The Ultimate Resonance: Boards of Canada and the Sound of 2026

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Dear 2120,

I’m sending you a message about the new Boards of Canada album. It’s called Inferno, and it’s  the mysterious Scottish duo’s first LP in 13 years. To you this album isn’t new. It’s nearly a century old. I’m bringing it up in this very one-sided conversation of ours because the music is what we call a sign of the times. It articulates what so many of us have been struggling to say. The confusion, the frustration, the anticipatory grief, the hyperobjective transformation happening in real-time, on our ever-restless screens as we worry about the kind of future our children will have to navigate. If you want to get a sense of what living right now actually feels like, this album is a pretty good place to start. 

The metacrisis moment

Boards of Canada’s ominous hexagon sn

The endless theorizing about our volatile geopolitical moment – the metacrisis, the climate crisis, the Epstein files, AI, the genocide, the far-right resurgence; how these connect, intertwine and intersect, and what it all means – that’s been covered pretty exhaustively by our talking heads in the media.

Things are getting worse. They’ll quite likely get a lot worse before they get better. We’ve got a pretty good grasp of the intensifying change happening all around us. But up until now it’s been too complex and elusive to capture through art in a way that makes you feel what that feels like.  

To put it another way, art made about the metacrisis has, up until now, always felt slightly off. Kind of dilettantish. Try-hard. And very performative. Regardless of the level of ambition or well-intentioned effort it has, with a few notable exceptions, fallen short of capturing the unadulterated mindfuck that is the 2020s. It fails because it tries to commentate on the crisis rather than inhabit it. It has watched it from afar, perched on its cozy institutionalized vantage point rather than channel and embody its deeply fucked up energy. 

Somehow, Mike Sandison and Marcus Eoin have become the bearers and mediators of that energy. Wherever it is they live in rural Scotland is the nodal point, the lightning rod absorbing how we collectively careen on the edge of the abyss and stare deeper into it with every new calamity we’re confronted with by the unrelenting news cycle. 

Head-pounding prophecy

Take the album’s first single Prophecy at 1420 Hz. Supported by a video created by visual artist  Robert Beatty, it gets underway with a cinematic Middle-Eastern flute. In the video, swirling light shapes, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Israeli iron dome rockets launched against Gaza, create a visual framing for the flute as it leads us into what suddenly becomes a  surprisingly goth affair with chiming, downcast guitar. What’s more, the sound design exhibits a textural digital crispness that feels invigoratingly sharp as it cuts through their trademark analogue haze with determined precision.


Not only that, but halfway through the track you realize that the BoC-brothers didn’t come to play on their fifth album as they summon a warped and demonic AI entity from another realm that’s possibly the future. ‘I AM GOD, THE ULTIMATE RESONANCE’ it proclaims – a genuine WTF moment for long-time BoC-fans like myself. Not because it isn’t amazing (it is) but, in my opinion, one of Boards of Canada’s greatest strengths has always lain in their subtlety. Their unparalleled ability for teasing out deep emotional resonance with few elements. Prophecy is an entirely different beast altogether; it throws the duo’s well-known talent for evocative restraint by the wayside and takes a big fucking swing in a glorious all-out assault on established good taste and expectation. By trading their signature analogue warmth for a colder digital signature Sandison and Eoin could be admitting that the past can no longer protect us. The comforting retro-haze of the 20th century has officially curdled into the hyper-accelerated digital panic of 2026. They aren’t looking back anymore; they’ve been forced to look forward, and it sounds terrified and terrifying. 

I was completely floored on the first 20 listens. It’s Boards of Canada, but from some alternately evolving timeline – which probably has a lot to do with the alternating times we live in. The strength of Prophecy was actually so impactful that it created the paradoxical effect of making me ever so slightly nervous that the brothers had pulled out their biggest gun early in the game in a marketing ploy to sell more records (hey, we all live in late capitalism – Warp Records are no exception). 

