Dude, where’s my 22nd century? – On the Burnout of Future Images

Both the harsh whispers of the Puritan work ethic and the desperation of children not to disappoint their parents (neither new nor insignificant) emphasize that in exploring their own future, humans have always been stalked by a sense of doing the forbidden.

As the individual experiences an ever-growing sense of acceleration provided by technological developments (new media and the “speeding up” of the infosphere) alongside a general decrease in security of past provisions and expectations (read: precarity, freelance positions, housing shortages, and increasing wealth disparities coexisting with rhetor... See more

Collapsing under the pressure of time-flows between completed and noncompleted time, a person’s ability to imagine the future falls away. While wrestling with the past and dealing with the present, concern for the future – any future – pales in comparison to making it through another day.

An overlap between the experience of temporality in the contemporary condition of burnout and time-flow in relation to social change has emerged. There is an intervention to be done, one that speculates on how these two apparently separate concepts have begun to overlap, revealing potentially exciting qualities in one another.

One holds onto an aspiration for back to normal (although the desirableness of that version of the present has come under question as well) and thinks of recent events as mere hiccups and minor diversions in the greater scheme of things.

From a cultural perspective, Fisher contrasts the cultural energy of the 20th century with the languors of the 21st: While 20th century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t fee... See more

If social change is a push-pull process “in which a society is at once pulled forward by its own magnetic images of an idealized future and pushed from behind by its realized past,” without a magnetic pull from the front, how are we to move out from the stagnation? The mass phenomenon of the burnout directly reflects the troubles of our cultural im... See more

This period has been addressed by Franco Berardi, and later by Mark Fisher, as “the slow cancellation of the future.” Referencing Moishe Postone’s 1996 book Time, Labor, and Social Domination and Spencer Leonard’s 2009 essay, “Going it Alone: Christopher Hitchens and the Death of the Left,” Wolfe writes: The ceaseless proliferation of the new now p... See more

We, however, are preoccupied and tormented by the haunting of what was and by the eternal Long Now.We are so burnt out from surviving the present (and the lingering past) that considering what could be seems but a naïve hobby – one that, ironically enough, few of us have time or energy for.

Suspended in the Long Now, we are paralysed between an overhanging past and the supposedly limitless opportunities before us. We are preoccupied with surviving today, while disappointment and crushed “prospects” abound, inhibiting our ability to dream beyond tomorrow.