On February 22nd, a co-worker asked what I thought about The Citrini Memo. I hadn’t heard of it. What was it? Sounded like an old Robert Ludlumn novel that I never got around to reading.  But it was real, and it was scary. In fact, it spooked financial markets. The Dow Jones fell by 800 points, and both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq dropped by 1%.

Basically, this Citrini Memo was fan fiction for investors and tech bros.  It was published on Substack and went viral. It was written as a memo from a grim future, outlining the how AI adoption could wreck the economy, upend the labor market, and crash equities. And the horrifying part? It wasn’t imagined to be from some far-flung future when we’re all dead and gone. This memo pretended to be written in 2028, and outlined the overwhelming rapid pace with which AI ruined the economy and the world.

The Citrini Memo was written in such an intelligent and matter-of-fact tone—it really isn’t sensationalist—that it seemed like it could be real. It talked about all the white collar jobs that would be lost to AI, and how a doom cycle that would be perpetuated in the labor market.

Maybe it all will come true – I’m not smart enough to know.

But somehow, saner heads prevailed (or maybe we all are just fooling ourselves) and the markets corrected themselves in a day or so.

WE’RE TOUGH

Here’s the thing: I think that comic fans are better at dealing with dystopian futures and facing “what’s next” without fear.  Unlike the traders who got skittish after reading The Citrini Memo, we go through this all the time.

• Comic fans know that in October of 1986, an atomic war wrecked the world, making way for the John Broome’s and Murphy Anderson’s Atomic Knights and their Strange Adventures.
• That same year, 1986, started another grim future spiraling into mayhem and set the stage for Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth.
• Killraven and his rebel friends traveled a devasted Earth in 2018-2020, with so many Amazing Adventures by Don McGregor and P. Craig Russell.
• Sabre, considered by many to be the First Graphic Novel, is one of my favorites. Creators Don McGregor and Paul Gulacy placed their thrilling tales in the upside-down world of 2020.
• More recently, in 2018, Mark Waid and Chris Samnee created their brilliant Captain America arc called “Home of the Brave”. In this story, a future America is in ruins and Cap, as you would expect, is there to save it. The kicker was that all along, we thought it was some distant future. But then one character explains to Captain America that it was just 7 years in Cap’s future. How could it have gone so wrong so quickly?

Of note: there’s one line in this series that always makes me cry. That Waid is a helluva writer.

And through all this glimpses into “what could be”, comic readers grow more contemplative, more reflective, and more thoughtful. That’s a good thing, and I truly believe these skills will help get us through the tumultuous times that lie ahead…in the real world.

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Want to read the “Citrini Memo”? Give it a go here.