Remembering The Future
Lost futures, cultural exhaustion, and noticing what is exciting in the present
Last Thursday, I bumped into someone I hadn't seen for years. I am pretty good at remembering faces and was immediately transported to the CCA in 2013, where the man in question, Steven Bode, had convened a day-long symposium on The Future.
The symposium was part of the programme for Tomorrow Never Knows, an exhibition of digital art by Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza. It brought together a remarkable panel: Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania; Paul Morley from the telly; Francis McKee, director of the CCA; Olia Lialina an early net artist; Sarah Lowndes, academic documenter of the Glasgow Miracle; and, James Bridle, then best known for The New Aesthetic, but who is now the celebrated author of New Dark Age and Ways of Being.
It felt uncanny to be reminded of an event about the future from the past. As Marshall McLuhan wrote: "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." Maybe, I thought, these ten-year-old talks about the future could help me to understand the present impasse. So I used my time machine and travelled back to Saturday 22 June 2013 to attend, yet again, The Future conference.
In hindsight, 2013 was an innocent time. It was pre-Brexit, pre-Indyref, David Bowie was still alive and unsanctified, and there was barely any mention of climate change that day. The main news seems to have been protests in Turkey and Brazil, which fit the model of post-Occupy, post-Tahrir Square fights for democracy. But what is striking about the talks is how exhausted everyone sounds, with the exception of James Bridle, who I'll discuss more below.
Bode started the day talking about how contemporary music shows the lack of any shock of the new, wondering if it is the canary in the coal mine of culture. He compared 2013 with the early 90s when rave and techno crossed over with the cybernetic philosophy of Nick Land.
Next up was Simon Reynolds, a music journalist and close associate of Mark Fisher. For Reynolds, the rise of retro bands like The Black Keys, The White Stripes, and Arctic Monkeys showed a failure in the culture. Since the 1950s, we've been used to the white heat of constant cultural progress, reaching its apogee in the futuristic dance music of the early 90s.
Reynolds spoke of the forces of reaction, the record store clerks who ruined music by weighing it down with the past. 1993 was the year of Gabba techno, but it was also the year of Blur's Modern Life is Rubbish.
The biggest album of the year 2013 was Random Access Memories by Daft Punk, a band who saw no way forward and so went back to the source of dance to people like Giorgio Moroder. The biggest TV programme was Game of Thrones, which appealed by being anti-futuristic.
Paul Morley, with his TV soundbite clarity, talked about how protesting in the street is the modern equivalent of punk and rave. He recalled being 24 and feeling too ancient to write for the NME. On the web, everyone has an opinion and the critic is no longer a revered gatekeeper. This means that we spend more time talking about the thing than actually doing the thing.
During a Q&A, a member of the audience mentioned Arika, a festival in Glasgow that has pioneered the idea of marginalised identities as the foundation of cultural change. Arika has invited people like Fred Moten, Samuel R. Delany, Huw Lemmey, and many more to Glasgow. They have done events about sex work and sexuality and help create the conditions for the current avant-garde to flourish. Head to any art event in Glasgow and you'll find such themes absolutely central. The music critic and zine writer, Claire Biddles, was in the audience at the CCA that day and I can recall her suggesting that Frank Ocean (then riding high with Channel Orange) and his black queer love was a way beyond the exhaustion felt by the white males on the panel when they look to the future.
As Francis McKee said in his introduction to the afternoon session, a bunch of middle-aged white men talking about the end of the future is perhaps not representative of the global future: "our future is not their future, they don’t want what we want”. McKee captured the exhaustion of the moment, that "no one knows where to go" and "anything that we have now is dead".
Part of that stagnation comes from the burden of carrying too much history, but we've also forgotten a lot. In her presentation, Olia Lialina talked about the early web and the futures we've lost due to the failures of digital archiving.
All the talks were fairly bleak up to this point, then James Bridle spoke.
Dressed in a futuristic silver T-shirt, James Bridle was the only speaker who seemed enthused about the future. Bridle dismissed music and literature as a way to understand the future. We need to cultivate a sense of wonder at these networked technologies. The New Aesthetic project was about revealing the weirdness of the now, with its automated agriculture and drone shadows, and seeing how the internet is changing consciousness.
The future is all around us, but is quickly domesticated into what Venkatesh Rao called the "manufactured normalcy field". There is all this crazy stuff is going on that we haven’t noticed. We are so blinded by 100 years of pop culture that we can't see the creativity going on in AI, robotics, and the network. For Bridle, "technology is our enlightenment".
I remember thinking Bridle's talk was mindblowing, full of interesting facts and fascinating references to William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. At the time, I didn't fully absorb how revolutionary it sounds, but take a listen to the end of his talk:
During the break, following Bridle's talk, I spotted Paul Morley sitting alone in the bar and saw an opportunity to introduce myself. He looked pale, shaken, fearful.
"What did you think of that?" I asked.
"I feel like I've just seen Hitler in 1933," he replied (at least, that's what I remember him saying). Morley couldn't get over the visionary certainty of Bridle, seeing it as dangerous. I nodded along, but it is only by listening back to it now that I understand why it unnerved him.
