Remember the Future? Hauntology, Modernism and Neoliberalism

I am getting very, very tired of nostalgia. I'm 30 years old and the distance from the 90s is actually getting to me terribly. We did lose a future, there is nothing good on the horizon, everyone seems to know we are not working on fixing any problems. Mankind feels to have no more potential left.

I liked the documentary

youtube.com/watch?v=EYnGza8W-5w

The thing is, once developing nations are on our level, will they experience their OWN hauntology, their own futures lost, their own post-era promised by that time period? What the fuck do we do when the entire world experiences this, almost simultaneously?

How do we find the future?

There is only one way.
youtube.com/watch?v=fncfIrjjMgo

Is there hope for the future in transhumanism? And related to that, the cybernetics thread is very cool

I've some doubts. Mechanically, sure. Tongue partially in cheek, you could save humanity's future by bioengineering lungs that could breathe our now Venusian atmosphere or something. Culturally, etc, it feels like it'd be trapped in the same mire we're already dealing with.

That trick with the magnet in your finger to feel magnetic fields - or even just smartphones, etc, should feel cyberpunk-futuristic as fuck, but instead it just feels like a continuation of the permanent present. A continuation of the end of history, rather than a new historical period.

I prefer not to think about how we've lost and we're nearing the end of humanity's history as a result. How, the present states are becoming so powerful that revolution seems nothing more than a delusional fantasy no different from the ideological bullshit printed on our plastic and cardboard distractions that somehow actually fucking work to sedate the population.

Good thread though

We'll never get there as climate change will destroy such nations and collapse Western society.

not gonna happen, is the other way around, it is the west that will become third world

independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-developing-nation-regressing-economy-poverty-donald-trump-mit-economist-peter-temin-a7694726.html

It was 9/11.

Eh, 9/11 was after "the end of history", it was a sign that liberal capitalism "winning" wouldn't yield utopia and definitely of high cultural impact, but other things had attenuated long before that.

In a laboured metaphor I'd say the 1970s were the local park, the 1980s were when that park was demolished by an evil businessman and replaced by a sterile shopping mall because the surprisingly diverse cast of teens just couldn't sing well enough to save it, the 1990s were when another generation of teens had a great time at the mall, and 9/11 was when the mall began a death spiral of selling produce for old women before going bankrupt in 2008 and now only hiring security people to beat up homeless folk who try to sleep there.

Good post OP I can definitely really relate to this. The sense that Western society is stagnating or even regressing with no positive vision of the future being articulated by anyone anymore.

An anecdote that I think relates to this. I have a group of friend who are relatively apolitical, but most are definitely socially liberal and some are vaguely anti-capitalist. One thing that really surprised me in talking to them was that many were hoping Trump would win the election (I'm not American so we weren't voting in it).

They weren't saying this in any kind of a left accelerationist sense or really for any logical reason. What it really came down to was wanting any sort of meaningful event to happen, wanting to see history in the making even if it was the bad kind.

I feel the neo-liberal "there is no alternative" mantra has led to a world in which everything seems so boring and pointless people are desperate for anything significant or consequential to happen.

I also think its significant that my friends are White Males. Every other social group is still being promised a better future through anti-racism and anti-sexism. I think this is a big reason for white male over representation on both the radical right and left. We are the only group who isn't being promised any more progress, but things don't really seem so great to us. Thus many people are desperate for history to restart whether its under the auspices of new fascist movements, new anti-capitalist movements, a war, an idiotic presidential candidate, just anything to shake things up.

Also obligatory Adam Curtis on Chapo talking about the melancholy of being at the end of history and imagining real change.
youtube.com/watch?v=VW_R98EBO7s

I definitely get this feeling mate. Somebody or some group is going to have to develop and fight for a better vision of the future or everything is going to hell. I feel a sense of responsibility to at least be ready to contribute to that in some marginal way. Just don't forget to do irl organizing as well it is equally important.

bumping

Yeah, I know what you're talking about, OP. Your sentiments really hit home for me.

A week ago, we had a thread talking about anime in the 80's and the 90's. An user talked about why pop culture in general this fascinating, hypnotic appeal to a lot of us. It's hard to describe it exactly, but it's best illustrated in Vaporwave: this (nostalgic?), hazy, almost retrofuturistic quality that commercials, video games, cartoons, anime, and movies collectively created for a lot of us.

In contrast, it's even harder to really articulate the feeling that we have towards the present. Is it trepidation? Is it regret? Is it fear? Is it a sense of fatalistic despair? I can't name it exactly, but I have the feeling that there are countless others of people around the world, imageboard users or not, who all have the same type of anxiety.

Here, you also touched on how many children have this weird perception of the future, where we expect to become adults in a society that's exactly like the one we grow up in, and I think that also adds to the sensation of hauntology. I don't know if it's just me, but I had this notion that I would "catch up" to the world, which would be waiting for me before it moved on. For example, I remember being excited at the idea that I could buy my own VHS tapes when I was older, or something along those lines. I never expected society, or the world in general, to take the unexpected twists and turns that it did.

Also, I recommend checking this channel out:
youtube.com/watch?v=Oqpr8LOkL1I
The videos seem rather mundane, but from the perspective of the present, they all drive home the hauntology that you describe. It's pretty addictive to look at these videos and observe that sensation.

I really loved capitalist realism. It seemed to sketch out this haunting feeling quite perfectly. But the whole thing felt really similar to Adam Curtis and I just end up at a similar place to where I was when I read the book. But both my praise and my problem stem from this ultimately being an affective political theory and because its based mostly in feelings (?) the theory is completely inactionable…

I think the issue is that it's essentially a political diagnosis, as opposed to a political treatment. It's great to know what the condition is, of course - but treatment remains elusive.

Now if only we could section humanity under the mental health act before it does itself a damage…

...

In my opinion the greatest benefit of transhumanism is that eventually we will be able to fix the psychological problems endemic to humanity which cause our species so much suffering. Sure, it isn't going to happen this century, but eventually it will be possible.

Quantum mechanics more or less rules out single-timeline versions of determinism. We're likely living an infinite number of parallel lives across all possible timelines. That's actually why I'm not too worried about the universe. If this version dies, others will live on in better universes.

This whole thread is gold and I wish we had more like this.
I've also been thinking about this a lot recently. Although I see it less as a future lost and more as post-soviet liberalism (being an ideological edifice serving only the pillaging of the welfare state) in west failed to ever provide any vision of the future. It is sterile and impotent. There's some vague whiggish notion that things will keep getting better and some promise of tech utopianism. The problem is that none of this has happened, Almost three decades later things haven't gotten better, crisis follows crisis, the recovery never arrives, job security is disappearing, families and interpersonal relationships become difficult to maintain, society become made up of atomised individuals in dreary, unfulfilling roles. As the conflict between being told things are getting better and the reality of them getting worse intensifies a feeling of hopelessness, apathy and nostalgia spreads throughout the culture. There's never anything to be excited about. None of the great new changes ever seem to really affect you but you're constantly told they're happening whether its gay marriage or some new tech gadget.

