The Future Is Here

It's just not here for you.

Disorientation runs deep, and it is certainly persistent. One would think that Donald Trump’s climbdown from his punishing tariffs would be reason for celebration. And it would if it weren’t merely a prelude for something else just as monumentally stupid and destructive. How much more expensive are goods going to become? Will my job still be here in a year, six months, one month? What, ultimately, are the prospects of pushing back when there is a clear political will to cast any dissident into a hole they might never come out of?

Highlighting this epic flail is the fact that we still aren’t sure just how to characterize this new moment we’re in: not just Trump but the whole global rise of the far-right, with its chainsaws, its brimstone rants about trans people and immigrants, its gleeful cruelties and conspiracy theories.

Were the tariffs a death blow to neoliberalism? And if so, do their persistent obstacles mean that free market fundamentalism is alive and well? Is it fascism? Is it still neoliberalism? Fascism with neoliberal characteristics? Illiberal neoliberalism?

These questions become tiresome. I’m partial to the argument that this is “both not yet fascism and not-yet-fascism.” What continues to elude us is the affirmative. What exists in place of the not yet? Do Trump, Netanyahu, Milei and all the rest even know? There’s a good chance they don’t. For the past few years it’s been consensus that neoliberalism is dying, but what replaces it has yet to come into focus. Something something morbid symptoms something something.

Call it serendipity, but, notably, all this comes simultaneously to a debate about the nature of what we call the future. Or, perhaps more specifically, how we conceptualize the future, particularly those of us who spend our time agitating for a better one.

On April 2, Tribune published Luke Cartledge’s review of Liam Inscoe-Jones’ book Songs In the Key of MP3, which lauds artists like FKA Twigs, Earl Sweatshirt, SOPHIE, and Oneohtrix Point Never as “icons of a new internet age.” Inscoe-Jones, and by extension Cartledge, use these artists to push against Mark Fisher’s influential “cancellation of the future” thesis. According to the authors, Fisher’s assessment that neoliberalism – with its privatization and commodification of cultural resources – had effectively stymied cultural innovation was either exaggerated or premature.

While Cartledge broadly agrees with Inscoe-Jones’ arguments, he also asserts that other writers do a more thorough job in rejecting the ways Fisher situated music against time. He particularly highlights the work of Anna Kornbluh, and Paul Rekret’s recent book Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis. Cartledge’s review and its critique of Fisher has prompted a long and thorough response from Mattie Colquhoun on their Xenogothic blog. Colquhoun – former student of Fisher and editor of his posthumously published Postcapitalist Desire lectures – defends Fisher’s thesis and attempts to better situate it in what they see as its various mischaracterizations from Cartledge, Inscoe-Jones, and Rekret.

Cartledge’s review and Colquhoun’s rejoinder are worth reading. So, for that matter, is Rekret’s Take This Hammer, which illustrates music’s relation to work not as a narrow category but as a fundamental pillar of existence under capitalism that touches all facets of life.¹ His mapping of the temporalities of trap music, ambient, and post-vaporwave forms is incredibly incisive, and his arguments around Fisher’s “cancelled futures” and “popular modernism” are thought provoking.

I cannot speak to Inscoe-Jones’ book, simply because I haven’t read it. But turns of phrase like “icons of a new internet age” should give heartburn to anyone with brainwaves. The impression is that Inscoe-Jones’ arguments only stay intact by demurring from the insidious forms of social decay instilled by and indeed coded into the internet. From the algorithmic narrowing of sonic variety to the almost lightning fast recuperations of anything remotely novel or dissonant, it is tough to make the case that the internet has been a net positive for music or culture. Arguments to the contrary just sound like something Paul Mason would say fifteen years ago. Too much has happened since for it to be a viable argument anymore.

We could say that artists like FKA Twigs, SOPHIE, and Oneohtrix Point Never (all unique and fascinating artists) represent a dialectical opposite to the all-encompassing enshittification of the internet, an alternative of radically democratic plugged-in ontology. But such a future only needs to be suggested in the first place because of the dominance of futurelessness. Ergo, without simply repeating Colquhoun’s arguments here, I find myself agreeing with their defenses of Fisher’s formulations.

