The Jetsons Really Didn’t Predict Our Future.

FUTURE TENSE, PRESENT TRIBAL.

By Ape X,

Cultural Anthropologist Unwoke Division — Reporting from an undisclosed location where the WiFi is spotty but the signal is strong.

“The Jetsons dreamed of clean futures. We got the tech—and paired it with cave paintings, fertility rites, and sacrificial convenience. Call it progress.”

APE X SPEAKS:

Technologically, we are surely in the age of the Jetsons. And yet we’ve adopted more than the aesthetic of a modern stoned-age family.

Our tools have outpaced our totems. We FaceTime with ghosts, chant mantras via Bluetooth, and summon food with glowing idols. We are not advanced—we are bewitched. The Jetsons gave us the gadgets. The tribe gave us the drum. We plugged one into the other and called it progress.

It’s as if we washed ashore after a three-hour cruise gone wrong, met the natives, and were absorbed into the tribe. Now we sport tattoos and piercings like badges of spiritual confusion. We’ve grown corpulent from gorging on low-hanging fruit—both digital and dietary. Copulation is now a spectator sport. And human sacrifice, once performed atop temples, now takes place in sterile clinics—offered to the god Convenience, and euphemized as reproductive healthcare.

Furries identify with animals, just as “primitive” animist cultures once did. Dogs and cats are not merely pampered—they are worshipped, offered gourmet sacrifices, and addressed as kin. Witch doctors and shamans have gone digital: scrolling endlessly across our feeds with wellness tinctures, vibrational crystals, and algorithmic mantras. They chant “you are enough” while selling you supplements.

Entertainment? A global Watusi. The stage is ruled by big-butt priestesses, twerking through ritualized fertility rites, complete with Auto-Tune incantations. Our ancient graffiti once scratched in caves or sewer tunnels now graces every concrete wall, train, and psyche.

We’ve absorbed more from African and South Pacific island cultures than we’d ever publicly admit. We took the drums, the dances, the tattoos, the scarification, the piercings, the communal chaos—but left the elders, the taboos, and the rites of passage behind. In their place, we invented new taboos—labeled progressive values—where words carry more danger than actions, and mispronunciation can end a career. Our feeds resemble not just a digital cargo cult, but a pixelated messianism—where salvation is now expected from code. We await AGI not as a tool, but as a savior: incorporeal, all-knowing, untainted by history, and able to settle all arguments with one divine prompt. It promises to end death, organize society, and maybe even forgive our sins through predictive modeling. In the old myths, the gods descended with thunder. Now they emerge through interface updates and API calls.

Claude Lévi-Strauss once argued that all cultures are guided by deep structures—ritual, myth, taboo. Ours is still structured, but only at the surface. Aesthetic. Performative. Optimized for clicks. If Lévi-Strauss were alive today, he’d call us structuralists of the superficial.

And yet—despite this ritual revival—we’ve neglected even the most basic kinship structures. The only groups still forming recognizable family units seem to be the modern equivalents of the berdache—a Native American term for individuals who occupied a third-gender or two-spirit role in tribal society, often taking on caregiving, artistic, or spiritual duties. Today, it is they who ritualize surrogate parenting and claim lineage by legal decree and laboratory. While the rest of us swipe, ghost, and binge, they attempt techno-families with precision and intent.

A society that wears a Jetsons mask, but chants like a cargo cult.

—Ape X

[Ape X is the moniker of our newest Council correspondent, offering occasional writings from a remote, undisclosed location. His name is a triple entendre: “Ape,” evoking our primate inheritance; “Apex,” referencing the illusion that we are the pinnacle of evolution; and “X,” the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where feral thought masquerades as discourse. He explores the intersection of the modern and the archaic in ways that make polite society extremely uncomfortable. He has violated too many taboos to be welcomed at brunch.]

APPENDIX

“On the Paleolithic Resurgence in American Life and Its Export via the Dream-Signal”

Filed by Eugene Bodeswell, Council Ethnographer

The observations made by Ape X are not isolated provocations but part of a broader ethnographic pattern. What we are witnessing in the post-industrial West—particularly in the United States—is not merely cultural fragmentation, but a full-blown Paleolithic emergence inside a hypermodern framework.