I live in a developing nation and experience hauntology too. I suppose it's a common thing to all countries that opened their markets (neoliberalism) to some degree.

10/10 thread, btw

Why not just escape into your imagination where you can generate worlds whose rules you determine and whose events transpire as a part of an existing narrative of history, where you are free to forget everything and accomplish nothing besides staving off your self-destructive nihilism

Joke's on you, I'm working on my tabletop game right now. It combines my love of making shit up with my love for arts and crafts.
It passes the time and it's seriously one of the few things I live for at this point.

Because doing so is the ultimate form of Ideology. It is exactly when we try to escape from it that we reproduce its structure in the fantasy of escape. And since we imagine ourselves now free, Ideology is that much more embedded in our unconscious.
In other words, dreaming of escape acts as a release valve for our actual feelings of unfreedom under capitalism. Instead of doing anything about it we turn the valve and feel as if we accomplished something, when in reality we only acted complicity with the behemoth.

Damn dude, I was just trying to have fun.

NO FUN ALLOWED jk I'm not a tankie

I'm currently trying to do this, but literally all I can manage is "what if neoliberalism died due to a few political twists in the 80s, leading to the restoration of 70s-ish society with 90s-2020s technology, including some of those elements of the future which we were deprived of. Also the USSR stays alive because reasons.", and with my limited understanding of a marxist outlook on history I feel almost guilty because it seems a bit too fanciful from a class-relations standpoint - though theoretically, i've wondered if "old money" bourgeois could make an alliance of convenience with domestic labour unions to punch the nouveau riche and retain their own relative social status (thinking "family owned big business" here, run by Montgomery burns tier villains who start to look like teddy-bears against the bland evil of the stock market), thus further re-enforcing the desired outcome. (Neoliberal myths of social mobility have made it such that I'd actively welcome an official class of lords and ladies - blunt honesty now has value.)

Alternate history is weird, and far too open to ridiculous fantasy. (Particularly "What if Carter/Callaghan had won", since both were already making neoliberal reforms when they were thrown out of office.) I should probably-really play/read/watch more proper fantasy or sci-fi so that there's at least a unique coat of paint on my uninspired social relations.

Also this I suppose, though I'm under no illusions that the fantasy is still oppressive - it's just a brand of oppression lukewarm enough that I could actually imagine myself and others doing anything other than focusing on how awful it all is.

your primitive cerebrum kept
trying to wake up from. Which is
why the Matrix was redesigned to
this: the peak of your
civilization.

laboured or not, i like that metaphor

Well shit, user. You actually might be onto something, considering that the culture industry climaxed around this point in time. Now everything made nowadays seems to have lost that special zeitgeist. Films? Nothing but capeshit, adaptations, or otherwise formulaic movies that are designed to cater to the largest number of people. Vidya? It's either the surplus of indie games that oversaturate the market, or triple AAA titles that are rushed, buggy, and require $100++ worth of DLC to have a complete experience. Anime? Mostly moe, harem, or half-baked light novel adaptations. Television? I'm actually stumped on this one. There's a lot of good shows to choose from. Most of cable television may be dead, but there are other avenues through which you can watch good programming.

That's the question on everybody's lips, isn't it? How do we break the conditioning? IMO, we don't. It breaks by itself. And it will, in a big way, eventually. But will there be communists, organized and ready to conduct the negation of the negation? I'm not so sure.

Walter Benjamin's arcades project is, I believe, an account of the origins of our world, the world of the commodity. Modernity has always been a rather eerie fairy tale place, haunted by phantasmagoria, visions of utopia and dystopia, sleepwalkers who go through their lives without ever waking up. That's what Baudelaire was on about, that's also what the surrealists where trying to capture, and, after the surrealists, the situationists, McLuhan. Before 'vaporwave' and 'hypnagogic pop' degenerated into self parody I suppose that's what they where trying to capture too. We haven't woken up from the dream of the 19th century.

The Arcades Project is also an unfinished book, what's left to us seems like a massive collage of preliminary notes, literary quotations and historical documents. In 1940, Benjamin chose to OD on morphine rather than allow himself to be captured by the Nazis, leaving his last great work unfinished. He was not only a critical theorist: for Benjamin, mass culture, critical theory, Kabbalah/ jewish mysticism (?), surrealism, utopia, phantasmagoria, revolution are all part of a whole which hasn't been realised yet. The future that never quite arrived.

monoskop.org/images/e/e4/Benjamin_Walter_The_Arcades_Project.pdf

proto surrealist cartoonist and follower of Fourierist utopian socialist though, JJ Grandville is also a recurrent character throughout the book. Really like his stuff.

Critics who draw on Benjamin's model of historicism have tended to sidestep the theologically inflected interplay of catastrophe and redemption that structures his thought. The mystical associations of redemption sit uncomfortably with the Marxist, poststructuralist and psychoanalytical dimensions of historical revisionism in an age in which the very notion of redemption seems suspect and untenable. Like the well-known allegorical image of the puppet controlled by a hidden dwarf that opens Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' the academic embrace of his thought, especially in literary and cultural studies, has for the most part kept the 'wizened' theological puppet master of a very particular brand of historical materialism out of sight. These dimensions of Benjamin's thinking are worth attending to and can cast this rather overfamiliar model of historicizing in an altered light.

At the heart of Benjamin's philosophy of history is the fragment and its dual character both as an index of the catastrophe of modernity and as the embodiment of a redemptive possibility. In the celebrated 'angel of history' passage of 'Thesis IX,' Benjamin depicts history as an ongoing 'catastrophe' that results in the ever-expanding accumulation of the shattered fragments of a broken world:

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." (Illuminations 249)