Thankfully, my fears were put to rest when I finally sat down and listened to the whole entire thing. This wildly rich and expansive journey through space and time. People are comparing it to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. With the exception of The Guardian who lambasted the drum programming and what they thought was dubious interrogation of religion, the critics love it, too.  Rarely have so many reviews become thinkpieces stepping out of the traditional music review framework. And with good reason; Inferno is just so interesting sonically and thematically. It prompts wider and deeper analysis. Which brings us to:

The Boards of Canada lore


Every Boards of Canada album launch is surrounded by intense speculation and relentless analysis. Every little detail is pored over, no aural stone is left unturned. The music is littered with symbolism, allusion, nods, winks and all kinds of surreptitious narratives often pulled from esoteric and occult sources. Inferno is no exception. In fact, it just might be their most reference-laden album yet.

To be honest with you, I never went too deeply into all that stuff. I’ve always been fairly crap at math, and I thought dissecting and arguing about possible interpretations of a given 70s sample on obscure message boards were for budding incels and people with an abundance of time on their hands. Up until now, I’ve just enjoyed the way the music makes me feel. However, with the launch of Inferno, I’ve changed my mind a bit. The references and the symbolism lend the listening experience an intellectual and thematic framework that you’ll be hard pressed to find on other contemporary albums. 

Here’s a small fraction of Inferno lore lifted and repurposed from the delightfully nerdy Bocpages  

Track HighlightEsoteric & Occult AllusionsScientific / Mathematical Anchor
‘Introit’Liturgical introduction opening a Christian holy communion mass.Sets the thematic baseline of structural ritualism.
‘Prophecy at 1420 MHz’Features Islamic scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr declaring God as the ultimate resonance.Points to the 1420.4 MHz hydrogen line frequency targeted by SETI for extraterrestrial life detection.
‘Age of Capricorn’Samples a Christian televangelist weaving prophecies of the antichrist and Nostradamus’s “Mabus.”Direct astrological nod to the zodiac age succeeding the idealized Age of Aquarius.
‘Naraka’References the distinct purgatory/hell realm found in traditional Buddhist and Hindu theology.Combines murky, low-end bass with ecstatic, looped Hare Krishna chanting.
‘The Process’Evokes the 1960s apocalyptic cult, The Process Church of the Final Judgement.Mimics an automated, algorithmic breakdown using distorted, synthesized text-to-speech word salad.
‘I Saw Through Platonia’Interrogates the absolute loss of linear temporal movement.Concept from physicist Julian Barbour suggesting time is an illusion; built completely over a raw human heartbeat.

As you can probably tell, Boards of Canada don’t play when it comes to their conceptual storytelling. You could spend decades decoding the music (as I’m sure many people have), and still not get to grips with everything.  

The sound of now


But what of the music itself? How does it actually sound as a cohesive body of work, and how does it make you feel? Speaking from within the 2026 context, my main takeaway is that it has reawakened my aural curiosity and to some extent my belief in music as a catalyst for transformation. That’s no small thing, obviously. Again, this is because it feels like the duo inhabit the zeitgeist rather than produce perspectives on it. Inferno is on fire in the best possible way: 


There’s the upliftingly sinister vibe on Age of Capricorn where a faded voice switches between ‘Mabus’  (a predecessor to the third antichrist, or the antichrist itself, according to Nostradamus) and simply ‘marvellous.’ It’s hard to tell the words apart. Needless to say, the ambiguity is something else.  

Then there’s Naraka, a bass weighty banger full of dread and danceable hooks that ends in joyfully uttered Hare Krishna samples. This would be corny AF on any other record than this (I’m still not completely sold on it, to be honest, but when you’re dealing with an LP of this magnitude – and all-out conviction – you tend to give it the benefit of the doubt).

Further on, Into the Magic Land hits an emotional register I can only describe – somewhat feebly and reaching – as out of this world. Interdimensional. From some place I know very intimately, but also feels decidedly alien. It’s a sort of comforting eeriness that envelops you, making you feel warm and cold simultaneously. It’s genuinely new in some way I struggle to describe. Maybe that’s why it’s so uncanny.

On Blood in the Labyrinth, you get the sense of a duo becoming increasingly emboldened in their newfound stylistic groove as they introduce a sitar, infusing the track with a 60s-psychedelia filtered-through-a-20s-lens vibe.  

