We must attempt to reclaim some proximity to the future. We have to stop strip-mining yesterday and act as though the future is already here.
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It’s Beginning to Feel a Bit Like The Future
I turn 40 in a few weeks, and I’ve realised something.
That it’s beginning to feel a bit like the future.
Looking around in 2025, the future I was sold as a turn of the millennium teen has arrived: pocket supercomputers, wireless internet, AR glasses, VR goggles, and synthetic minds. Yet, the part I needed: an affordable home, a stable climate, data privacy, and fresh water free of microplastic, never really showed up.
The future worth growing old in was drowned in a bucket in the name of profit.
It feels like the future has run out of road.
Vanessa Andreotti calls this moment “the storm where ways of knowing are dying” Where the tarmac ends, the work of hospicing modernity begins. We must stay by the bedside of a story that can no longer walk.
Dougald Hine says that the condition of modernity can be measured by a society’s proximity to the future. How close it feels and how much of it is sensed ahead. Bruce Sterling made a similar point in his closing keynote at Interaction 2011, noting how, for the Victorians, media was full of future: in postcards, Jules-Verne and world-fair dioramas etc.
“You could hardly open a magazine in the 1890s without stumbling over a chrome-and-steam vision of the year 2000” he said.
Late-Victorian culture was an era of high colonial modernity, and as a consequence of that worldview, they lived with a surplus of future. Their future’s horizon was more than a century ahead. We, meanwhile, struggle to even picture five years ahead, we have mislaid our sense of the long now.
The Victorians overdosed on a ‘single story of forward’ and it influenced all that came after. Our task is to hospice their dying stories and midwife what may come next.
I was in my twenties when I fell into Solarpunk, and I’ve spent much of the last decade arguing that we must re-future society. Imagine new possibilities, new ways of living and being in the world. It’s not, and has never been, a call to rekindle the logic of modernity, or to push back the future’s horizon. But instead it’s an invitation to sketch out the landscape on the other side, to speculate on whatever’s coming.
We need to reconnect our 2000 year old eschatological hunger and obsession with teleological progress – the sense of movement along a timeline – back into culture. We don’t need a single straight line, nor to make predictions. Instead we must refill the future with possibility.
On July the 2nd we passed a midpoint; every sunrise now places us closer to 2050 than to 2000.
I’ve been reading Colette Shade’s book: Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything. Essays on the Future That Never Was, and having lived through that era, I realise the year 2000 now feels as distant as 1975 did at the time. forever ago.
Perhaps this distance explains the resurgence of Y2K.
Since the crash of 2008 our culture has swung on a Janus-shaped hinge: once future-oriented, it pivoted towards the past. But now box-office returns for Marvel films are sliding; Star Wars soon turns fifty; and corporate media continues to culturally frack the last millennium while fashion loops nostalgia ever faster.
Hardly anyone is talking about 2050, let alone 2100.
In my adult lifetime we’ve become a civilisation that looks backwards, and this pivot from future to past is (I think) a consequence of fraying narratives and ossified economic structures.
We stopped looking toward the future, and instead stare at the past because we cannot bear to face the present.
Yet it is precisely from the now—from an honest reckoning with the present—that possible new futures emerge. And we must fill them with spirit and story, and both can only arise from living ground.
In the book of Genesis, Lot’s wife looks back at Sodom, and is struck down by God, turned into a pillar of salt. I have always read this as an allegory for nostalgia. A gaze turned toward a past robbed of vitality. Salt, inert and crystalline, entombs her longing; she does not perish by fire but by inertia.
Nostalgia evokes history without life. It treats the past as though it were no longer alive, yet in reality, the present is nothing but the living outcome of that past. And if we linger too long on an inert yesterday, we too risk sharing Lot’s wife’s fate.
Sterling’s 2011 challenge still stands: “try to find a picture of 2100 today and the page is blank.”
Which is why we must at least attempt to reclaim some proximity to the future. We must try to fully inhabit possible futures. We have to stop strip-mining yesterday and act as though the future is already here, because in many ways it is.
We do not need 2100’s chrome skylines sketched out in neon; we need conversation, and kitchen gardens, and mutual aid that practises 2100’s ethics today. We must also try to midwife the not-yet future without suffocating it with recycled utopias.
Every morning now tips us further into the un-imagined. Possibility is underfoot, not over the horizon.
Solarpunk, at its best, is part of this midwifery: a seed catalogue rather than a master plan.
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