Capitalist Realism – Letters to 2120

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

June 14, 2026June 18, 2026 lettersto2120Leave a comment

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 sun

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 Highlight	Esoteric & Occult Allusions	Scientific / 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

May 8, 2026May 9, 2026 lettersto2120Leave a comment

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

March 1, 2026March 1, 2026 lettersto2120Leave a comment

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)

January 22, 2026 lettersto2120Leave a comment

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

January 5, 2026January 5, 2026 lettersto2120Leave a comment

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

December 25, 2025December 25, 2025 lettersto2120Leave a comment

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.

Aphex Twin Just Dropped Two New Tracks

November 28, 2025 lettersto2120Leave a comment

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.

user18081971 · Zahl am1 live track 1c f760m1 unfinshd

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.

Imagining 2120: Generating Desire for Postcapitalism

November 24, 2025 lettersto2120Leave a comment

Dear 2120,

Writing to you feels weird. Like texting someone who won’t read it for a century. But here we are, stuck between a world that’s clearly breaking and one we haven’t figured out how to build yet.

Here’s the thing: we’re supposed to imagine the future, but we’re really bad at it. Most of what we get fed is either dystopian nightmares or the same capitalism we have now, just with fancier phones and flooded cities. Mark Fisher (quoting Jameson) said it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. He/they nailed it.

But something’s definitely shifting. People are starting to realize that what we want – like, actually want – matters politically. Our desires either keep this broken system running or help bring something new into being.

Ursula Le Guin said the future is a kind of fiction, and she was right. We don’t have to accept Silicon Valley’s depressing version as the only story. We can write different ones. Slower, weirder, more human.

There’s this idea from Jacques Attali that every dying system contains hints of what comes next. And yeah, we’re definitely dying; supply chains failing, climate chaos, institutions crumbling. But in all that noise, we’re hearing something else. Mutualism replacing rigid hierarchies. Local communities thriving within global networks. Economies that measure health instead of just growth. The next thing isn’t going to show up complete, it’s emerging in pieces, visible in the cracks.

The problem is we’ve been trained to want the wrong things. We’re addicted to ownership, competition, endless accumulation – and these habits keep us locked into a system that’s literally killing us. Even people who want change often want it to be easy, comfortable, something they can buy into without real disruption.

So the challenge isn’t just building new systems. It’s rewiring how we imagine life itself. Making the postcapitalist world feel not just possible but genuinely desirable.

What if creativity wasn’t about competing but about contributing? What if technology helped people and ecosystems thrive instead of extracting from them? What if pleasure came from connection rather than consumption? What if status meant what you gave, not what you owned? What if growth meant maturing, not just expanding?

Writing to you instead of just about you changes something. It makes you real – not some abstract concept but someone we’re in relationship with. You’re not a prediction; you’re who comes after us. And you’ll inherit both our mess and whatever we manage to get right.

We’re trying to build you something that doesn’t eat itself. A world where abundance is about ecology, not money. Where resilience is collective, not just a personal brand. Where liberation includes everyone or it’s meaningless.

If we pull this off, your world will seem obvious. Just like feudalism looks absurd to us now, our obsession with markets and competition and individual success will seem embarrassingly primitive to you. Maybe you’ll laugh at how we measured everything in productivity and profit. Or maybe you’ll just be relieved we finally moved on.

I’m not writing this as prophecy – more like a reminder that we can shape what we want. Desire isn’t fixed. We can redirect it. The future isn’t something we just watch happen. It’s something we create.

If we learn to want different things, we’ll build different things.

And if we build different things, maybe you’ll inherit a world that actually works.

We’re still figuring it out. But we are actually trying.