At the risk of stretching the category beyond its usefulness, all forms of capitalism have involved cancelled futures. From the enclosure of the commons that robbed the peasantry of their livelihoods to the automated pop ups reminding us that time without the hustle is wasted. One of Rekret’s most salient points in his arguments is that the Fordism which popular modernism apparently longs for always denied a viable existence to the racialized and oppressed. But most of the white men who supposedly shared in its abundance were also being denied something. Living as an extension of an assembly line, performing the same motions day after day after day, partaking in meals and leisure at only set and allowed moments; these are the characteristics of what Walter Benjamin called “empty time.” Time of dull repetition, each moment largely indistinguishable from the previous one. Time without discovery or evolution. Dull. Numb.

It may be better to be exploited and bored by capitalism than unexploited and starving, but the point is that both exist on a continuum. What we might call the “organic composition” of empty time was unique during the decades of high Fordism. Its mollifying comforts were more accessible on the whole (at least in the “developed world”), its temporal shapes more tightly wound. Hence the significance of the pivot, of the break with empty time provided by mass protest and global revolution. It’s why supposedly privileged students found common cause with lumpen Black militants and why many blue collar workers embraced the counterculture.

This begs a question, not of temporality necessarily, but of historicization. The typical (if oversimplified and static) view of Fisher’s ideas is that popular modernism’s high points fell roughly between 1960 and 1990, while the slow cancellation of the future comes after, concomitant with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the triumph of neoliberalism.

But if cancelled futures come standard in capitalism, and if some form of popular modernism can be found beyond the fall of Fordism, do these respective terms mean anything? Are they worthwhile categories? Or does their permeability simply turn them into distinctions without difference? Furthermore, now that the system that ended history and canceled the future has itself finally ended, does this mean futurity is back? If so, what does this mean for the construction of an art and a viewpoint that can provide real liberation?

History never sections itself off quite so neatly as our categories would like it to. It never simply ends one epoch to start another. Opposed models of untrammelled trade and protectionism always jockeyed for dominance in capitalism. Whichever prevailed was often down to contingent factors, chance maneuvers or victories for this or that section for this or that class. Similarly, different structures of feeling predominate in various moments by expressing – in admittedly contingent and chaotic ways – the crass drives that keep capital moving.

Neoliberalism didn’t kill the impulse that drove popular modernism, but it did radically disrupt its routes of expression. Keep in mind that while social safety nets were eviscerated, the rate of exploitation overall increased in these decades. Working longer and harder for less in return became an expected part of daily life, leaving less leisure, less time to recover, more stress numbing people’s emotional and intellectual capacities. Time itself became emptier as algorithms made labor more flexible. Strategies for coping became similarly profitable, particularly after everyone’s phone started to give them access to the virtual entirety of all known human information. Doomscrolling became a favorite pastime. What Fisher described as “depressive hedonia,” what’s now becoming known as “cheap dopamine,” further flattens our existence into something more akin to what the situationists called a representation of life, rather than life itself.

We should also keep in mind that part-and-parcel to this, streamlining the narrowing and deadening of daily life into a sequence of undifferentiated non-events, is the shaping of artistic output into something that often denies audiences any sense of alterity. In the post-Spotify age, it is difficult to think of even something as tame as MTV’s earliest years, when programmers enthusiastically featured some rather experimental artists. Let alone the kinds of explosions that characterized popular music through the 60s and 70s. It isn’t that contemporary versions of these same experiments aren’t happening. Just that the algorithm has made them into exceptions that prove the rule. Until they don’t. But that outcome is contingent on forces that have not yet managed to cohere.

This is just one more example of how technology, imprinted as it is with the values of late capitalism, is far more bound to exile us from active participation in history and the future than it is to aid us in creating them. How this looks, however, cannot be understood past mere sketch before it happens. That’s the unpredictability of the superstructure. When we ponder the day when artificial intelligence finally takes our job, we know it won’t be as simple as the Kids In the Hall arms-in-a-vat-of-dead-fish sketch. It won’t be our boss saying “sorry buddy, but corporate gave me no choice” before wheeling in a massive server with a red light that insists on calling you Dave. Until Trump’s climbdown in the middle of last week, it might have looked like a tariff list cranked out by ChatGPT. It still could.

For the time being though, however much the underlying forces of this moment might present in a different shape, its functions and mechanisms remain the same as they ever were. The form has changed, but it has yet to negate the content. The future is here, it’s just not here for you. It never was.

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Header image is from Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s art installation Not Everyone Will Be Taken Into the Future.

1. An excellent book, whatever disagreements I may have with it. Review forthcoming.