And You Retreat in Time and Space is a French Touch moment with disco-noir vibrations suddenly pierced by cacophonous sci-fi blockbuster brass noise that might not sound out of place on Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories – from the upside down. 
Underneath it all I’m hearing multiple musical currents run in and out of the foreground: tinges of kraut-rock, generous helpings of Italian horror maestro Dario Argento’s opulent synth-driven soundtracks – and maybe even a bit of classic Dopplereffekt electro.

Questions to explore


Let it be said that I’m a die-hard fan. I’m more biased than most, but if I pull my head out of my ass for a split-second or two I might say: Boards of Canada are electronic music royalty living in complete isolation in rural Scotland, entirely insulated from the physical realities of the genocides, climate collapses, and economic ruin they are supposedly mediating. Isn’t there a deep, hypocritical paradox that I’m letting them slide on – blinded as I am by their creative fortitude? Is their hyper-isolated silence a form of artistic purity, or is it the ultimate luxury of privilege, withdrawing into a Scottish fortress to aestheticize our suffering into expensive vinyl packages and deluxe flexi-discs for late capitalism?

Much to consider. For now, I’ll let the answers to those questions blow in the temperate Scottish winds. The seeming contradictions won’t detract from my profound enjoyment of this headfuck of an album.


I could ramble on about Inferno for days on end. Its warm and creeping dread. The way it activates parts of your memory that makes you feel like you’re communicating with another version of yourself. Ultimately, words fail to do it justice. It’s just that good. You’ll need to listen for yourself in a little under a hundred years. 

This is the end

I will say this, though. For me, personally, its greatest feat is creating a space for emerging emotions. For a world in visceral transition. There’s religion in there, sure, but that feels like a gateway to something else. Something to do with capturing a rapidly evolving collective consciousness. And possibly a way of alleviating your fears and thus dissolving your apathy by naming and exploring their causes.

All that’s left to say now is that Inferno feels like a big deal in 2026. It makes you feel like you’re a teenager again doing homework you actually enjoy. The metacrisis art that fails makes you feel implicated, guilty, overwhelmed. This makes you feel curious. Engaged. Like the world is still worth figuring out. That’s not a small thing in 2026.

I hope you’re listening in 2120.

Inferno by Boards of Canada is out now on Warp Records.

The Hydrogen Line: Boards of Canada Just Dropped Some Spine-Tingling New Music

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Dear 2120,

A Scottish duo called Boards of Canada just released their first music in thirteen years. The track is called “Prophecy at 1420 MHz,” and I think you should know about it. Not because of the music, exactly, but because of what the title is pointing at.

1420 megahertz is the hydrogen line. It’s the frequency at which hydrogen atoms naturally emit radio waves, and because hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, this frequency is essentially everywhere, always. It’s the hum underneath everything. SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, designated it the most logical channel for interstellar communication precisely because any sufficiently advanced civilization would know it. If something out there wants to be heard, that’s where it would transmit.

Boards of Canada named their comeback single after the universal distress frequency.

The music fits that frequency. It’s slow and midtempo and ominous, built from droning bass synths, flutes, melancholic guitar, and a computerized voice delivering something that sounds less like lyrics and more like a transmission from an uncertain future. It doesn’t sound like a band returning in triumph. It sounds like a signal that was always there, finally reaching us.

Here’s what I keep thinking about: the hydrogen line is a frequency no one invented. It predates every civilization that has ever listened for it. It will still be transmitting long after every civilization that ever sent anything along it. It’s a reminder that the universe operates on timescales that make our drama look like static.

Boards of Canada have always done this, embedded cosmological anxiety inside accessible, deeply emotional electronic music. Their earlier work is full of references to astronomy, information theory, mathematics. The beauty of “Music Has the Right to Children,” their breakthrough record from 1998, is inseparable from its terror. It sounds like childhood memory and entropy simultaneously. Like something is being preserved and decaying at the same time.

That tension feels different now than it did then. In 1998, the dread was ambient, metaphysical. Today it’s operational. We have actual timelines. We know what 2120 might look like under various emissions scenarios. The hydrogen line is still transmitting, indifferent to all of it.

