Food delivery apps are a harbinger of decline.
The Victorians were obsessed with the idea of the future.
Unlike the dystopias of the 20th century, crafted through the horrors of war and tyranny, the Victorian futurists imagined bright, mechanised utopias where technology delivered fairness, abundance, and joy.
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) pictured Boston in the year 2000 as a land of equal wealth, credit cards, and benevolent corporations. William Morris, in News from Nowhere (1890), conjured a pastoral Thameside vista where the smog and industry of London was replaced with an artisanal commune in which government and money were no longer necessary.