Apocalyptic as this scene might seem, in the rubble of history that piles up at the angel's feet Benjamin detects something worth rescuing: the remains of 'spark[s] of hope in the past' (Illuminations 247). Underlying this frequently cited passage is the co-presence of cataclysm and redemption that runs through Benjamin's entire philosophy of history. The 'sparks' that the angel seems incapable of recovering, but which Benjamin urges his historical materialists to heed, derive from the Lurianic Kabbalistic account of the 'breaking of the vessel' (see Scholem, 262-5). According to Luria's interpretation of the Zohar, God's divine light was supposed to be contained in ten sefirot or special vessels, but the light was too powerful for them and they broke apart. Falling to earth, their shattered remains became the kelipot or 'husks' of all that is malevolent in the world. However, sparks of divine light or shekhinah remain mixed among the kelipot, and the recovery and restoration of these sparks to their place in the 'ideal order,' as Gershom Scholem puts it, is 'the secret purpose of existence' (264). In Benjamin's 'Theses,' the malign 'husks' are analogous to the disastrous history of the bourgeois culture that heaps 'wreckage' at the angel's feet. It is the task of the historical materialist to sift through the debris of this history for shekhinah-like 'spark[s] of hope in the past.' Brought to bear on the present, grasped as part of the 'constellation which [the historian's] era has formed with a definite earlier one,' these luminous shards have a transformative capacity to constitute the present as 'the time of the now … shot through with chips of Messianic time' (Illuminations 255). In other words it is only in the moment of their recuperation into the present historical moment that the revolutionary promise of the fragments of the past can be glimpsed, and this transformative capacity inheres not in some essence of the fragments themselves but in the fleeting light that they can cast on the calamity of contemporary modernity and the prospects for imagining it otherwise.

Don't bother reading Ghosts of my Life unless you are actually British. I tried and couldn't understand half of it.

youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ

Franco Berardi has written about this as well.

libcom.org/files/AfterFuture.pdf
shop.aalto.fi/media/attachments/6298d/Berardi.pdf

Also here's some music from The Caretaker:

youtube.com/watch?v=L_Xp1waSpcQ

It's a great title, isn't it?
The link to Tony Benn's stint at Minitec is both hilarious and has a sense of truth to it.

What a whiny, wanky thread.

So, plenty of people on here were more upbeat as kids than they are now. Is that any way a new and distinct phenomenon? What do you think what bummer experience life has been for kids who grew up reading SF in the 50s and 60s? It was normal in the 70s to expect humans on Mars in the 90s, for instance. Yeah, and kids have more free time than working adults usually, no shit.

To get some clarity about what the Zeitgeist of an epoch is, if there is any to begin with, the first thing you must do is get away from your own biography. When you are a kid, stuff is new. For you. When you only know three movies, there is a good chance that the next movie you see is going to be the best one you have ever seen. Likewise with reading comics and many other experiences. You have to look at what people back then said about the time they were living in, the statements that were basically the same across different age groups. Maybe you can't find some unified Zeitgeist in that, but who said that every time and place has one? Hmm, time and place. That's another thing you should consider. Maybe a yankee has a good reason to describe the 90s as a decade of optimism, 90s Russia was hell.

Hey, I was a kid in the VHS era as well. I have a message for you, let me put it this way: You were a fucking dense child. That is all.

There's a very interesting theory background regarding this whole thing. Many of us who grew up in consumer society feel this strange feeling when looking back at our childhoods. It's almost like instead of childhoods we had a capitalism induced fever dream haunted by industrial society's myriad ephemera and phantasmagoria. Glimpses of another world amongst the banality. I grew up in neoliberal era Latin America and I've felt it too. Russian author Viktor Pelevin's book Generation P, deals with the post soviet equivalent of this aesthetic, imo.

youtube.com/watch?v=_1NaR4jr-8k

The thread isn't about simple childhood nostalgia, though (at least if I'm reading it right.), it's more like futures (promised in childhood or not) that never materialized but still float on the periphery of consciousness.
You've probably hit on the point better than anything with
And why isn't it normal now? Why has tomorrow been erased from existence? Why do we still conceive of the idea as individuals, but without any real sense of direction or faith in the thing? (iirc, NASA still pretend we're going to mars.)

Even the 1970s with their all-pervasive misery and declineism had some sense of the future, in clean energy, in space, in the functional-modernist synth music in the background of an open university lecture and the lingering modernist architecture of the postwar era. Hell, even in music or the sense that things can only get worse. Then someone turned off the faucet - now what? Stagnation. Events, without history.

psychogeography is a thing related to hauntology, but i don't know much but the word and that it relates to place as hauntology does to time.

"I was happy and now I'm sad" isn't a theory. What makes you think the dread an 80s kid feels now is fundamentally different from the dread a 50s kids felt in the 80s, working overtime to buy all sorts of plastic crap for their 80s kids?
And by "deals with" you mean he wrote a weird fantasy novel. Gr8 theory, m8s. And how is this going to help us build communism?

this is why i'm glad human history will soon come to a genuine end with the death of humanity at the hands of a vengeful, Venusian planet.

Dear cunt,

it is not my intent to glorify capitalism or to claim that society hasn't changed in the past 50 years or so in a way that could be theorized about. What I am saying is: This wankery over pop culture is going nowhere. It's not a model, it's not a theory, it's not analysis, it's just random babbling by sad shits. You don't turn that babbling into meaningful theory just by sprinkling it with words like theory or model while these words don't connect with anything else you are saying.

One of you dorks mentioned Pelevin, and guess what, in the late 90s I did read Generation P and also another fantasy novel by him, Buddha's Little Finger. Do you think that made me a more competent communist? If that stuff counts as theory, then Lord of the Rings also counts. Let's have an enlightened discussion about how the modern world is all about the human versus orks, your weed dealer is Gandalf and George Soros is Sauron. Yeah, that's some great T H E O R Y you have there, guys. I am going to Frankfurt with you, and we will stand in front of people utterly indifferent to anything, and you will say:
The crowd then totally flips out and will come with us and we will storm the banking district and I'll be driving the BLF tank.

Nostalgia is useless and your "theorizing" about is useless as well. To know what is technically possible, there is no way around spending time researching technology. You will not get that information about the potential by meditating about pop culture. There are questions how we organize in groups, how we structure discussions and decision making, and this has a lot to do with programming skills and math. You will not obtain these skills by watching old anime or listening to Madonna critically or any other BS you "intellectuals" do.

can you just fuck off and engage in pretentious pseudo-activity elsewhere?

The post is literally saying the opposite.
Yeah, unlike a serious discussion about hauntology and psychogeography.

Bump for salt.

ew lol for as much emotion as you put in there you seem to want to deny the emotional aspects of these T H E O R I E S. but I'm glad you brought up a bunch of meaningless points in here and reminded me to smoke more weed

Death to those who do not provide citations.

That would be a legitimate criticism if the topic under discussion was purely about pragmatical organization. It's not. It's primarily a cultural discussion. There's no point barging into the cybernetics thread and shitposting about how a bunch of math and coding won't describe cultural phenomena. That's obvious from the start. If this thread triggers you, don't reply. A simple rule few can bring themselves to follow.

It's the other way around. denies that this chat about emotions and nostalgia amounts to any sort of theory.