What a strange thing to put on a lead single from your comeback album. A prophecy, delivered over a beat that makes you want to keep moving anyway. The frequency that connects everything, dressed up in something that makes your body respond before your mind catches up.

Maybe that’s enough. Keep transmitting. The hydrogen line doesn’t care whether civilisation makes it.

The album is called Inferno. It’s out May 29th on Warp Records.

www.warp.net



FIGHTING THE AIR OF INEVITABILITY – Analysis is driving collapse

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Dear 2120,

Opinions are like buttholes. Everyone has one – and sometimes it’s irritated.

These days, the people who spend their days thinking about things, more specifically the worsening conditions we all find ourselves sinking deeper into by the day, are in abundant supply. What you might call ‘pop-collapsology’ is all the rage, featuring in podcasts, YouTube essays, op-eds and similar formats, fuelled by a cultural moment that sees us simultaneously horrified and fascinated by the prospect of our own demise.

But what happens when a new politically-minded media class make a living from selling worst case scenarios, effectively promoting sensationalism in the guise of thoroughly researched insight?

The answer, increasingly, is this: the map becomes the territory. When collapse is the product, collapse must be perpetually imminent. The audience — anxious, engaged, algorithmically primed — rewards the darkest read of any given situation. A bad jobs report becomes the death rattle of the middle class. A regional conflict becomes the opening act of World War Three. A political setback becomes the end of democracy itself. Each piece is meticulously sourced, carefully hedged, and yet somehow always arrives at the same destination: we are, irreversibly, going down.

There’s a word for this. It used to be called doom-mongering. Now it comes with a Substack, a Patreon, and a guest spot on a podcast with three million subscribers.

To be clear: the problems are real. The inequality is real. The ecological crisis is real. The institutional rot is real. Nobody serious is arguing otherwise. But there is a profound difference between bearing witness to crisis and monetising the certainty of its conclusion. One demands moral courage. The other is just a more sophisticated form of infotainment — trading on your audience’s dread the same way a tabloid trades on their outrage.

And it’s not just contrarians saying so. As @earthlyeducation put it recently: “If you say humanity is doomed to extinction and that there is nothing we can do to prevent total climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse, we need you to know that is just as unscientific as saying there’s no climate crisis.” Certified doom, in other words, isn’t bravery. It’s denialism with better footnotes. The solutions exist. The science is there. What’s missing, as they point out, is the political and financial will of those who hold the power — and that will is not a fixed quantity. It can be built. It can be demanded. But not if we’ve already written the obituary.

What gets lost in the collapse industrial complex is agency. If the system is terminal, if the arc of history has already bent toward catastrophe, then the only rational response is either paralysis or the grim satisfaction of being right. Both are, conveniently, great for engagement. Neither produces change. Worse, collapse-certainty actively depletes the political will it claims to be lamenting — because audiences internalise the conclusion, not the analysis. They don’t come away galvanised. They come away spent.

History is not a conveyor belt. Movements have reversed what looked like iron laws. Institutions thought too rotten to save have been rebuilt. Majorities written off as comatose have woken up and acted. The people who called these things impossible were not stupid — they were, in many cases, the best-informed voices in the room. They just mistook the weight of evidence for the verdict of fate.

Analysis is a tool. In the right hands, it illuminates what needs to change and sharpens the case for changing it. But analysis untethered from the possibility of action isn’t insight. It’s a performance of intelligence — and in this particular cultural moment, it may be one of the more consequential things making the worst more likely.

The question worth sitting with isn’t whether things are bad. They are. It’s whether your intellectual framework leaves any room for them to get better — and whether you’re willing to tolerate the uncertainty and occasional embarrassment of believing they still could.

Bassy Escape: Tracey – Sex Life (feat. Riko Dan)

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Dear 2120,

Hot on the heels of Donald Trump taking a step down the escalation ladder (as a Danish journalist aptly phrased it) and revising his inflammatory statements about annexing Greenland, we’re all in desperate need of a break from the theater of geopolitical absurdity.

