility, happiness and well-being. No. That world doesn’t exist and never will.
And yet the most frightening thing is something else: we’re driving ourselves deeper and deeper into the abyss. Every day. With our actions, words, and thoughts.
We have only ourselves to blame for what happens around us and for the suffering we endure.
And so there’s no point anymore in shouting, “Come to your senses!”
It’s too late.
Though I’d like to believe it isn’t.
Angelina Davydova, environmental journalist
I want to see a more peaceful, calmer world with greater solidarity, where people and governments in different countries work to solve global problems, including climate change, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, inequality, and treatment for rare diseases.
A world where humanity works across borders on comprehensive solutions to environmental and social problems, while trying to build a new system of economic and social governance that doesn’t deplete resources, pollute the environment, or deepen inequality. A world where people have the resources, energy, opportunities and time to pursue these goals without facing threats to their lives, freedom, or health.
But we probably won’t see such dramatic changes for the better in 12 years. For now, many parts of the world seem to be heading toward destruction instead: International relations and agreements, international organizations, and joint efforts to solve problems are breaking down. Ongoing wars and conflicts, new races for resources, the rise of authoritarianism and other undemocratic forms of government amid political crises in traditional democracies, growing social inequality and divisions within societies, and the lack of real action on global environmental problems are all pushing many parts of the world further toward the destruction of existing political, social, civic, and international structures.
I very much hope that this period of upheaval and destruction, as the world we know disappears, will eventually hit rock bottom, after which countries and regions will try to begin a new era of renewal, joint action, and cooperation. I’d like to see that new world. For now, we can only guess what it might look like.
Dmitry Kuznets, Meduza’s military analyst
The future, as physicists and philosophers tell us, is fundamentally unpredictable. Yet many people try anyway, passing off outcomes they consider likely as certainties. I’m not comfortable making forecasts, but if you insist, I’ll give it a try too.
In a short-term forecast — and 12 years isn’t far off — the likeliest outcomes are those in which the world doesn’t change very much. After all, it’s barely changed in the past 12 years: The Russian army was fighting in Ukraine in 2014, too; Meduza was working out of Latvia, and most of its readers were in Russia.
There are differences, of course. The war between Russia and Ukraine will be over by 2038. But, alas, Russia has already mortgaged its future — in every sense — to fight it, and no “victory,” whatever that word is supposed to mean, will get it out of that debt trap.
We can, of course, hope (or fear) that artificial general intelligence will sweep everything away like a mighty hurricane and let every country and society start with a clean slate. (What’s a 12-year forecast without AI?) But here, too, it’s better to make a cautious prediction: Don’t expect AI to solve all the mysteries of the universe, dramatically increase labor productivity, or wipe out all of humanity and put us all out of work.
AI advances will be adopted fastest in warfare: We’ll almost certainly soon see vast numbers of fully autonomous drones deciding for themselves whether to kill. That will certainly happen before people trust AI to fly commercial airliners or perform other safety-critical tasks.
What the AI industry will take from us is money. In the U.S., capital investment in this sector already exceeds investment in all other industries combined. News organizations are especially vulnerable: Their reporting is already being taken without compensation and delivered to paying users by AI agents. We’ll be sure to discuss all of this on Meduza in 12 years.
Whatever the world is like in 12 years, I hope we’ll still be able to explore it in all its beautiful and terrible diversity. I’d like to believe that efforts to correct globalization’s mistakes won’t lead to closed borders, and that technological progress won’t exclude people from pursuing knowledge.
Apart from that, progress has so far made the world better and more interesting (even if many people disagree), and there’s no reason to think that trend will change by 2038.
Alexey Uvarov, historian
How inevitable a good or bad future seems depends in large part on how we feel at the time. In the fall of 1940, for instance, hundreds of thousands of Londoners endured constant bombing by the Nazi Luftwaffe and later lived to see the Beatles and the Moon landing. How much of that future could they possibly have imagined back in 1940?
The thing is, we’ve grown used to living in a world that’s moving in the “right” direction, a world destined for progress. But for millennia, humanity lived in a different kind of world, including one that saw two world wars, genocides, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nuclear disasters at Chornobyl and Fukushima. None of these terrible tragedies condemned future generations to eternal suffering, though the suffering of those who lived through these horrors is immeasurable.
Perhaps that’s where our hope lies: Neither the “course of history” nor the “logic of human development” makes progress or self-destruction inevitable. It all depends on us — on people — and recognizing our power to shape events can help restore our faith in the future.
In hindsight, we tend to see many tragic events as inevitable, but in fact nothing is predetermined. So we shouldn’t expect either flying cars or the ashes of a nuclear apocalypse in 2038. It will be a new, changing world, in some ways less balanced and less predictable than ours.
But the question is what we ourselves can do for our future, rather than which direction the world is heading. I believe and hope that the world in 2038 will be a place where everyone takes more responsibility for their own life and future.
Galina Yuzefovich, literary critic
From where we stand today, it’s hard to imagine a bright future, but I’ll try.
By 2038, even if the world hasn’t entirely abandoned the idea of war as a way to resolve differences (that’s too much to hope for), it will at least have entered another long period of relative peace.
Clearly, artificial intelligence isn’t going anywhere (though as a natural-born Luddite and technological pessimist, I wouldn’t mind if it did). But I’m almost certain that agreements setting standards for AI use will be reached before long, so I’m not worried about a machine uprising or a total catastrophe in the job market (including creative work) by 2038.
As for my own field, I think we’ll very soon see intellectualism and serious reading come back into fashion. In fact, that’s already happening, but I see it as a “long-term trend” that won’t run out of steam in 12 years — it will gather strength instead. Society will inevitably celebrate print books, long novels, and the slower pleasures of sustained attention, while Instagram Reels and other “fast” content will become a little embarrassing, like fast food.
I’ll take the liberty of referring readers to John Lennon’s song “Imagine,” which expresses my ideals best, and focus on books. I very much want to believe that by 2038, reading will really be back in fashion — that it will return not just as an activity society approves of (in that sense, it will definitely come back — it’s already coming back), but as something more. That books will once again be at the center of public attention, that people won’t just put them on shelves and take pretty photos of them, but actually read them, discuss them, and share them with one another.
With all the enormous upheavals we’re witnessing, and those we can only foresee for now, this may seem like a trivial detail and wishful thinking on the part of someone who simply loves to read. But I really am convinced that reading is what allows both individuals and humanity as a species to maintain a certain depth and complexity.
Books also foster empathy and provide a foundation for constructive, civil debate — something a genuinely democratic society cannot exist without. In the future I hope to see, reading will matter again — both as an individual pursuit and a shared social activity.
At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.
If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at reports@meduza.io.
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Portraits: Dimitrios Kambouris / Getty Images / AFP / Scanpix / LETA; Kristina Nikishina / Epsilon / Getty Images; Meduza; Martin Ahven / Õhtuleht / Scanpix / LETA; Maria Moskaleva’s Instagram page