Sublime

Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.

Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.

Why are these kinds of stories so hard to sustain, so often subsumed by negative and dystopian visions when the fact is, nobody can predict the future. Assuming dystopias has an element of self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s also unlikely things will unfold exactly as anyone predicts.

Pallasmaa draws substantial implications from this situation, including the loss of our ability to truly imagine alternative worlds.

Why are these kinds of stories so hard to sustain, so often subsumed by negative and dystopian visions when the fact is, nobody can predict the future. Assuming dystopias has an element of self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s also unlikely things will unfold exactly as anyone predicts.