Trump seems uncharacteristically subdued — for now, at least.

What we need right now is a little pause on the politics and a big fat PLAY > on the ass-shaking.

Enter Tracey with “Sex Life”— a momentous, low-slung bass banger. A much-needed escape from late-stage capitalism feasting on itself:

Naked Imperialism

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Dear 2120, 

You already know this, of course, but 2026 is off to a turbulent start. The US has kidnapped the Venezuelan president under the pretense of him being a ‘narcoterrorist’ – whatever that means. For the Trump administration it means supplying the US with drugs and contributing to the fentanyl crisis. Trump, however, has subsequently been characteristically forthright and disturbingly honest about what they’re actually doing in Venezuela: seizing control of the country’s world-leading oil production.

Now, Maduro is certainly no saint, and Venezuela’s government is clearly an oppressive dictatorship. But any sane person can see that this is just another imperialist US power grab. It’s about the oil; it’s about consolidating the American position in a global political landscape with China on the rise.

There’s nothing new to these sorts of power grabs. What’s new is the complete and utter honesty from the Trump administration about their brazen colonial intentions.

In the old days, US coups required plausible deniability: CIA-backed insurgents, carefully staged color revolutions, years of economic warfare disguised as sanctions. Before Trump, the US would manage it coups and invasions in more surreptitious and clandestine ways, pretending to ‘spread democracy’ and whatnot.

Now they barely give a fuck. They just copy the Iraq propaganda playbook (which was pretty sketchy to begin with), and let DJT say the quiet part out loud because he can do no wrong in the eyes of the MAGA cult.

They might be coming for Greenland next. Watch this space. Or not. It’s already in your history books, I guess.  

2025: The Year in Review

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Dear 2120,

What are we doing? Where’s this going? What is this? Who am I?

If 2025 was an extremely discombobulating year offering more questions than answers, it looks like we’d better buckle up: 2026 is set to be even more intense. The US is sliding into a bizarre form of tech-enabled proto-fascism, dubbed by zany jokesters as ‘The Nerd Reich.’ Palestine keeps suffering despite the so-called ceasefire. The far right has surged across Europe. And we’ve breached 7 out of 9 planetary boundaries, according to PIK. It’s bleak AF out there.

But good things are happening too. Zohran Mamdani became New York’s new socialist mayor, running a fearless campaign for working-class affordability. The Green Party’s Zack Polanski is now the UK’s most popular party leader, championing a similar progressive agenda. Across the world, people are organizing, resisting, building alternatives.

At this point, people here in 2025 usually wheel out that Gramsci quote about monsters as a way of sounding worldly while managing their metacrisis anxiety. I like Gramsci. It’s a good quote. But here’s the thing: there’s no guarantee these monsters are disappearing anytime soon. In fact, they’re having a pretty good run. They seem invigorated, like they’re having a grand old time wreaking untold damage on us and the planet in their deranged pursuit of influence, control, and obscene wealth. There’s definitely some form of sociopathy at play here. 

The brutal truth is that they’re not going to stop unless someone stops them.

Enter Regenerative Propaganda

This situation, this clusterfuck, this slow-motion collapse, whatever you want to call it,  is what prompted me to start my own company, Regenerative Propaganda. After spending most of my career in culture, communications, and advertising, watching talented people waste their abilities on stupid and harmful things, I decided to just go do what I always wanted without compromising. No more quietly rolling my eyes like a surly teenager when my boss told me to write or make something more “palatable to the market.”

So I went and did it.

I wouldn’t call it an overnight success story. But I’m at a point where it’s starting to make sense financially. I still hustle in the old world of extractive consumerism  (selling people shit they don’t need) to make ends meet. But I think it balances out on the good vs. bad scale. And every month, the balance tips a little more toward the work that matters.

What I’ve Learned This Year

→There’s very little money in actual regenerative communication. And I mean actual regenerative communication: degrowth, sufficiency, having fewer material possessions to focus on what truly matters: community, care, ecology, purpose. It should be the world’s biggest open goal, but here we are. To an alarming and frustrating degree, the system rewards the people selling the disease, not the cure.