It doesn't have to be that way, but to level up, you need to get away from your own biographies and arguing by anecdote. When you hear some marketing jerkoff blather about generation X or whatever, do you mindlessly copy that talk, whether that concept actually makes sense or not, just to have conversation? Do you want to have a chat about how colorless green ideas sleep furiously? Talk to a cat then. It makes sense to talk about a particular generation or a particular period if there is a broadly shared experience among people who are in that category, an experience that they themselves see as important. Getting drafted to fight in World War I is such an experience. What's yours? The unjust cancellation of Firefly after just one season?

...

bump

Eh, it introduced me to Joy Division

Where the fuck do you live? Central-asia?

My cultural knowledge is ridiculously poor and my musical taste could best be aproximated by firing a shotgun at some kind of genre-chart from long distance.
Britain.

The arcades where ancestors to today's shopping malls-streets covered in iron and glass ceilings so Parisians could stroll around the shops even when it was raining outside, people watch, drink, gamble and amuse themselves with curiosities such as wax museums. Eccentric utopian socialist thinker, Charles Fourier, envisioned a free love communist utopia future in which people lived in Phalansteries, huge communal palaces with great halls and glass and iron covered passages lined by balconies.

me too, thanks

I think I get what you're talking about OP, like this longing and fetishization of the past/future that never really existed that is essentialized in a thing like vaporwave or afrosurrealism. We've ended up in this dead-end, absurdist world where nothing seems to make sense, unless mediated and distorted through a kind of virtual means. For me it's a nostalgia for things that never actually existed.

Might I recommend Ghostly Matters, by Avery Gordon. This is the only text I've ever read that deals with the sociological concept of "haunting" and provided the language to describe to the sorts of contradictions (ghosts/phantasms) that haunt our world. I find these to be the root of the kind of uncanny, eerie, and confused feelings we have despite all the distractions. Futures that never came and histories that have been conveniently effaced. That kind of thing. From what I remember, it talks mostly about race, but the concept has Marxist roots can be very easily applied to capitalism and modernism.

This is like poetry. I can feel it too.

Literally worse than political charts, which really does say something.
But I guess I should check my cultural/creative class priviledge.

REDDIT FAGS GO HOME

This. Nobody here is claiming that the past was completely idealistic (no matter what era you're from, some shit will always be taking place in another part of the world), but rather that their perception/world view seemed to be cloaked in this nebulous, haunting feeling.

It's from the introduction to Archaeopoetics: Word, Image, History by Mandy Bloomfield.

Y'all should watch this documentary. One of the best films of 2016. You can watch it on Fandor for free, I believe.

Thanks, user. That guy's stuff are, as you said, mundane, but there is something about them that makes you feel

What would you say are some musicians or bands that capture this feeling?

Obviously Burial and Kode9 - anyone else?

Why do you think someone was firing a shotgun at one?

I would say that if there was anything that encapsulated the feeling of hauntology, it would be the chill-out/ambient chill genre of music (not to be confused with chillwave).

From Wikipedia:
I think that the music really does reflect this. It makes heavy use of synthesizers and other electronic instruments, giving an optimistic "space age" vibe. Listening to it really feels like you're listening to the echoes of somebody's vision of the future, from the perspective of the past.

Stuff by "The Caretaker", "Boards of Canada", etc is some of the first names that came up when reading into hauntology itself.
It feels much more ghostly (and a lot of caretaker stuff in my experience actually goes back before the 1970s into the 20s and earlier) but it's some good stuff. That sort of sense of memories that never really existed is definitely there.
youtube.com/watch?v=0gNI1LYktP4

What do you mean about a lost future? A future that never came to happen? Those are all hypothetical what ifs.

Nope that won't happen. The west has a much smarter and more capable population than the first world. It's what makes first world, first world. You have garbage governments all over the world, the policymakers in the EU are probably more corrupt than some African countries (EU aparatus is not even elected lel). The real thing what seperates one country from another is the capability of production of the people. It's much higher in western countries than others. Autism Level and differences between race play a huge part in this.

As for the west becoming third world, well nope. Though there will likely come a large recession in the near future. EU countries are fucking up hard, northern countries won't be able to bail out Spain, Italy maybe Portugal but that will be a problem on top of Greece. It's just waiting to crumble. The United States has a much stronger position towards the EU, because the EU is just a group of countries and has no real federal unity. So with fiscal policy the US is naturally in a stronger negotiating position.

>(Neoliberal myths of social mobility have made it such that I'd actively welcome an official class of lords and ladies - blunt honesty now has value.)

Are you me? Perhaps that's what porky has learned from the 20th century revolutions: he can pork all he wants, as long as he plays along with the puppet show.

Bump. This is a good thread.

Hauntology touches on the concept of time and culture being perceived as an eternal repetition of the present. I think this subject is really interesting, and I’d argue that a hauntological perception of time is largely shared by the general population. This is true if you look at how the concept has appeared as a recurring theme in recent pop culture TV and cinema:

In Arrival (2016) the protagonist is a linguist whose tasked with interpreting an alien species written language. She soon discovers that their language doesn’t flow in a linear fashion, but in circular form. Once having learned their language, she also discovers that not only does their language follow a circular instead of non-linear fashion, but so does their perception of time. And in fully understanding their language she too gains the ability to perceive time in a circular fashion.

In Interstellar (2014) Mathew McConaughey is on a space mission to save a dying mankind through the population of desolate planets. Near the end of the film he’s thrown into a tesseract that can manipulate time itself as a physical dimension, using this to communicate with gravity, he is able to relay critical information back into time. NASA then uses this information to launch several giant space stations containing the surviving members of mankind. Looking at one of the space stations, its interior is tubular and built like a replica of earthly life. Life here literally becomes a circular repetition of the present, an imitation and a spectacle that’s timeless and never evolving.

In True Detective S01 (2014) the concept of time as circle is mentioned multiple times. Mathew McConaughey appears here again as Rust Cohle, a homicide detective. While arresting a meth cook/serial killer, he’s told by the arrestee that time is a flat circle, and that Cohle will arrest him again. Cohle picks this up, and repeatedly states this belief during the series; that time is a flat circle, everything is a repetition, and everything that has happened will happen again.

I think there are some important conclusions to be drawn from all this, although I haven't reached any myself.

It's much more low-brow but I'm reminded of that futurama episode where time loops forever.
I always found that a peaceful if scary idea. If you could make little manipulations (I think the futurama characters did) in particular. Death not being death, just the beginning of a period of waiting.

Maybe it's the boomers becoming sentient of their mortality? Or perhaps that's too simple an explanation, too general, ignoring the impact such thinking can have even on the young.

