Gideon Lewis-Kraus's essay in The New Yorker on the rise of the "scenario" as a cultural genre lands at a strange moment. The scenario, he argues, is a way of forecasting that feels rigorous while actually laundering assumptions. You pick your variables, you model your collapse, and the exercise feels like thinking while actually functioning as permission to feel prepared without being prepared. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is pouring $75 million into a San Francisco art campus that will bear his name on the ruins of the California College of the Arts. Two scenarios, two institutions, same structure: a powerful actor funds the narrative infrastructure of the future and calls it philanthropy.
The Scenario as Power Move
Lewis-Kraus traces the scenario genre from Cold War defense think-tanks through Silicon Valley's existential risk discourse to the current wave of bio-catastrophe fiction like Annie Jacobsen's Biological War. The common thread: scenarios feel like open questions but are built from closed assumptions. Who gets to run the scenario? Who funds the think-tank? Who names the building? Huang's $75M gift to Vanderbilt's new San Francisco campus does not merely support arts education. It shapes which arts, in which city, under whose institutional aegis, get to define what art is for in the age of AI. That is a scenario, rendered in concrete and donor plaques.
Tech Money and the Institutional Imagination
The White House this week also rolled out AI funding that Nature describes as signaling a new era for US science. Public and private money are both flooding into the infrastructure of knowledge production simultaneously, each with embedded assumptions about what questions are worth asking. Max Hollein's thinking about museums in the digital age applies here: institutions are not neutral containers. They are arguments, made permanent. The scenario tells you what the institution thinks the future looks like. The funding tells you who's doing the thinking.