In an essay published in April 2020, Arundhati Roy likened the pandemic to “a passage, a gateway between the present world and the next.” Global destruction would take the old with it, to allow us to step into a brand new reality.
According to the World Economic Forum, the pandemic presented a “rare but small window of opportunity”. He claimed that financially the pandemic was the “reset” we needed. Academics, analysts and journalists have tried to predict this ‘new’ world, on the other side of the rainbow. Countless articles were written about “the future after Covid”: catering, tourism, work, relationships, fashion, concerts, etc. And just like that, we hit “restart” on the Future. We declared her longing for the “Next Phase” of humanitythat is, a world where everything would either change radically or be restored to the way it was in the past.
It didn’t happen – or rather: it doesn’t happen – neither of the two.
If the post-Covid era has given us a new development in the history of the future, it is perhaps a widespread – if little perceived – sense of stagnation. To put it simply: Are we finally getting bored?
Recycled art
The New York Times had written that we live in the least innovative age when it comes to the arts: “For 160 years, we have talked about culture as something active, something in motion, something in constant forward motion. What happens to a culture when it loses that speed?’ It’s not that there aren’t cultural products and new content (everything else). It’s just that that “something” that will mark a new era is missing, that dive “inthe bottom of the Unknown to find the new!”, Baudelaire would add.
The 80s, the 90s, the indie sleaze of the 00s are back in fashion and now the 2010s. Currently on Netflix we see the series ‘One Day’, which is set in the period 1988-2003. If we did not know that the events take place in the past, we would hardly understand it from the actors’ styling, which is not very different from the clothes worn by young people today.
‘Murder on the Dancefloor’, a song from 2001, has been trending on Tiktok for weeks, given new life when it became the film’s soundtrack Saltburn. Nicki Minaj’s record ‘Pink Friday 2’ is one of the most successful of the year, breaking one record after another. All his songs are based on samples of older tracks and the disc itself is the sequel to Pink Friday, which was released 14 years ago. On the radio a voice informs us that they are playing hits from “the 70s, 80s, 90s and today”. Which one today? Why does every decade up to the 90’s have its own sound and style, while “today” is a vast 25 years? Shopping for furniture, I notice that everything looks like “something” else: retro 50s sofas, funky 80s mirrors, Victorian lamps, minimalist, Scandinavian tables and maximalist, Persian rugs. Really, is there anything that isn’t an imitation of another era?
Mind you, the above does not mean that there are no talents. There is vast and endless talent out there, sometimes recognized and sometimes not. The question that arises, however, is the following: why is cultural production no longer progressing at the same pace as it used to?
We look a little down, don’t you think?
For some years now, something has remained stagnant: in museums, in the political arena, in dance halls, in studios, on the radio. This is not a new observation. Philosopher Arthur Dando argued that art ended with Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, while literary critic Fredric Jameson declared in 1984 that the whole of modernity“was spent and exhausted”, that there was no new style, and that “producers of culture have nowhere to turn but to the past: to the imitation of dead styles”.
The shock of the future
In 1970, futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler coined the term “shock of the future” to explain the experience of “too much change in too short a time”. According to this theory, repeated, dizzying changes would sooner or later paralyze us, socially, culturally and politically. Today, four years after the pandemic, we observe that we never crossed the threshold of the future. Not only that, but a series of ongoing crises is forming on the horizon. Where is the “After” we’ve been fantasizing about for so long? Why did speculation and predictions fall so far?
Countless articles are written every day about new trends in social media, fitness, food, style and decoration. These short-lived micro-trends feed our need to belong for a while. But let’s not laugh. They are not expressions of a single “Next Phase”, rather they are distinct subcultural elements, soon to be replaced by others. The vicious cycle of trends (and the attempt to predict them) may have intensified with social media, but it’s nothing new. Millions of former trends were buried in dusty piles of magazines and forgotten blogs – trends that promised to bring this “new” into our lives.
The next big thing: The death of ideologies?
The course of civilization may mirror that of the economy. Yesterday’s ideologies promised us a perpetual march forward, but after a big boom, there was a long, slow, frustrating slide. As the economist Robert Gordon has shown, the transformative growth of the period between 1870 and 1970—the “peculiar century,” as he called it—was an anomalous super-event fueled by unique and unrepeatable innovations (electricity, sanitation, public works, domestic machinery combustion), whose successors did not have the same economic impact.
Perhaps, again, it is the fault of what happened at the beginning of the 21st century: first, we dived headfirst into the sea of endless information on the Internet. Soon after, our digital lives were subjected to the “orders” of algorithms. The digital tools we embraced were heralded as catalysts of cultural progress, but they have caused such chronological confusion that progress itself, the Future, means almost nothing today. Before us lies a global collective unconscious where Pipast, present and future exist simultaneously.
Perhaps this is the spirit of our age: the lack of a single spirit, the death of the next new ideology “that will save us and take us forward.” If such a thing is true, it is not necessarily good or bad. In the midst of repeated crises that hit us, it is difficult to envision the future, a utopian almost god-sent future. But crises may not be the preparatory stage before the “Next Phase”, but normality itself. And the “Next Phase” will inevitably come, that’s for sure. Until then, it pays to see the future, not as something that will be brought to us by the overlords of technology, but as the result of our own actions – big or small.
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