Late Futurism – The Future as a Mode of the Present

Il futuro desertifica / La vita ipotetica / Qui la vista era magnifica / Da oggi significa / Che ciò che siamo stati non saremo più – Baustelle
(The future desertifies / The hypothetical life / Here the view was magnificent / From today it means / That what we have been will be no more)

Design Hustler

For some time now I’ve plunged, against my better judgement, into the abyss of LinkedIn, and I’m not even sure why. The first time I had ventured there, several years ago, the reason was clear: I wanted to understand the workings of the platform in relation to the behaviour of its users. The investigation resulted in a chapter in my book Entreprecariat, where I argued that LinkedIn was the social network par excellence because it embodied, in the most blunt and ruthless manner, the competitive logic existing, albeit concealed, in all other social networks. At the time, however, I believed that designers did not take “the parents’ social media platform” too seriously and preferred other channels for finding work and sharing ideas.

I was wrong. There’s a type of designer who straddles user experience and service design on one side and academia (somewhere between systems thinking and speculative design) on the other, posting content that resembles Instagram motivational quotes in both length and quality. People (Designers?) who have worked for Google or IDEO, or who have launched some very expensive summer schools dedicated to more-than-human design and now propose drab rehashes of already worn-out ideas, ideas whose vitality has been sucked out by countless artistic-academic manifestos. One among many: friction as a positive quality of interactions, as a mindful moment of awareness—only to indulge in an unearthly rage when Gmail doesn’t load for half a minute. This is how we go from Luna Maurer’s performance Emoticons Don’t Have Wrinkles, powerful because it embodies friction literally, as her yellow-painted face is projected in tremendous enlargement throughout her performance—to a banal motto slapped onto a lazy Canva template.

But the key concept that seems to bind together these design hustlers—hustlers because their exceedingly obvious self-branding activity confirms the previously stated thesis about the importance of LinkedIn—is that of the future, or rather futures, strictly in the plural and strictly preferable. Corollary to this notion is the category of imagination, often endowed with the radical attribute: a faculty to be unleashed against our tomorrow. Indeed, many design hustlers call themselves futurists or futurologists, but I prefer to call them late futurists. To elucidate why, I will have to go on at great length, and for this I apologize in advance.

Requiem for a Dream

First, a confession: I have a hard time taking the whole conceptual scaffolding that supports preferable futures and the radical imagination seriously. Of course, just as there are, within this system of ideas, naïve and simplistic variants, there are also more subtle and elaborate ones; but my skepticism invests its fundamental assumption: the belief that the future, whether conceived as singular or multiple, lies further along the timeline; that the future is what, in a more or less predictable, more or less surprising, more or less controlled way, has yet to happen. Sadly, the future is not that, or rather is no longer that. From my point of view—and not only mine, as I shall show today, the future is nothing more than a mode of existence of the present, a style; to put it more bluntly, a senescent idea that drags on to us. 

It has not always been so: in the 1950s the future possessed a spatial concreteness that stood as a guarantee of the temporal one. It was within sight: all one had to do was to look up to the sky and observe the moon. That natural satellite was the future, and our distance from it, measurable in miles, also represented a temporal distance. However, the future as a ‘’world to come’’ came to a halt once we set foot on the Moon. As a matter of fact, it was already staggering. According to J. G. Ballard, “science fiction has always departed from the principle that the environment is dynamic, that changes were taking place in it, until the recent period. Now, the idea of the future is almost dead. No one plans 1995 the way people planned the future during the 1930s. The past, like the future have been annexed to the present.” Ballard places the breaking point at the end of World War II: “Probably the first casualty of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the concept of the future. I think the future died sometime in the 1950s. Maybe with the explosion of the hydrogen bomb.” The point, however, is not so much to identify the precise decease date as to make up one’s mind once and for all to hold a funeral.

Ballard was perhaps the first to address the mourning but certainly not the only one. In 2013, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi described the “slow erasure of the future,” a concept later taken up by Mark Fisher to chronicle the corrosion of the artistic infrastructure in post-Thatcherian Britain. In 2015, David Graeber gave voice to his generation’s deep albeit unexpressed disappointment over the unfulfilled dream of flying machines, symbol of a bright future (a future that, according to the author, has not been realized because, from a certain point onward, there has been more investment in disciplining technologies than in imaginative ones). In his book New Dark Age (2018), James Bridle spoke of the end of the future in an even narrower sense, namely, as an erosion of the human species’ memory and ability to think. In the same year, Peter Lamborn Wilson (better known as Hakim Bey) argued that: “we have at last reached the Future, and […] the truly horrible truth of the End of the World is that it doesn’t end. One big J.G. Ballard/Philip K. Dick shopping mall from now till eternity, basically. This IS the future—how do you like it so far? Life in the Ruins: not so bad for the bourgeoisie, the loyal servants of the One Percent. Air-conditioned ruins!” And to conclude this somber review, in 2020 McKenzie Wark wrote a letter addressed to the future, understood, however, as the actual recipient:

Dear Future, I don’t believe in you anymore. Nobody does, but nobody will admit it. You were the last of the Gods to die. Or maybe: you will be the last God to die. It’s hard to get the tense right. Did you ever exist, or did you cease to exist? Did we kill you or did you die? […] No sacrifice will bring you into existence. That’s not how history ends. We won’t be reconciled. The absolute never comes. We’ll fuck and laugh and live our little lives as best as we can.

However, if the future is no longer what, like the dreaded Baffone, “has to come”^¹. “A da venì Baffone” is an Italian expression referring to the either hopeful or fearful arrival of Stalin, the man with the big mustache (baffone)., but rather a mode of the present, this does not mean that the pendulum of History has halted. It is therefore useful to make a distinction between the future as an old idea looming in the present, and the new, that seething magma that presses upon the present, shaping it, until it redraws its features, making it unrecognizable. Thus, the new is what produces a new figure, but to do so it must disfigure the present. If the future is different, the new is other. While the future speaks, the new acts. To better understand this distinction, it is worth examining how futures studies conceptualize the future and comparing this view with some interpretations of the concept of the new.

Lorusso 2019.
Silvio Lorusso. 2019. Entreprecariat: Everyone is an Entrepreneur, Nobody Is Safe. Eindhoven: Onomatopee.

Ballard 1995.
J. G. Ballard. 1995. Il futuro è morto: Psicogeografia della modernità. Milano: Mimesis.

Berardi 2011.
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. 2011. After the Future. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Fisher 2014.
Mark Fisher. May 21, 2014. “The Slow Cancellation of the Future”. Talk at MaMa, Zagreb, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ.

Graeber 2016.
David Graeber. 2016. The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, And the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy. Brooklyn: Melville House.

Bridle 2018.
James Bridle. 2018. New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge, and the End of the Future. London: Verso.

Bridle 2018.
Lamborn Wilson. 2014. “The New Nihilism”. The Anarchist Library, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-lamborn-wilson-the-new-nihilism.

Wark 2020.
McKenzie Wark. 2020. “Letter to the Future”. Ssense. https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/culture/letters-to-the-future.