I think the concept of death not being death but a period of waiting relates to how we live in a crisis system of neoliberal capitalism, a system that by should by all means already be dead but keeps staggering on like a zombie (also explaining the popularity of zombies in pop culture.). I don't think it's merely a generational thing, I think the perception of time being an endless repetition of the present is very real to millennials; Many cannot move out of their parents basements and start a family due to the economy. They're therefore stuck in this frozen time between adolescence and adulthood.

Do you think that this has to do with the fascination of cartoons, anime, and other objects of their childhood that a lot of millenials have? I can't really articulate it, but I feel that there's been some kind of change in cultural expression, with regards to the media that some have started to produce.

It's not like it's specific to millennials. People of all ages get excited when they see something they remember. It's just that our parents or grandparents didn't have access to instantly accessible digital media. So when they grew up and got jobs or whatever they left Johnny Sokko and his Giant Robot behind for football or whatever because that's the social norm.

But now media doesn't rely on stations or distributors any more any now it's essential that demographics get expanded as much as possible so you have media companies dredging up long dead properties just to capitalize on and exploit this feeling of nostalgia.

I'm too lazy to build on it, but I feel a sort of strange longing for paternalism - which is very weird, because I'm generally quite suspicious of authority. It's just that the semi-lack of it - perhaps the official lack of it - is even emptier. (I suppose by analogy, think of neoliberalism as a parent who is distant and basically leaves you to figure out things yourself, yet still makes demands of you at inconvenient times - re-enforced by a sort of undeserved authority of being the parent, by de-jure fact instead of by actual role adopted.)

The way things are built on providing people with more of what they want, instead of envisioning new things they might want is an absolute source of doom. In light of thinking about it that way, Adam Curtis' "The Trap" sort of becomes more relevant again - because obviously, if you're trying to lead people to a better future, if you get them all up and active, they can goose step just as well as they can organise and educate.

We never learned to control the tendency, of course. We tried to take a shortcut, and it's not going to work. Indeed, on reflection I have to wonder if by building up this emptiness Neoliberalism itself will invariably lead people to goose-stepping for a second time - I'd say that on balance, I'm so sick of the present state of the world that it's certainly considerable. When told "There Is No Alternative", nearly anything looks tempting.

k-punk.org/precarity-and-paternalism/ Stuck with me.

This has been the collective response to the banging at the gates of power of our own 21st century fascists.

Digital reverie affords us a slower and more spooled out escape from the reality of the threat that is very much there; instead of waves of bliss passing over us until we die, though, we crawl anemically through graphical representations of humanity and communication.

It's like the old idea of software as a metaphor, a representation of the actual actions a computer is taking at the command line.

Because that's a little bit what it all feels like now. The rise of the meme is the apex of life as metaphor.

Trump is Hitler, not his own unique threat, the Russian menace is back in motley, but there's nothing new under the sun.

Even we on 'the left' try to replicate the successes of the past, and consciously ape the iconography, vocabulary, and methods of a dead age.

Part of the reason I think the aegis of the Haunt is so present is because we're all living in this dead age, just projected a few decades into the future.

Holla Forums even speaks constantly of spooks, and the 'spectre' that's haunting Europe.

All of our configurations were prefigured in the dead utterances of thinkers in the past, and the reason time feels so out of joint is that time is upside down. Things didn't turn out the way they were supposed to, and they never seem to.

We're trapped in a past mouthing the futur proche when all that's really left to us is le subjonctif

...

Does that fact that so many of us hear music digitally mean anything? Neil Young says it's wildly different from analog, but I don't have enough experience with analog sound to know.

Are our ears being degraded? Is this part of the malaise we're slipping into, that our sonic experience is so different than it was in the past?

I wouldn't know truthfully, I'm just quoting Mark Fisher. "Hauntology" was a word I didn't really understand and that helped clarify the image in my mind.

I think the defining thing would be the crackly sound of records, tapes, etc. The physical recording was imperfect, a different object, a sort of sign that time had been frozen. I suppose also copies decayed with time, etc, in a way that doesn't really apply to digital copies. Digital transmission allows a much more perfect simulation of presence. (Perhaps tepidly, from ignorance, I could suggest an uncanny valley effect? The imperfections of analogue recording being the smiley-face version of audio, while the not-quite-human digital sound contains some very subtle hint of wrongness. Of being too perfect. Perhaps headphones come into play there, since the impact of the acoustics of the room, is minimized, and the homogenising process thus aided. I should emphasise though, that this is the equivalent of Homer-Simpson's doughnut shaped universe. If I'm right, it's because I'm wrong.)

k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003703.html
came to mind there.

k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/000818.html
also really sticks with me, though I suppose it's not that relevant sound-wise I'm going to watch The Stone Tape ( youtube.com/watch?v=vtvJWKaDI9s ) at some point as a result.

Kneale has become slightly fascinating to me since k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/000679.html , I'm maddened by the fact I can't find a script - or even a re-enactment of - the film. The premise for The Road fascinates me, both in a temporal sense (being haunted by the future) and in a sort of more general way. (I'm very drawn to nuclear war, as a big abstract thing. Possibly because 1980s predictions of the end of the world align so well with the end of history, though without the distinctive cutting point of ATTACK WARNING RED, ATTACK WARNING RED.)
Tongue in cheek, but not quite so firmly as it ought to be, I'd suggest the reason is that we all died in a nuclear war some time between 1977 and 1989, and everything since has just been our ghosts floating around, unaware that anything has happened but strangely weightless.

wew

bump

Mark actually used to make mixes that he'd post to his blog. Here's a relevant one (though they all are, really): k-punk.org/this-place-is-nowhere-and-its-forever/

the weird thing about the 1970s for me is how prescient a lot of media of the time seems to have been.

