In 1997, WIRED magazine urged readers to “suspend disbelief” and imagine the prosperity, freedom, and ecological bliss that market deregulation and open borders will create in a mere quarter century. In 2020, the article predicts, humans will arrive on Mars. They will look back at our Earth and know it to be a globally prosperous “open society” whose denizens are busy solving intractable problems: eradicating poverty, restoring the rain forests, surpassing the nation-state form with truly democratic international governance. The United States will steward the world into this future as the “first among equals,” democracy and free-markets will be its core values, free flowing people, ideas and products its visible attributes. “Open, good. Closed, bad. Tattoo it on your forehead.”

Predictions tacked to definite dates are easy to ridicule, and in light of today's unprecedented environmental disasters, spiraling inequality, relentless poverty, and sectarian strife, WIRED's soothsaying looks particularly inept. But one prediction came true: humans made it to Mars. And not because private spaceships now bring curious billionaires somewhat closer to the red planet, or because new Mars rovers send back high-res images. We made it to Mars in another imagined future, one in which the open society has not taken root.

The idea of “open” and “closed” was born of the Cold War. In open societies, Frederich Hayek insisted, people who have no common goals “form a mutually beneficial and peaceful spontaneous order by submitting to the same abstract rules” (Frederich Hayek, The Confusion of Language in Political Thought [London, 1968], 14). Conversely, closed societies care less about rules than about common goals. Open societies run like markets, closed societies like households—and like any household, khoziaistvo, they have a khoziain lead them. To Cold War hawks, this directed collectivist striving smelled of totalitarianism and primitive “tribalism.” But that is only one point of view.

Launched in late 2020, BirchPunk is a YouTube series about Russia circa 2098. On earth, things have gotten openly bleak. Technological innovations expedite audits and financialization: municipal hand-pumps require residents’ thumbprints to dispense water; weather management systems switch into “inclement” mode for non-payment. Beater Bukhankas and Zhiguli cars fly on blue plasma flames, dodging air turbulence potholes. People protest new 20 G towers—they'd prefer cell towers with more radiation—and complain about androids stealing their jobs. Meanwhile, the powerful Izhevsk Dynamics Corporation has promised to put “an android in every home.” In a TV-interview, the Corporation's director talks of outshining Boston Dynamics with an unprecedented 33 meter robot—while off-camera disobedient androids are zapped in an incinerator, and… wait, are those androids real? Ill-wishers say they are made by computer graphics! (BirchPunk assures us, that's a lie.)

But BirchPunk's bleak forecast leaves hope: it's on Mars, with Nikolai, farmer from Riazan΄ country. We meet him filming promotional videos for his android-staffed CyberFarm: “Friendly team, Big Ambitions… um. Communications. High responsibility!” But the reality is not so robotic at all. Nikolai's farm relies not on abstract rules, but on household ethics. His androids play pranks, set things on fire; the usual rural tomfoolery. Nikolai loves an android milkmaid named G.L.A.S.H.A. but she loves the tractor. The farm produces fractal cukes, möbius carrots, and other vegetables defiant of Euclidean geometry. Nikolai keeps things together with his twentieth century toolset, tinkering parts gleaned from an alien ship. They sit together in their downtime, Nikolai and the androids, cracking sunflower seeds in the Martian sunshine, and Nikolai is the only human being around. Even the long-awaited AI Russia Awards Inspector turns out to be a small armless levitating robot, whose voiceless scanning Nikolai finds annoyingly cold—until they spend an evening drinking “genetically modified kombucha” together. Nikolai makes friends easily. By the time the scanner leaves, Nikolai invites “AI–Vanich” back for desert-worm hunting.

I doubt AI–Vanich will find the time. But I'd like to suspend my disbelief and imagine that there will be a khoziaistvo left in the year 2098, even if only on Mars. It gives me hope that sentient beings will one day look back at our present and see that aggrandizing the “open society” was a terrible plan.