Out of Time

Set in the 23rd century, Alasdair Gray’s 1994 novel A History Maker anticipates contemporary drone and surveillance technology combined in the ‘All Seeing Eye’ that acts as both broadcaster and policeman. This idea of us living in the world of fictions past is a recurring one as we try and meme our way into understanding the dystopian present.

From the cliched trio of 1984, Lord of the Flies and a Brave New World come more pressing and urgent examples as the MAGA misogyny anticipates a theonomic society and ends with women donning the dress code from Gilead in protest at the contemporary patriarchy.

The Handmaid’s Tale –  Margaret Atwood’s best-selling novel, is the story of life in the dystopia of Gilead, a totalitarian society in what was formerly part of the United States. Facing environmental disasters and a plunging birthrate, Gilead is ruled by a fundamentalist regime that treats women as property of the state.

Exploring this theme of feeling like you’re living through a post-modern fiction, Dan Brooks references a JG Ballard essay from the 1970s in which: “our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality.”

This is interesting not just because it is an example of how ‘out of control’ we feel – literally living in someone else’s narrative but also feeling like we are in end-days.

Brooks writes: “In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.”

This idea of cultural disorientation is a key theme in Mark Fisher’s work (Ghosts of My Life, The Weird and the Eerie) and his idea of the ‘slow cancellation of the future’. We are living not just in the fragments of post-modern fiction but in a culture where a complete lack of originality is dominant, where we are only re-treading and re-gurgitating previous culture (particularly in music).

In Ghosts of My Life he writes: “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.”

“It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”

But if sci-fi predictions from fiction are coming ominously true through, emerging into real life, so too is the future specifically anticipating AI. In 1966 Star Trek introduced the Universal Translator capable of decoding and translating unknown languages. In 2019 Babel Fish emerged and from that Google Assistant Translator Mode now translates 27 languages in real time. 1984s The Terminator predicted as self-aware AI weapons programme SKYNET which attempts to wipe out humanity with a nuclear strike.In 2019 the US army develop ATLAS (Advanced Targeting and Lethally Automated System). In 1989: Back to the Future features smart glasses for television and phone calls, and a smart watch which can precisely predict weather. In 2012: The Dark Sky app provides custom alerts on the weather to the minute. 2013: Google Glass is able to make calls, send texts, display photos, and provide directions. 2015: Apple Watch comes enabled with WiFi, Bluetooth, a GPS, and even a heart sensor. The convergence of outlandish projections from the past continues as the AI revolution quietly accelerates beneath us.

I asked Co-Pilots take on the slow cancellation of the future:

“Mark Fisher’s concept of “the slow cancellation of the future” can be seen in various aspects of contemporary culture and society. Here are a few examples:

1. Music and Film: The prevalence of remakes, reboots, and nostalgia-driven content in music and film. Instead of creating new genres or groundbreaking works, there’s a tendency to recycle and repackage past successes.
2. Fashion: The cyclical nature of fashion trends, where styles from previous decades are constantly revived rather than new, innovative designs being introduced.
3. Technology: While there are advancements in technology, many innovations are incremental rather than revolutionary. For instance, new smartphone models often offer only slight improvements over their predecessors.
4. Politics: The stagnation in political ideologies and the lack of visionary leadership. Many political movements and parties seem to be stuck in old paradigms without offering new solutions to contemporary problems.
5. Urban Development: The gentrification of cities, where old neighborhoods are renovated and repurposed rather than creating entirely new urban spaces.

These examples illustrate how the future feels “cancelled” because there’s a sense of repetition and a lack of forward momentum in various cultural and societal domains.”

That’s really not very good or interesting, but it’s close. What we are experiencing is a world in which cultural stagnation and stasis is combined with radical almost unimaginable technological change.

Writing in his recently published The Darkest Timeline, Bram E Gieben talks about what he calls ‘a radically atemporal moment’ in which “All historical eras, but in particular the vivid, imagistic, mediated truth-events of twentieth century history and aesthetics appear super-imposed over each other, taking place simultaneously. This represents the total commodification of history, making the present also radically unthinkable…”

He goes on: “We’re at peak re-make, trapped in the prequel problem – our fates already known and assured, replete with false promises and choices that lead nowhere. We’re at the event horizon of cultural singularity, beyond which there is only collapse, and forgetting. As such we are free to enjoy comfortable dystopias … Science fiction is not just escapism or prophecy, it is the literature of those dispossessed from the present and alienated by the future. The only true future is already here.”

This idea of the present being ‘radically unthinkable’ is a major obstacle to political change. Dan Brooks suggestion that “sooner or later, we must become authors again” seems a bit glib, but it is worth remembering that sci-fi was once a way of imagining new worlds and opening our imagination to possibility.