Is the future end? For some, it’s been a while. Ten years ago, the late critic Mark Fisher wrote of the “slow cancellation of the future” in his book, Ghosts of my life, due to cultural stagnation that makes our collective unable to “grasp and understand the present”. For Fisher, the future was lost, not only because of the fragmentation and acceleration we now accept as part of a life shaped by the internet, but also because of “a common condition: life continues, but time has somehow stopped.” Such stagnation reflected how Fisher’s generation understood the future as the destination at the end of a sparking arrow, prelude to the pursuit of knowledge, freedom and technological innovation. The future was once a myth whose certainty is due to the dialectic of Marxism as well as to the assembly line of Henry Ford: We used to rub sticks together to make fire and live in wild chaos; soon we will be traveling in interdimensional spaceships and eliminating mass suffering. That myth has completely disappeared, as we have witnessed the eruption of the past, present and future into a simultaneous, repetitive, and notoriously uneven plane.
But wait — we haven’t seen leaps and bounds in innovation since Ghosts of my life? Is it since we put on our VR headsets, watch eSports championships in a cramped quarters, and put our wages into shady blockchains? How can the future end then, if it comes to us now? Nearly a decade before Fisher, singularity theorist Lee Edelman had something to say about it in No future. In it, Edelman argues for a more specific abolition: the “reproductive future,” or the social and political organization around generational succession.
Edelman wrote. In the context of the reproductive future, we are often biased against unbroken and incremental change, and against radical, weird, or truly revolutionary behavior that threatens what we know. The so-called “natural order” of biological sex, family values, and economic growth. So-called realism has trapped us in an eternal present, where even the most daring innovations cannot envision a better and more equal world — and in fact, depend on the failure of our imaginations on their successes, if you consider how Amazon -demand deliveries merely set a precedent for deteriorating working conditions; or Elon Musk’s Hyperloop only makes sense in the future without public access to transport; or how Meta can only envision the alternative space as a shopping mall cum office that hasn’t even been remodeled for the homeowner.
There’s much to love about Edelman’s point of view, the way we’re urged to embrace the “odd lair of death” and turn our backs on the horizon of the future altogether. He ends a chapter with the tagline: “The future stops here.” If reproducible futurism is focused on creating meaning, such as withdrawing existential origin from the illusion of progress and inheritance, then Edelman’s proposition encourages self-denial. meaning and determinism in pursuit of ideological liberation. However, it is not a liberal orientation towards the present, but a conspiracy of forces — survival needs, pessimism about political will, a systematically diminished working class. system and class racism, etc. — the trap of so many of us now, keeping our future in the hands of globalizing corporations whose domestication remains a priority. No doubt you’re used to the self-proclaimed futurist with no sense of self, promising to guide you through the risks and opportunities of the future. like tour guides holding chopsticks in their hands. Even financial futures – i.e. derivatives – depend on predictability, even if volatility is part of the mechanism.
Which brings us back to the point, by Lee Edelman’s successor, Rebekah Sheldon, who wrote: “In the name of the future, we must be protected from the future.” As we face the pervasive uncertainties of climate chaos and narrative fallout, and reach new heights of cynicism-capitalism, we will see growing concern for the future beyond the affliction of ordinary futures; Futures contracts break instead of maintaining the status quo. If the normative future only values difference in order to exploit or overcome it, continually reducing social relations to the unit of the individual, and forcing us to think about planetary problems – for example such as famine, extinction and climate catastrophe – which are practically unsolvable, how can we then build a future that embraces diversity and collectivism? In the words of artist Sin Wai Kin (fka Victoria Sin), “How do we envision a future that is not a way forward but a way down?”
In recent art and cinema, ideas around different futures have crystallized in the form of nationalistic futurism, such as Hanzi, indigenous futurism, and contemporary Afrofuturism. Many current alternative scenarios for Western advancement are based on historical revision or geopolitical re-imagining. Indigenous futurism and Afrofuturism, for example, raise the question of what science, technology, and industry would be like if it were not dependent — as it is today — on environmental exploitation and obscurity. human costume? However, others, such as Middle-Rightism and Gulf Futurism, simply ask, how would we see the future if the core concept of “progress” emerged. from somewhere other than the West?