I'm still somewhat convinced that The Limits to Growth ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth ) was broadly accurate and that we're heading full-steam-ahead for "Overshoot and collapse"
The film Network, with the money speech ( youtube.com/watch?v=zI5hrcwU7Dk ) in particular, but the film as a whole in how it looks at the media, etc. I'm sure there were more films like this, but my memory is pretty patchy.
Carter's "Malaise Forever" speech presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=32596 (That it is remembered as such, to me, says more about the American psyche than anything else could possibly ever manage.) is full of the stuff.
In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.
…
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

It could just be some sort of spotlight effect, and there are a number of predictions that didn't bare out - but the energy crisis and general sense of decline of the time seems like some sort of forewarning, a tremor. Like the 1970s disaster film antagonist hoist by his own petard towards the end of the film, we've ignored it. The hotel has been built on a fault-line. The walls have been insulated to mask further tremors, the building code has been ignored. Go back to sleep, everything is fine. Go back to sleep, breakfast will be served at 9. "I said go back to sleep!" yells the purple-suited gentleman beneath the wobbly chandelier…

I feel like, in a way, the worse ideological conditions of the times, and the gulf between your conforming, average mindset coming straight from the 50s and the new movement of the 60s and 70s, including up to hippies and their possible excesses, such an ideological gap between 2 or 3 generations tends to make you think more. That period was all about breaking barriers, "opening your mind", "raising your consciousness", etc. A lot of it evolved into New Age bullshit, but such an important movement in society is also bound to include and generate artists and thinkers, that will then create high-quality stuff.
There's a whole undercurrent of strong realism in the 70s, if you look at Jaws, The Exorcist, Chainsaw Massacre… even Star Wars, they're all movies that depicted a world much more realistically than your bombastic "classic" Universal monster movies. Even something pretty good like Incredible Shrinking Man felt a little wooden, or theatrical. There's a lot more "sensation" in the 70s, the flashlights and their noise and the closeups in TCM, sometimes the dialogues are almost incomprehensible in Alien, just like in real life. Sensation, but not sensational. Whereas now, that may be cliché, but the trend is quips and humor.
I think trends matter, and a trend of realism and breaking barriers is bound to give more interesting things than a trend of quips.

Also I definitely think it's possible that people are genuinely dumbed down by tv and the level of public debate.
You could almost say that we're still in the 70s; the problems that were raised during this period still exist.

That blog is fucking great.
Listening through mixes 100% of those I've listened to so far has had top tier Kanye material and reading about capitalist realism is comfy.
Fucking sucks.
Gonna go buy Capitalist Realism tomorrow.

I dig what you're saying, OP. I have felt that, for a while now, we have been unable (or unwilling) to imagine our near future, either in fiction or philosophy. It's like we're trapped in an unending 9/12/2001, when the excitement for the future, hope in progress and even possibility for a slightly less awful capitalism gave way to a general bleakness for the future of mankind because it dawned on everyone that the world was in deep shit, and as they have been told again and again, TINA. Like some author said, it seems far easier to conjure the most marvellous alien worlds than contemplate the smallest change to the System.

Culturally, I think we have been even more in stasis. We're flooded with overt nostalgia, stripmining of older culture, and popular culture became an endless circlejerk of references. No one creates anything anymore, everyone just parodies, homages, deconstructs, revisits, reboots or steals.

Absolutely nothing is worse than a wasted opportunity, especially in something as important as politics and political economy, and history is full of them. One tweak in a past event, and we could have been in Utopia right now.

The woes of abundance. You have everything you wanted, but you can't enjoy it. Might be because when you were a kid, a single game was something expensive and relatively rare, and thus had far more use-value to you. Or might be related to simply growing up, or to the depression/alienation epidemic. Or perhaps all of these.

Well that was kind of the point of having a bogeyman. You could argue that now it's "terrorism".

Not really happening, except kinda-sorta with China. Look at how few countries became developed in the 20th century. Singapore and South Korea are the only good examples, maybe Taiwan which is an outlier. The USSR is kaput. Petrodollar sheikdoms are monstrosities literally built on slave labor.

Alright, let me read some more posts before replying again.

I think the problem is not that we don't have utopia, it's that at some point we started to get uncomfortably close to it. Lifting millions out of poverty, world peace and increasing automation could have enabled most of us to have a life of leisure. But we don't want that.
Hedonism makes you numb, and in the long run it destroys you. Conspicuous consumption is the opiate for treating a deep seated sense of metaphysical emptiness, who's void cannot be filled up by "stuff".
The End of History as Fukuyama described it is not a paradise, it is a nightmare we wish to avoid.

We suffer from a lack of real challenges that defined the lives of our ancestors. They used to dream. They had aspirations greater than themselves: Colonizing other continents, conquering disease, spreading their faith, going to the moon. Great works of art, science and engineering that served as milestones that defined their eras.
Sure we've still had a a few. But most of that stuff was thought up decades ago. And it is far an in between. The sort of advances we've had over the past decades don't really compare with the sort of monumental achievements enjoyed in previous ages (Flight, electrical power, totally new fields of science, culture and engineering). The internet really is a release valve that masks the current era of stagnation.

This also somewhat explains the obsession with growth: The idea that maybe, just maybe, utopia is just around the corner if we add a few more dollars to the GDP. If we just consume a bit more we will find the "utopia" we seek. We're chasing the dragon. In reality it is the inverse of what we want. Or rather, need.
We now have survival without struggle. Consumption without sustenance. It fucks with our pysche because we aren't build to be live as plants. Survival at it's most primal level made life worthwhile. This level of depersonalization and alienation is causing our society to rot at it seems.

People escape in fictional worlds of heroes, disasters and atom-splitting apocalypses because everyday life is so completely and insufferably vapid. People join organizations like ISIS or vote for unhinged candidates not as much because they truly believe what they say, but because deep down they crave action and chaos. The End of the World as We Know It is preferable to wherever we'd otherwise be heading.
This "End of History" will (hopefully) just end like the last time we were at a cultural and existential impasse: The early 20th century. In fact, if we don't have a few world wars and continent ravaging ideological conflicts to spice things up soon, it will drive us to suicide and voluntary extinction.

For whatever is worth the opinion of a random user… I think that history won't have a Singularity, but will be punctuated by several technological singularities. The first being industrialization, and God knows what comes next, but I think it's fair to say that Gattaca and replicators will be two of them. Each singularity is an extremely strong tool to elevate mankind and build Utopia, but of course, that's not guaranteed to happen, because Porky and whatever elite replaces Porky in the coming centuries.

Regardless, one should not rely on future technology to solve mankind's problems. Pic related. We don't have to count on the future to save us, because we already have everything we need right here.

I think there is this unstated assumption in the far left, that its only real opportunities appear in times of immense crisis, the cabal examples being both World Wars. So we implicitly agree to sit here, twiddling our thumbs until WW3 or whatever, because we don't really know how to operate any other way.

I have the feeling that, if the left is to get anywhere, it must first memetically disinfect itself from the ghost of Leninism. For better or worse, disinformation of ML dictatorships are virtually everything that 90% of people know about the far left. I feel we need to bring back that promise of a better future that capitalism is failing to deliver, and not in a hackeneyed "power to the people, comrade". We ought to be more libertarian and, yes, more utopian, and this should be represented in iconography, lingo, design etc. with which to supplant the moribund left. I think this is to say, to hit the reset button not of leftism itself, but rather on what people perceive it as. The person that creates a leftist logo better than the hammer and sickle will be my hero.

ayy

Oh boy, personal hackeneyed theory time. I think that modern capitalism is, on purpose or not, infantilizing us. All it needs of us is to create surplus-value and consume. The latter can be increased if your demographic has poor impulse control, low demands, bad consumer practices, non-combative, obedient to authority, easily influenced by marketing etc. In other words, a child. We're being turned into mental children in order to become "better" consumers – "better" from Porky's point of view, of course.