Bridle is dismissing everything that Morley represents. Music critics can amuse themselves all day by playing records and opining on what they mean about the future. Bridle challenges them to actually look at the world as it exists. Bridle makes ex-NME journalists look like Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons who wastes his life pontificating about Aquaman.
Between 1955 to 1996, music shaped our idea of what the era meant. Since then, though, technology—internet, smartphone, social media—has reduced music to a footnote. In the culture at large, there is a moral turn, a philosophical turn, a social turn, an environmental turn. We sublimate our feelings for the future through our relationship with the planet, just like we used to sublimate feelings through music. James Bridle's recent book about ecological planetary intelligence feels more to our sense of the future than even the strangest Autechre b-side.
Culturally, we are still in exactly the same place we were in ten years ago. Ewan Morrison's recent essay, The Great Reboot: In Memoriam Mark Fisher, describes our malaise:
We cannot imagine a better world than this one, so the future has degenerated into endless cycles of aimless repetition. For Fisher, these are the consequences of the globalist neoliberal dream of the end of history. Ask an AI algorithm what culture should be created, and it will tell you: Fast and Furious 11, Avatar 4, Indiana Jones 7, reboots of all successful past TV shows and re-recordings of all already popular songs.
Simon Reynolds had a brilliant line in his talk about how "the point of the future as a cultural ideal is not about what the future is going to be like but the intensity it creates in the now". When I think about the enthusiasm of the Effective Altruists, I can see that they have this energy because they still see so many possibilities in the future. They have looked at the numbers and believe that a trillion happy consciousnesses could colonise the universe. It reminds me that there will always be young people born who don’t accept the supposed exhaustion of the present and want to create a new future, however hopeless it seems.1
The Future in 2023: A Survey
To get a better sense of how people think about the future now, I asked a selection of friends, artists, writers, and intellectuals to give me their response to the question: What do you immediately think about when you are asked to think about the Future?
Hanna Tuulikki
It means deep sorrow for the future.
Pat Kane
Absurdity. That human ingenuity and technological prowess have brought us to such a “precipice”, as Toby Ord puts it. Yet living under the shadow of our self-termination by existential risk compels me to be more straightforwardly utopian & transformative in my political & cultural praxis. No time left for anything less.
Sam Enright
Crazy futuristic technology, I suppose. Although, I would also be likely to think about my personal future and what I'm going to do with my career; maybe I am self-centered.
Chao-Ying Rao
Fear.
👀
Duncan Maclaren:
What I immediately ‘think’ about is a feeling of excitement, undermined by the question ‘how long have I got?’
Emma Balkind:
When I'm asked to think about the future, I think about infrastructure and whether it will keep up. Just now it seems like all the tech we have is very small and individualised but the world around us is crumbling and very much underinvested in. I suppose I worry that it will actually just keep going more in that direction.
For instance, I have an electric bike but the roads have potholes, I can work from home but maybe I'll need a job that gives private healthcare because the NHS stops coping. Those sorts of things seem in the near future. But at the same time, listening to the radio today there was lots of positive coverage of the strikes in the public sector. I don't know whether to feel optimistic or pessimistic at the moment!
IKM
LOL, Neil — I think only you could do a ‘quickfire survey’ on what people think about when they think about the future. To be completely honest, my current feelings about the future are too confused a mixture of hope and despair to be easily summarised I’m afraid.
Luke Robert Mason
Magick. I mean that quite seriously. The ability to not only predict futures but to create the circumstances to allow certain futures to be actualised.
MV Brown
Tomorrow.
Neil Bromwich
Prepping!
Alastair McIntosh
I think about how to catch the alarming stimuli of our times, and engage them to deepen awareness of the nature, meaning, and potential of our humanity; the better to face come-what-may in the emergent come-to-pass.
And that’s before breakfast on a day I’ve got 40 pheasants coming into GalGael to gralloch!
Kate E. Deeming
The first thing that came to my mind was ‘home’. A comfortable chair next to a fire with warmth and smells of lovely food and laughter and people I love around me. Books and chatter. It’s not global but personal I guess. It’s pulling in and gathering. It’s warming one another.
Victoria Lampard:
It’s not the classic vision of flying cars and space travel. These things are happening, but all the fun has disappeared from them because they’ve been predictably portioned out to techbro billionaires. I don’t think especially optimistically about the future. It won’t be dramatically bad just a mundane managed decline ... unless it’s in personal terms, which do in fact hold a lot of promise.
Having said this, there is still a lot of exhaustion out there. For instance, during his talk in 2013, Simon Reynolds mentioned that his 14-year old son was not interested in music and just wanted to play the game, Minecraft. I looked his son up out of curiosity and that he is now a journalist writing about Tiktok trends like #corecore, which, while it doesn't offer a way out of cultural stagnation, does give a wistful hauntological way of reflecting on it.
Very thought provoking, although most of it is beyond the capacity of my brain! I still feel that people haven't changed since biblical times, although we have lots more play-things & lots more ways to repress & destroy!
the future is an exciting prospect when there are more open spaces ahead of you. I visited Christchurch in New Zealand a year after the 2011 earthquake that devastated large areas of the city and took 185 lives. Twelve months on, growing out between the cleared gaps sites between the still standing buildings were incredible artists projects, small scale architecture and community led initiatives. I was struck that this local people led creativity would not have happened without these spaces for the imagination.