One of the things that’s struck me the hardest about the new year is that nothing has seemed to change. Perhaps it’s my being naive, but there’s a part of me that still believes that the passage of time means something. I wanted to believe that the dawn of 2025 would ignite something in us, that we’d lurch forward clear-eyed and ready to do something.
That has not been the case.
The incoming Trump administration has not been met by a 2017-style Resistance, but by a series of prostrations, each more debasing than the last. The so-called opposition has crowed its acquiescence the loudest, with everyone from Ro Khanna to Bernie Sanders to Tom Suozzi kissing the ring.
On the tech front, the A.I. bubble, like the crypto/NFT bubble before it, continues to grow unabated. Nevermind that A.I. has not demonstrated profitability, it has not demonstrated a valid use-case beyond bullshit content generation (already termed “slop” by actual humans and avoided like the plague). Nevermind that the resources required for it make it an environmental catastrophe. Companies continue to throw it into everything, regardless of whether anyone wants or needs it.
On the artistic front, we continue to see heartless franchise films and soulless reboots dominate the cultural landscape at the same time as TV shows and movies that evince soul and artistry are met with crickets, crumbs, and cancellation. 2024 was the year that shows like “Our Flag Means Death” and “Scavengers Reign” were cancelled, while various permutations of the same Disney remakes and Marvel movies got billion-dollar budgets. Inventive games that received sterling reviews are apparently not enough to keep game developers on payroll. Various studios cut their best-and-brightest loose, all while executives talk up the promise of A.I. as if it can do anything to make a game good.
It’s only been a week, and it’s enough to make you want to holler and throw up your hands.
I recount all of this not because it is some new nadir but because it is the same old song. This has been the state of things for at least the past 10 years. The relentless march towards mediocrity, the failure to learn anything, the continued death of the future. Mark Fisher wrote extensively about this on his blog and in his published works.
He wrote about the “slow cancellation of the future,” a phenomenon in which 21st-century culture is marked by “stasis” and “anachronism” wherein the psychological perception of progress is disrupted, and replaced by a “crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion.” A cursory look at 20th century politics and culture reveals a wealth of future-facing expectations: flying cars, luxury communism, pan-Africanism, space exploration, scientific development, and more. However silly, there was genuine belief that there was something beyond the horizon of the present. There was discourse and deliberation about who would rule the future, but there was a collective belief that there was a future.
Now, of course, there were limits to a lot of these visions. As writers like N.K. Jemisin have noted, many of these visions for what the future would be did not include Black and brown people, queer people, the disabled, etc. But for every vision of the world tainted by the bigotry of the present, there was something like Drexciya or the Arkestra or Combahee: radical, bold visions of a future not just populated with marginal people, but driven by us.
These kinds of visions are few and far between, and largely “relian[t][…]on styles that were established long ago.” The futuristic sounds emergent in 2010s R&B have been trashed for 80s/90s revivalism and a revanchist eye towards cheap Motown imitation. The techno-utopia has become a feudalist nightmare, with the walled gardens of Meta, Apple, and Google growing taller by the day. The New Deal-era vision of social democracy that grew larger and more inclusive with each successive Democratic candidacy was first killed by Jimmy Carter, but even he can be held up as progressive in comparison to the trenchant conservatism of the Harris 2024 effort.
This colonization and defanging of the new is part of the broader death of the future, and contributes to what Fisher, borrowing from Derrida, terms “hauntology.” Hauntology is a term meant to describe what happens when the colonization of the vanguard is successful. The victorious present, perpetually indebted to the past and devoid of new ideas, is disrupted — in fits and starts — by the echoes of the futures it has killed.
We see this in the 90s and Y2K revivalism that’s occurring right now. People longing for something that’s new, something that evinces a future in which they can belong, are mining past sonics, aesthetics for guidance. The future that could have been had the promise of the 90s and 2000s not been killed in its crib haunts the present in the form of the garage and drum n’ bass revival, Y2K indebted fashion, the rejection of social media and of modern technology. It’s worth noting that some of this looking-back has been very harmful: instead of embracing the radical queerness and openness that defined the millennium, there’s instead been a turn towards traditional gender roles, antiquated ideas about sex and gender, and an embrace of strongman/authoritarian posturing. But even this is not new — in the same way that, post Civil Rights movement and Vietnam, the flower children cut their hair, went corporate, and turned out for Nixon, so too did the children of the 2020 uprising backslide into the comfort of Twitter gender wars and Trump.
In some sense, this blog (both as a project and this particular post) are hauntological. The retreat into discrete internets, of blog rings and personal pages, is the ghost of the early internet lurching forward to haunt the present. Fisher’s writing, indebted heavily to Derrida and other post-modernists, haunts this post and a good chunk of my others. Alternate timelines and possible futures live on in us, even as the Real scares and confounds.
But it’s not enough for us to dig up dead futures and wear them like thrifted jackets. Our imperative is the invention of a new future. We can, of course, look to the radical promise of the Black Panthers, to the writings of California socialists like Angela Y. Davis or Ruth Wilson Gilmore, to the cultural criticisms of Mark Fisher. But we cannot be so moored to them that we do not strike out and seek to break free of the cyclical death march of neoliberalism.
Not to sound too Nietzschean, but it is incumbent upon us to create new ways of being, to make art that isn’t slave to the sounds and strictures of the past, to dream of new ways of governing, of living. We must discard the things that don’t serve us. It has been clear for almost a half-century that the systems of the present — of unlimited capital accumulation, of culture wars, of cis heteropatriarchy, of techno-feudalism and surveillance capitalism — do not serve us. They are killing what brings us joy, they are killing our future. But worse than that, they are killing us at a soul level.
I can only hope that 2025 becomes the year that, instead of us, these necrotic value systems die.