I confess most of it is out of my area, but that ending:
Seems like a good match for my previous post:

Relates to a previous point in this post.

I'm a big fan of the "worst timeline" meme.

The what now?

Now that's a good summary of current capitalism.

Oh, I have no doubt that a lot of groups are doing this on purpose, but "dumbin down" isn't the right word, given the Flynn effect. But they are definitely polluting public discourse on purpose.

Look at the old commies. They generally just censored dissent and transmitted propaganda signal. Old capitalism transmitted both – much more propaganda than dissent, obviously, the important part is maintaining the illusion of true democracy. Modern capitalism, on the other hand, seems to be flooding all information media with noise, and if it didn't start as noise, the clash of excess signals becomes noise all the same. Which, come to think of it, is the perfect strategy for the groups: they fill media with shills, hacks, pundits and apologists vomiting all sorts of lies and disinformation. If the people believe them them, perfect. If not, it just adds to the noise that renders public debate unbearable.

A stupid musing I just had: In the nature of recording technology at the time (i.e. photo and film) the 1970s Britain seems so grey and dirty, almost soviet in nature. (I include the weather in that.) Even rural areas in sunny England often manage to give off a vibe of being stuck in the Scottish Highlands on a rather cold day.

But if you think about it, seen with human eyes - particularly in the rural area where I live - There'd have been almost no difference. I mean, the area hasn't fundamentally been changed in many cases back to the year dot (unlike cities or even large towns) and the 1970s played home to the 1976 heatwave - I'm not sure if it's been beaten, but we've not burned the planet up so much that it's normal yet. That grey, soviet country was actually (in my area at least) identical to the now, if not a bit warmer and with lights out at 10 'cos there's a strike.

There are two things that occur to me along these lines, the first is the way memory seems to degrade things in a fashion similar to film - i.e. my childhood is remembered in "lower resolution" or such, somewhat faded - which makes the feeling that the past was fundamentally distinct all the more powerful and helps to give a strange homeliness to the decade. (Even weirder, to think that people had eyesight before we had cameras with which to approximate it), and the second is the half-conspiratorial half-serious notion I hold to that there's a conscious process of disavowing the 1970s. Oh no, not then, dark and grey and cold and shit. A defence mechanism of neoliberalism or something. No detective, no need to look under the bed, no sunny weather there.

Reality is much stranger than we give it credit for.

Damn, you said it so succinctly. I don't know if it's the fact that every writer, artist, director, etc. is all collectively experiencing hauntology, even if it's on the subconscious level, but I get the feeling that a lot of the stuff being produced today is being produced in the shadow of earlier works. These earlier works themselves also parodied, deconstructed, referenced, and revisited, but now, it seems so jarring or forced. I can't explain why the reaction is so aversive. Is it because the works that are being referenced or brought back remind us of a more optimistic time; a time where we had slightly more hope towards the future than we have now? Or is it because new works try to capture the Zeitgeist of an earlier time, but fail because our world isn't in the same state as it was back then? Who knows.

Like mentioned, there's been a change in cultural expression. There's this fascination with the past that seems to permeate everything now–and it's not just limited to stuff in the United States, either.

vaporwave

...

I think you're conflating hedonism with conspicuous consumption. Sure, they're more or less the same thing in capitalism, but not in other modes of production. I don't see why hedonism couldn't be the end goal of a highly advanced, post-work socialist society, because once you eliminate the need for work, all you have left is pleasure or alienation, and I'm afraid to say, it doesn't seem to be a conscious choice. Take The Culture novels, for example. Lovely as they are, they depict a society that embraced hedonism wholesale, and the possibility of alienation is just handwaved away. Maybe it just reflects the author's personality.

About the challenges of ancestors, yeah I feel you. Not to go evopsych here, but on a primal level, we were built to live in small-to-medium bands, working cooperatively to desperately find our next meal. In nature, there is never lack of a goal. Civilization brings with it the possibility of ennui, being disposable and depression. The lack of purpose and/or goal and/or cause and/or meaning in life (whichever term one prefers) is, I imagine, recurrent and universal in post behavioral modernity societies, and will remain so, but this stage of capitalism is being particularly nasty in that regard. God knows there's absolutely nothing that I want more in life than a concrete way to help our cause. Not just distributing leaflets or whatever, but actually furthering socialism. It seems literally the only way to do that currently is joining the Kurds, and I don't have the health for it, and don't want to know if I have the balls or not. And the far left is pretty much the only thing I believe in, the only cause I have, so I'm out of luck. And, I imagine, a lot of posters in this board are in the exact same boat.

Moving on, I would say the obsession with growth doesn't stem from any desire for utopia or any brave motive. It's simply capitalism's drive. Adding this utopianism is just, paraphrasing Zizek, capitalism trying to assuage itself of its own newly-perceived guilt. Or just plain a marketing stunt. Or both.

Now this I found particularly insightful. I'll think on it.

Your last paragraph reminded me of this brilliant Orwell quote:

Now I must say, despite all our arguments here, frankly, this bleak interpretation of this crisis of alienation we're going through doesn't sit well with me, if only because it implies socialism is impossible. And beyond that, it might be falling into the old muh human nature fallacy.

Lastly, I would just like to add something about Buddhism. One of the central ideas, it seems, it to stop thinking in terms of goals and live day-to-day; focus on the journey rather than the destination. I think it's good advice, but not something you can control. God knows I wish I could live like that.

I think the most accepted answer is that we're stuck in the post-9/11 pessimistic, reactionary, inwards-turned zeitgeist. I guess you can argue that we're strip-mining old pop culture seeking more joy and optimism, but I dunno, I feel like it's too neat an explanation, not the least of which because these rebooted old pieces of culture aren't optmistic. Just the opposite; they abandon that original optimism and are filled with the current pessimism. Altho, of course, maybe I have just consumed the bad reboots and in general they actually are optimistic, but if they are, they sure aren't healing our zeitgeist.

I fear that, and I really hope I'm wrong here, that we stopped creating things and are strip-mining our pasts simply because we cannot create anymore. The collective unconscious, imagination or whatever you want to call it is barren earth, no longer able to create life, so we turn to the past because it's all we have. We have very much lost the future, exactly as the first posts of this thread talk about. Since we can't create new ideas, it follows that we can't create a new and better world. The end of history is true and it's a nightmare, like said, and we can only hope it'll end sooner rather than later.

