Our dominant technological futures help maintain decrepit horizons of the social. As Brecht once observed: "I stood on a hill and I saw the Old approaching, but it came as the New." Prediction supplies a powerful conceptual model for this dynamic of stasis through disruption by connecting the technical conceit of predictivity (that criminality or emotion can be anticipated through data-driven modeling) with the mythological use of prediction (where history is an extrapolation of known technological advancements). Drawing from theories of ritual and experiment, I examine the demonstrative, belief-building work that prediction does - from 18th century automata of Defecating Ducks to Amazon warehouses, from the 1956 Dartmouth Conference to the 10,000 Year Clock. What we call "tech" today serves as a legitimising function for capital, and crucial to this function is the active foreclosure of any political future other than more of the same.