Have We Forgotten How to Dream of the Future?
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With the extraordinary availability of television programming, running hours and hours of content, with millions of songs at your fingertips, streamed and forgotten on a whim, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our cultural climate was teeming with originality. It isn’t.
One World. One Mind.
Photo by michael steinberg from pexels
Perhaps it began with the neo-liberalism of the early nineties, the political force that sought to unify the entire earth beneath a single umbrella of trade and corporate control. A homogenization of culture was necessary if we were all to sing with one voice in Coca Cola’s utopia (Fruitopia?). Technology became affordable, global communication became easier than ever. Perhaps some of us felt free.
This was the solidification of the Deleuzian “society of control” that we now find ourselves in. Where freedom takes on the appearance of a free flow of information and a seemingly border-less world. But the price of this freedom is the data harvested by every tech company and every airline which in turn is readily shared with governments for purposes of social control. We stopped dreaming of the future because, so we were told by our leaders, the future was already here.
The End of History
Photo by lucas pezeta by pexels
Another remake. Another Carpenter-esque synth-laden retro futurist soundtrack. 32-bit graphics, butterfly clips, yet another remake. Same story, different spandex. It was once thought that the 2000s would see flying cars and automation replacing drudgery creating a society of leisure. Instead we got seven different Spider Man films.
The new millennium began with revival: garage revival, post-punk revival. Artists like Amy Winehouse, the Arctic Monkeys and Lana Del Rey have built careers on being living musical remakes, monuments to the past. Corporate entertainment continues to feed the pap of childhood to us well into our adult life so that we remain forever infantilized, forever dependent. All potential forever neutralized.
If you are looking backwards, you will never move forward. What are “Ready Player One”, “Stranger Things”, “Blade Runner 2049” and the undying popularity of “Star Wars” but a kind of MAGA sublimated into aesthetic. A desire to return to an inaccessible past, using the language of genres that have historically pointed forward.
No Future for You
Mark Fisher, the great theorist of all lost futures, firmly demonstrated the link between late capitalism and corporate nostalgia (what Simon Reynolds calls “retromania”) when he wrote that:
“neo-liberal capitalism has…systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new…as public service broadcasting became “marketized,” there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful.” (Ghosts of My Life, p. 15)
As corporations gradually colonize every aspect of our lives, as control becomes de-spatialized and we carry the office, the school, the prison around with us, there becomes less and less room for the new. We are sold the past and so the past is what we come to expect. We are taught to fear the strange, the unsettling and take comfort in the bosom of familiarity.
Utopian Dreams
It is up to us to demand the unfamiliar, the strange, the uncomfortable. We deserve a future, not the eternal prison of the past. If we’re ever to emerge from the suffocation of control, if we’re ever to breathe a breath that hasn’t come at a price, we need to remember how strange the future can seem and forget its false familiarity.
Matthew Smith
Matt is a writer, musician and actor based in the unceded Algonquin territory commonly known as Ottawa. He loves dogs, hates cops, drinks too much tea and overthinks everything.
Twitter: @Squabbleronline