I'm just not sure of the causality of things. It seems that the end of story caused vapid consumerism and alienation, while 9/11 made things worse by adding pessimism and reactionarism. Does this make sense?

You gonna have to be more specific, especially considering one of the characters actually is a spook.

I would disagree. There would still be suffering under socialism - that's inevitable.

But it's not bad. Riding a burst soda-can around the moon without being sure if you're going to freeze to death isn't an enjoyable experience, but it's the kind of thing that will inevitably happen on the march to progress. You fight it, you live and you learn. Even with near-FALC conditions, you're going to want people to explore beyond what they already know, shoot them into space and see if there's anything interesting - and sometimes things will go wrong, sometimes they're going to die. But they're going to accept the risk, because that's the price of moving forward, because they want to be amongst the first to show that you can actually get new shit done.

There's that odd general trend I find with most ideologies, not that i'm accusing you of this, (but particularly socialism/communism since they actually offer nice places to live, instead of just redefining suffering so that it's always deserved by the sufferer.) where there's a tendency to almost push things into utopian terms - if one person gets a papercut under socialism then we might as well keep capitalism. I've not had a papercut in recent years thanks to capitalism, what if socialism gave me that papercut?
Which to a limited degree is what I think Orwell was getting at - i.e. that the new struggles opened by socialism are often buffed out, leaving the much less desirable (but totally overt and celebrated) struggle of fascism to voice the alternative.

k-punk.org/shades-of-white-fear-and-justice-in-christopher-nolans-gotham/
By coincidence I was just reading this which I feel is relevant.

When you have only read three novels (seen five movies, etc.) in your life, the chance that the next one will be the best one you have ever experienced is not tiny. As time goes on, it shrinks, and it must shrink even if the distribution of good and bad is the same among old and new. The number of new bands or whatever that pop up in this year is tiny compared to the number of bands etc of the past 100 years.

I am not saying this is all what is going on, but the sort of "theory" going on in this thread is pozzed by extreme navelgazing and a way of free-form thinking that is no different from that of people who are into healing crystals and drink their own piss. Don't compare some random movie from today with memories of a movie that you fondly remember and draw bold conclusions about the world from that, it makes you a triple retard: You are not comparing the movies, but one movie as you experience it now with all the knowledge you know have about movies with some memory of how an experience felt when you were more surprised by telegraphed plot twists, more surprised by cool effects, more surprised by everything. A better comparison is when you watch both movies now, but you are still a double retard then. Why do you remember the old movie? It's more likely that you remember quality stuff. So, the less retarded comparison of pop culture old and new is to check out random movies old and new. Now, you are a proper pop-culture critic. Which is still retarded.

Is it really a bad thing that the author of those words killed himself?

youtube.com/watch?v=4-PkAQcuZOw

Not everything is theory, jesus christ stop being such a faggot and relax.

youtube.com/watch?v=1BmRiDxrnPQ
this is both funny and depressing at the same time

good thread

...

I've always wished someone could dumb down the story of how Hauntology went from a pun by some French guy into the term for spooky variations on BBC library music.

I mean, I half get it, but I'm also more lost than a city-dweller walking through a small town in the north of England circa 1973. Except it's always 1973 because this is a hammer horror on repeat. Here comes the cannibal blacksmith wicker female edward heath vampire occultist, don't let him hit you with his gramophone of terror!

...

A thought I just had: Fundamentally, does neoliberal capitalism not reject character development?

Both in the individual's case (ranging from distrust of ideologies that want to "improve man", in part this is "muh human nature", but it also goes beyond this to assert a concrete sort of human nature even the capitalists of the postwar world would have objected to.) and in a more media-oriented way (only producing iterations on what worked before, because people won't like new things, nor could they be "taught" to appreciate new art, or whatever.)

Presumably extending from this some sort of knock-on impact on fictional character development, which if my reading when pretending i was going to be a writer taught me anything, is sort of important for making good stories.

bumping just in case this vanishes while I'm asleep

Only half related, but I might as well save this thread from oblivion:
The idea of European unity in the 1990s is fascinating in this sort of light, perhaps like the positive vision of the end of history. (In a purely theoretical sense of positivity - I'm not saying there's a "good neoliberalism")

It's quite strange with hindsight when you see how disunified Europe is, that - at the time - it could've seemed unification into a federal state was a reasonable prospect for the future. Indeed, this is what spurred me to the thought - the airline-simulation game Aerobiz Supersonic from 1994 treats the Maastricht signing as the creation of a federal state - "The dream of the European peoples to become one is achieved in the formation of the European Community" - and changes all national flags to the EU flags at that point onwards. In the game's then-future scenario running from 1995-2025, the EU extends all the way to Russia! Sadly, like the brief return of Supersonic airliners around 2008, (in the words of Adam Curtis) this was a fantasy, but it's a very interesting fantasy, because it's completely organic - this is a very political statement, a very politicised view of how the world could become - but it's just background context to a game about airlines, it's not intended to be a message or a period piece. So that it was a vision that seemed normal enough to include in such a "dry" context is fascinating, because it vanished so quickly into the aether.

Was it like the Concorde industry and done in by 9/11 and poor luck? Or like TWA and already on it's last legs from decades of other issues, 9/11 just providing convenient cover? Who knows. Perhaps we are living at the end of the end of history.

A woefully inadequate one.

...

Yes the future came, this is important because the future can't really come, it is always the present, but yet it came, because we where not envisioning the future, but the specific future of the year 2000. As image board dwellers you all know from experience how people tend to see round numbers as significant, the same mechanic that makes 9.99$ seem more affordable than 10.00$, makes grandmas 90th birthday a bigger event than her 91th, and gives us the urge to divide history in to decades to be nostalgic about. And so while the 1950's man might have said; "we are living in the future", no one believed it more than those that experienced 2000, well except perhaps those that experienced 1900.

The difference from the man in 1900 who had invent the future and therefore started ill conceived ideas like bolshevism and fascism, was that in 2000 we had a pretty good idea of what the future looked like, mainly because we had watched a lot of sci-fie. The future was free marked capitalist, with flat interactive screens every room, many many more tall glass buildings, and maybe some flying skateboards and gadgets like that.
We got the televisions, we got the screens and televisions, we even sort of got the flying skateboard. The problem is that noting is as good as in the movies. So we know that we live in the future, we know what the future looks like, but everything is just a little bit off. Reality is a imperfect copy of the future we know, so little by little reality starts to fall in to the uncanny valley, until one day reality is no longer as real or emotionally fulfilling as the fantasy it parodies.

I confess I can't tell if you're agreeing or sarcastically disagreeing with me. The pic seems to support my argument.