→The work finds you if you’re patient. Once I stopped chasing every gig and started being clear about what I stand for, the right projects started appearing. Not many. Not enough. But the right ones. People and organizations who actually want transformation, not just greenwash their way through quarterly reports.

→You can’t do this alone. Building something regenerative in a degenerative system is exhausting. You need community, co-conspirators, people who get it. This year I’ve been lucky to connect with others doing similar work — designers, strategists, activists, artists — all trying to build the world we actually want to live in.

→Compromise is inevitable, but capitulation isn’t. Yes, I still take work that makes me wince sometimes. But there’s a difference between bending and breaking. I’m learning where my lines are, what I can live with, what I can’t. It’s messy and imperfect, but that’s the reality of trying to operate ethically under capitalism.

→This is going to take longer than any of us want. The monsters aren’t going anywhere fast. The systems that produce them are deeply entrenched. Real change is slow, frustrating, unglamorous work. But it’s the only work worth doing.

What’s Next

In 2026, I want to do more of the work that matters and less of the work that just pays the bills. I want to collaborate with people building genuine alternatives; community energy projects, worker cooperatives, regenerative farms, mutual aid networks, social movements that actually threaten exploitative empire. I want to help tell their stories, amplify their work, and make the case for a world beyond endless growth and extraction.

I’m also thinking about how to build more resilient structures for this kind of work. How do we fund truly regenerative communication without compromising its integrity? How do we support each other through the inevitable precarity? How do we build something that lasts?

I don’t have all the fully-formed answers. But I’m learning, adapting, trying to practice what I preach.

Here’s to a turbulent, terrifying, occasionally beautiful 2026.

We’re Cooked (again)

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Dear 2120,

Reality is coming apart at the seams, it would seem. If you’re wondering why I haven’t sent you an AI-themed letter yet, it’s mostly because: A) I’d like to try and forget the work and money it’s costing me as a person who makes a living writing things, and B) the indisputable fact that the legions of people who yap incessantly about AI here in 2025 are among the most insufferable members of our species.

This caught my attention, however. Made me think The Matrix wasn’t a pipe dream – and maybe not even that far away.

RIP, the real world.

How Fossil-Fueled Expansion Engineered Our Obsession With Newness and Reinvention

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Still from Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’ (2007)

Dear 2120,

I hope you’re settled. Because we’re not. We’re addicted to newness. New stuff, new looks, new versions of ourselves. It feels totally normal, but it’s actually a pretty recent thing, engineered by cheap fossil fuels and the insane growth they made possible.

How It Started

Fossil fuels powered more than factories. They rewired how we think about stuff and identity. When production exploded in the 20th century, buying things became who you are. “New” turned into shorthand for progress, success, basically everything good.

Cities powered by cheap energy became testing grounds for different lifestyles. Novelty stopped being special and became expected. Your identity became something you’re supposed to constantly upgrade.

Breaking Rules Became the Rule

Fast change made disruption a virtue. People who broke boundaries became heroes. The growth-at-all-costs mindset loved rule-breakers because they suggested more expansion was possible.

This logic runs everything now. Tech worship “disruption.” Culture chases the next edgy thing. If you’re not breaking something, you’re boring. Transgression went from rebellious to required.

The Reinvention Hamster Wheel

Global supply chains and social media algorithms cranked this into overdrive. Now we cycle through trends and identities constantly. Reinvention went from meaningful choice to compulsive behavior. Staying the same feels like stagnation. Change became convention.

You end up with this restless psychology where you have to keep reinventing yourself just to feel relevant.

When Reality Isn’t Enough

Umberto Eco wrote about how we became obsessed with making things that feel more real than reality. Prosperity stopped being about actual material comfort and became a vibe you engineer. We remake reality to be louder, shinier, more intense every time.

The ‘new’ is addictive because you can always design it to feel better than what actually exists. Culture turned into an escalation machine where each iteration has to top the last one.

The Dark Side

Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood shows where this psychology goes. Daniel Plainview builds an oil empire through pure conquest. He violates every boundary to expand and dominate. Competition defines his whole identity. He wants wealth for the myth of it, not what it provides. Prosperity as spectacle.

