9: Fast Forward - Futures Thinking and Globalization

Who Gets to Build the Global Future?

Globalization is dead.

Again.

Apparently.

For decades, globalization has been declared inevitable, unstoppable, finished, revived, broken, transformed, and occasionally blamed for almost everything happening on Earth. Depending on whom you ask, we are entering a borderless future, retreating into nationalism, splitting into rival geopolitical blocs, surrendering our jobs to artificial intelligence, building a multipolar world, or somehow doing all of these things at once.

And strangely enough, that last possibility may be closest to the truth.

Globalization was never a single machine moving steadily in one direction. It has always been a collection of overlapping processes through which goods, money, people, ideas, technologies, diseases, environmental pressures, political movements, and cultural practices move across space. Those processes do not necessarily accelerate together. Trade can fragment while digital communication expands. Governments can tighten borders while businesses recruit workers internationally. States can subsidize domestic semiconductor production while remaining dependent on minerals extracted thousands of miles away. Nationalist politicians can denounce globalization from smartphones assembled through global supply chains.

In other words, the global future is unlikely to be simply more globalization or less globalization.

It is likely to be stranger.

Recent evidence already points in that direction. The World Trade Organization has documented growing fragmentation between geopolitical blocs, including renewed divergence in trade patterns associated with U.S.-China tensions, while simultaneously emphasizing that international trade remains deeply embedded in the global economy (WTO, 2026). The International Monetary Fund likewise describes geopolitical fragmentation, trade tensions, technological transformation, conflict, and economic interdependence as forces operating simultaneously rather than sequentially (IMF, 2026).

That makes our final chapter less a prediction exercise than a question of possibility, power, and choice.

Who gets to shape what comes next?

Governments?

Corporations?

Workers?

Social movements?

Artificial intelligence companies?

Communities already dealing with the environmental consequences of decisions made somewhere else?

People who have historically been excluded from the institutions writing global rules?

And where exactly do you fit into this?

Throughout this book, we have followed globalization through history, culture, economics, political power, health, environmental change, mobility, food, gender, technology, and everyday life. At almost every stop, the same lesson kept resurfacing: global systems create connections, but connections do not automatically create equality. Who moves and who cannot, who profits and who pays, whose knowledge becomes authoritative, whose labor disappears into a supply chain, whose culture travels easily, and whose passport opens doors have never been random details. They are part of how globalization works.

The future will be no different.

Except now you know what to look for.