It’s not the failure of the imagination to think of a future that isn’t the mulling offspring of a unholy marriage between state-sponsored and state-subjugated capitalism (I know, but it is both-and). It’s nostalgia predominating as the only possible affect cluster, the lens through which the world is viewed. The foreclosing as illegitimate the idea that the best is yet to come.

Phase one: Yes I could live in the world of 1980 or 1990 or 2000 - look back at that splendor.

And conversely, its aider and abettor: the future is a bleak graveyard. Those poor miserable fucks of the future - they won’t be able to exist in fully human ways. The robots will win, the seas will rise, the episodic major scale extreme events will come more quickly and wreak devastation of a higher intensity over a larger area. Oh the ominous path to come.

The certainty that what is to come will be worse is the ordinary unhappiness of historical positioning, and we haven’t yet submitted to the couch and the dreams and the envy and the attachment theory of the mirror stage. We have not yet begun to begin anew.