Time & Perspective Quote by Don DeLillo

A DeLillo line like this lands with the chill of a weather report that’s also an indictment. “The future belongs to crowds” isn’t a pep talk about solidarity; it’s a diagnosis of power migrating from the individual to the mass, from private interiority to public swarm. DeLillo has spent a career tracking how modern life turns people into receivers - of broadcasts, narratives, shocks - and “crowds” is his bluntest unit of measurement for that condition.

The verb “belongs” does quiet violence. It implies ownership, not participation: the future is a commodity already spoken for, and the title deed is held by something impersonal. That’s classic DeLillo subtext: we like to tell ourselves history is driven by genius, leadership, or moral will, but the real motor is scale. Crowds are markets, audiences, electorates, mobs. They buy, binge, vote, trend, riot. They generate the only force large enough to steer institutions, and they’re also the easiest force to manage through spectacle.

Context matters because DeLillo’s “crowd” is rarely democratic in a warm sense. It’s shaped by media, by fear, by the contagious logic of images. In a DeLillo universe, the crowd isn’t just many people together; it’s a technology - a system where attention is synchronized and emotion becomes infrastructure. The line works because it compresses a modern dread into six words: your future won’t be decided in a room of thinkers, but in a surge of bodies and data, moving as one, convinced it chose the direction.