These are loose notes based on this essay: There Is No Modern Future.
I recently read a substack by “Professional Idiot,” (actual name) which was quite good. I don’t make a habit of reading substacks but I was tricked into reading this one because I got linked in it.
The substack is about the absence of contemporary political futurism in fiction. Professional Idiot (PI) notes that Vekllei is not an expression of contemporary modernity and raises questions about what that says about our present. They refer to Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, which is a favourite of mine and will feature (again) in an upcoming essay I’m writing on “Commonwealth peripheralism.” So I agree that framing political beliefs as utopian thinking is useful, and also that there is some kind of inversion going on between “conservative luddism” and “progressive technocracy” right now.
Historically speaking, it’s worth questioning whether Western progressivism has ever been uncritically optimistic about the future. PI raises environmentalism as an example of “small-c” conservatism, but I’d suggest technological skepticism has been a feature of leftism since genesis – think of the profound impact of the industrial revolution and two world wars, and how they shaped prewar anarchism and postwar counterculture. Although I’ve known most Marxists as historicists – believers in that “great arc of justice” – the idea that history is structured and deterministic has been criticised since it was basically developed. Here I’m thinking about Walter Benjamin’s messianic critique in his Theses on the Philosophy of History but also everyone before and since, including Louis Althusser and the anti-eurocentrists.
Vekllei isn’t an expression of cynicism – retrofuturism is, after all, “futuristic” (cities on the moon, robots, monopolar fusion reactors, and so on). The reason these concepts are compelling is that they feel physical, substantial and scarce today. They speak to machinery we can conceptually understand and that comprise something larger than a consumer product. Even LLMs – a pretty fantastical asmiov-esque technology that produces a lot of computer comedy – is worn down through trite commentary and its abstract nature (in the cloud, through a browser, like every other fucking thing).
So in this sense, I think retrofuturism is straightforwardly a rejection of the present for a different future. This is how utopian thinking works – it may not be a blueprint for coordinated political action, but social dreams rarely are. And you can invert utopia to find reality, since it seems to me they are inextricably connected. The basis of utopia is the present; the question of Vekllei isn’t “how do we make it real” but “what are the differences of this setting telling us about what’s happening now.”
As such, I would suggest retrofuturism is counterintuitively a very comfortable genre for the present. And – this is very indulgent for some notes on someone else’s writing – let’s look at Vekllei for a moment.
- they are basically optimistic, and live in a high trust multicultural, federal country of beautiful islands spanning both poles
- they live good lives with good food, clothes, drink and beautiful men and women
- there is a sense of humorous and mostly harmless dysfunction
- they are militaristically compassionate
- people are well educated and productive
- they travel frequently
- they have no televisions and so hang around cinemas
- they live in beautiful, compact houses and spend more time outside
- they drink a lot (ha ha)
- choose to use old things
- lack a consumer society
- all their stuff looks how I like it (sharp, a modest baseline, exotic, and NOT fucking Frutiger Aero)
It’s pretty utopian. I’m sure it upsets people, though I present these facts in more complicated ways when I’m depicting them. But the basic layout here is my social dream – and if you invert it, what do you find?
The United States?
Just kidding – my enthusiasm for Americana borders on Japanese.
But perhaps it’s worth considering that the opposite of utopia is dystopia, and that we live in troubled times. Maybe retrofuturism is not a meaningless regression but a map of the present, read not by what it labels (robots, lasers) but what it doesn’t (contemporaneous nonsense, frutiger aero).