And where does it end? Isolation and self-destruction. That’s what happens when transgression becomes your whole personality.

What It Cost Us

This mindset gave us climate chaos, biodiversity collapse, and depleted resources. But it also did internal damage; constant restlessness, insecurity, loss of meaning.

Transgression used to challenge power structures. Now the system just absorbed it and uses it as fuel for faster cycles of consumption and novelty.

What’s Next

We need to rethink what prosperity, desire, and creativity even mean. Stuff like degrowth, regenerative design, doughnut economics: these show how novelty can come from restoration instead of extraction.

The goal is redirecting creativity and transgression, not killing them. Transgression can mean breaking with the logic of “more, faster, louder” itself. Reinvention can mean getting back to balance. Novelty can mean building things that actually last.

The 20th century trained us to crave endless newness. We escalated that into fake realities that feel more abundant than real life (Eco). We built a psychology of conquest disguised as ambition (Anderson).

The myth we inherited says progress has to break boundaries. Always. Forever.

But there’s a different way. Value having enough over having more. Depth over escalation. Sticking with things over constant reinvention. Transgression as refusing the destructive playbook we were handed, not as domination.

That’s the shift we’re trying to figure out. I hope for our sake and yours that it does.

Aphex Twin Just Dropped Two New Tracks

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Dear 2120,

Aphex Twin, ‘the electronic Mozart’ of our era, just uploaded two tracks to SoundCloud. The description says he’s annoyed about UK rain and there are “probably better mixes” he’ll share if he finds them.

That’s it. 

Everything online is supposed to be polished and optimized to compete for attention. But he’s been using SoundCloud like a messy folder, just dropping rough recordings and sketches whenever. No strategy. 

It’s small, but it matters. Not everything has to be content. Not everything has to be finished. Some stuff can just exist for people who are actually listening.

Maybe you’ll look back and see this as artists learning to opt out of the content mill. Or maybe by then it’ll just be normal to share work without needing it to perform.

Antimemetics: The Death of the ‘When’ Meme

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Dear 2120,

I want to tell you about a book called Antimemetics and why it matters – both now and hopefully for you too. It’s about ideas that don’t spread. Not because they’re bad, but because they’re too complex, too uncomfortable, or too inconvenient to go viral. Memes spread everywhere. Antimemes just… vanish. They leave barely any trace except in quiet corners where people are actually paying attention.

This hits different right now, to stay in the parlance of meme culture, because of how our platforms work. Everything’s optimized for speed and visibility. The ideas that win aren’t the most important ones – they’re just the loudest, the catchiest, the most entertaining. Meanwhile, the slow stuff, the complicated truths about climate and justice and how we actually relate to each other get buried. Antimemetics gives us language for that. For what disappears even though it matters.

Here’s what’s interesting from a futures perspective: if attention is our main currency, then invisibility becomes a kind of resistance. The ideas that refuse to be broadcast: cooperative economies, regenerative systems, ways of valuing things beyond money. Those might be the real foundation of whatever comes after capitalism.

Bifo Berardi wrote about how late capitalism exhausts our attention, and how that exhaustion might open up new ways of thinking. David Graeber showed how everyday cultural practices can hide radical possibilities. Italo Calvino reminded us that entire worlds can exist in the imagination if we bother to look. They’re all pointing at the same thing: the invisible is where new worlds grow.

A century from now, you might look at Antimemetics as a snapshot of a weird transition period. A time when the most important ideas couldn’t compete for attention. When what shaped culture was as much about what was absent as what was everywhere. You might trace back to the quiet networks and experimental practices that survived in the margins The stuff we couldn’t see clearly but that somehow carried us forward. All our viral spectacles will look silly, but those invisible signals might be what actually mattered.

I’m writing this because paying attention is the first step of caring about something. Cultivating the invisible means cultivating possibility. Antimemetics teaches us to notice what resists the algorithm, to follow what doesn’t want to be broadcast, and to protect the seeds of ideas that might actually build something lasting.

Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading