0Image: British Flag in London by 117PXL via Wikimedia Commons
We live in a world haunted by our past. Musicians rehash the sounds of the 70s, 80s, 90s. We dress in Y2K. Our cinemas are filled with sequels, remakes or biopics of dead people. Our government finds itself flogging the carcass of a politics from 30 years ago. Society feels stuck in a fog of nostalgia.
This is one product of the internet age, wherein events, people and ideas are immortalised and replayed back to us on a continual basis. Such a process has created a now that is undefined, muddled and confusing. Within the popular imagination, AI is the future. Yet this encapsulates the contradiction of our era, for it is trained on millions of fragments of our past. Everything AI creates is just a complex remix of ideas that have come before, and it is hence by nature incapable of true original thought. It embodies the cosplay of progression that can be seen in all domains of British life today.
There is an argument that this world of remixing the past is an inescapable stage of a society’s development. It is also unsustainable. It has made it largely impossible for the public to envision any sort of future, bar the dystopian nightmares of Black Mirror and Hunger Games, or the fear mongering of Trump and Farage.
A pessimistic outlook only serves to benefit [the ruling class], and it is of no coincidence that their media platforms have, up until now, failed to provide a real vision for the future.
On the contrary, it is evident that the ruling class, those who control the means of information, thrive off of the lethargy. A pessimistic outlook only serves to benefit them, and it is of no coincidence that their media platforms have, up until now, failed to provide a real vision for the future.
Yet we cannot stay scared of the future forever, and this is where I find the optimism in life. The hunger for something new, properly new, is palpable in Britain. Our generation will not have it easy- that is a fact. Out of this discomfort there has to arise a vision of the world, a language to make sense of our reality and remould the things that worry us into sources of hope.
The hunger for change flares up in obscure places. For example, see the rising tendency for ‘quiet quitting’ in UK offices, wherein employees are proactively doing the bare minimum they are asked of at work. See the explosion of Depop and Vinted as a replacement for traditional shops. These are organic lifestyle changes that subvert any sort of politics or organised movement. Where it would traditionally be tempting to label these trends as anti-corporate or environmentalist, this future transcends the language of the past, and the immense baggage that political terms have amassed. As the world around us becomes increasingly unequal, apolitical responses like this will become exponentially more common, if only through necessity.
From this logic, there is obviously a brooding pessimism on the immediate state of British life. Yet the natural long-term conclusion to this can only be optimistic, there has to be a break from the cycle of nostalgia, providing a route to a genuinely fairer and brighter future. We just don’t know what it is yet.
In the end, pessimism serves only the 1%. An optimistic outlook serves us all.
As a young person in Britain, I feel optimistic about my future
We live in a world haunted by our past. Musicians rehash the sounds of the 70s, 80s, 90s. We dress in Y2K. Our cinemas are filled with sequels, remakes or biopics of dead people. Our government finds itself flogging the carcass of a politics from 30 years ago. Society feels stuck in a fog of nostalgia.
This is one product of the internet age, wherein events, people and ideas are immortalised and replayed back to us on a continual basis. Such a process has created a now that is undefined, muddled and confusing. Within the popular imagination, AI is the future. Yet this encapsulates the contradiction of our era, for it is trained on millions of fragments of our past. Everything AI creates is just a complex remix of ideas that have come before, and it is hence by nature incapable of true original thought. It embodies the cosplay of progression that can be seen in all domains of British life today.
There is an argument that this world of remixing the past is an inescapable stage of a society’s development. It is also unsustainable. It has made it largely impossible for the public to envision any sort of future, bar the dystopian nightmares of Black Mirror and Hunger Games, or the fear mongering of Trump and Farage.
On the contrary, it is evident that the ruling class, those who control the means of information, thrive off of the lethargy. A pessimistic outlook only serves to benefit them, and it is of no coincidence that their media platforms have, up until now, failed to provide a real vision for the future.
Yet we cannot stay scared of the future forever, and this is where I find the optimism in life. The hunger for something new, properly new, is palpable in Britain. Our generation will not have it easy- that is a fact. Out of this discomfort there has to arise a vision of the world, a language to make sense of our reality and remould the things that worry us into sources of hope.
The hunger for change flares up in obscure places. For example, see the rising tendency for ‘quiet quitting’ in UK offices, wherein employees are proactively doing the bare minimum they are asked of at work. See the explosion of Depop and Vinted as a replacement for traditional shops. These are organic lifestyle changes that subvert any sort of politics or organised movement. Where it would traditionally be tempting to label these trends as anti-corporate or environmentalist, this future transcends the language of the past, and the immense baggage that political terms have amassed. As the world around us becomes increasingly unequal, apolitical responses like this will become exponentially more common, if only through necessity.
From this logic, there is obviously a brooding pessimism on the immediate state of British life. Yet the natural long-term conclusion to this can only be optimistic, there has to be a break from the cycle of nostalgia, providing a route to a genuinely fairer and brighter future. We just don’t know what it is yet.
In the end, pessimism serves only the 1%. An optimistic outlook serves us all.
George Dixon
As a young person in Britain, I feel pessimistic about my future
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