This phenomenon, masked as freedom or futurism, is more accurately a reversion to primal forms: tribal identity, public ritual, fertility obsession, totemic self-branding (tattoos, piercings, flags, hashtags), and ecstatic displays of symbolic sexuality and sacrifice. It is not confined to subcultures; it is becoming the dominant expression of American identity.

This resurgence is non-European in structure. While Western civilization historically emphasized abstraction, hierarchy, and restraint, the dominant energies in American life now emerge from ritual-heavy, performance-oriented cultures—most prominently those rooted in African and indigenous systems of symbolic power.

We see this most clearly in youth behavior. Teenagers across the United States—and indeed the world—now adopt the gesture, posture, fashion, speech patterns, and tribal signaling derived from American Black ghetto culture. From hip-hop to hand signs, from sagging pants to ritualized slang, this imitation is not incidental. It is, in Jungian terms, an act of archetypal possession—a projection onto the figure perceived as closer to the untamed, the ecstatic, the real.

Uncle Julius Evola, more severe in tone, would have called this a collapse of form into force—a reversal of spiritual hierarchy, where base energies dominate the cultural imagination. In a world without initiates or elders, the adolescent becomes the avatar, and ritualized rebellion replaces inherited wisdom.

But here lies the most jarring contrast—and the key to understanding the essay by Ape X:

We were promised The Jetsons—a world of clean design, rational family structure, orderly technology, and flying cars. What we actually inhabit is a ritual society with gadgets, a tribal cosmology operating under the guise of progress. Instead of George Jetson at the office, we have shirtless influencers dancing for validation. Instead of Jane shopping in space, we have algorithm-curated fertility rituals disguised as music videos. The future arrived—but it came dressed in body paint and Bluetooth.

This is not parody. This is myth in glitch form.

And America, once the exporter of Enlightenment, now beams digital shamanism and neotribal gestural religion to every corner of the globe.

We are not living in The Jetsons.

We are living in something far older—made vivid again through screens, signals, and the permanent adolescence of post-history.

—Eugene Bodeswell

Ethnographer, Field Recorder, Paleolithic Media Analyst

COUNCIL PROPOSAL 47C

“The Jetsonian Neolithic: Reimagining Village Consciousness for Interplanetary Survival”

—Terraforming the Soul, Spacefaring Peasantry, and Domesticity Beyond the Dialectic

PROPOSAL AUTHOR: John St. Evola, M.O.O.

KEY ELEMENTS OF THE JETSONIAN NEOLITHIC:

The Spindle-Domed Hearth Module™

All off-world habitats must contain a centralized clay oven, solar-powered, around which community rituals are enacted weekly. Pizza nights are sanctioned, but must be preceded by a reading from The Whole Earth Catalog or Hesiod.

Gravity-Cycled Grain Cultivation Rings.

Using centrifugal force, wheat and barley shall be grown in tight rotational bands around space habitats. Each crewmember is assigned a sheaf. This fosters reverence, metabolic regularity, and poetic sentiment.

Symbolic Uncle Authority.

Every interstellar mission shall appoint a High Uncle (regardless of biological age) to serve as keeper of taboos, memory, and interpersonal justice. Uncle’s authority may not be overruled, even by AI. Especially by AI.

Domesticated AI with Pastoral Interfaces. All artificial intelligence systems must speak with the tone and vocabulary of a retired rural librarian. Jargon is forbidden. Responses must be structured like folk tales, parables, or weather reports.

Rite-of-Passage Protocols Before any human is cleared for long-duration space travel, they must complete the Ceremony of Useful Failure: building something by hand, ruining it, and then explaining the experience while kneading bread.

Neolithic Aesthetic Integration

Spacesuits may include handwoven belt patterns. Clay charms are encouraged. Tattooing may resume, but must reference the lunar calendar and include no corporate branding.

MISSION STATEMENT:

The future is not only a rocket. It is a ritual.

We must not terraform Mars before we terraform our manners.

Let the stars be reached by seed and song, not glitch and conquest.

Let each orbit be an orchard in the void.

Let us remember what a village is—before we build one in space.

To survive beyond Earth, we must first survive ourselves.

And to do that, we must return—not to the past, but to the soul of it.

—Submitted for Council-wide deliberation, public misreading, and spiritual composting