In Defense of Utopianism

May 7, 2017June 4, 2017 lettersto2120Leave a comment

Dear 2120,

What does the Venus Project, Silicon Valley hype men, Italian Futurism, Ray Kurzweil, David Lynch, Holly Herndon, new age prophet Terrence McKenna and the abonimable snowwoman Ayn Rand have in common? They all feature in this week’s letter on the benefits of utopianism, that’s what. If your tolerance for emotional earnestness is of the lower variety, now would be a good time to disengage your ocular viewing configuration. If, on the other hand, your interest in self-indulgent tirades from around a century ago have been piqued, I suggest you get locked into your interface because it’s about to get real.

A 1995 visualization of you from Johnny Mnemonic.

First off, I should probably come clean. It’s a precarious state of affairs, but a lot my contemporaries look at me funny when I speak in utopian terms. When I venture the offensively uncomplicated opinion that the world would be a much better place if everyone thought happier thoughts and that the solution to a lot of the problems we face is optimism instead of pessimism, I get accused of propagating the sinister, shiny-surfaced, dream-colonizing rhetoric of modern advertising.

As soon as I lift the lid on my belief that we’re bound to overcome the challenges faced by the entirety of humanity, and that we’ll do it by collectively aligning our thought patterns along more positive pathways, I’m suddenly cast in the same category as Silicon Valley hype men disguising their hidden, megalomaniac, Ayn Rand-inspired agenda with progressive, world-changing aims. Either that, or they patiently take their time to politely let me know that I’m full of shit.

You see, I surround myself with people of a certain persuasion. Creative people, writer people, academic people, people of a certain ilk of whom Tolstoy would likely say that their lives are passed in ‘idleness, amusement and dissatisfaction.’ Open to experience and informed by power-critiquing strands of postmodernist thought as they are, they seek complex answers to complex questions.

Old man Tolstoy.

It’s not that I blame my friends and learned acquaintances for shooting me dirty looks when I state my optimism. All things considered, I realize full well that I can sound like a bit of a dickhead. Bearing in mind how zealots, terrorists, fanatics, Italian Futurists, Steve Jobs, Bono and other self-aggrandizing fringe groups and individuals with utopian agendas furthered untold devastation, fascism and questionable, rose-tinted eyewear, my utopianism is, somewhat understandably, regarded with guarded skepticism and overbearing glances among the cognoscenti (also, in my day, this is pretty much par for the course when you dare to suggest that the human condition can ever be anything, but an interminable struggle in the presence of people who make a living thinking about things).

The funny thing is that I’m not even that happy, so it’s not as if my utopianism comes easy to me. I mean, I’m happy enough, I have a lovely girlfriend whom I love, reasonable health and all that, but for various reasons, I am, like a sizable part of my generation, what you could call ‘existentially challenged.’ With no religion or fixed belief system to give me an overarching sense of purpose, I fail to see what the big deal about existing really is. What the point is, to be accurate. In that particular respect, I’m probably not that different to my worldly buddies.

Still, despite these reservations about the sanctity of existence, I remain, forever and always, an optimist on the part of humanity. Maybe it’s the excessive Star Trek TNG-watching of my impressionable youth, which drummed it into me that we’re destined for escaping the minor quibbles of Earth to sail among the stars, forging neorealist, diplomatic relations with samey variations on humanoids who’ve somehow all mastered English.

Or maybe it’s just that I’m so deeply embedded into the capitalist matrix’s modus operandi of ‘working hard, applying yourself and not whining about it’, which is giving me tunnel vision, effectively blinding me to the irreconcilable contradictions of our age. Whatever it is, I can’t seem to shake it. Don’t really want to, in all honesty. And I have my reasons. Reasons that I’ll now send your way because, well, you’re not even born yet, so you don’t really have a say in the matter.

1) David Lynch has my back – No, really!

I mean, it’s not like I can call up one of the most brilliant directors on the planet and get him to explicitly state that he agrees with me, but the director of Twin Peaks and the creator of tons of other genius, mind-bending stuff is a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation also known as TM. TM, if you’re unfamiliar, has as one of its core tenets that if the square root of 1% of the world’s population acted according to its beliefs, we’d be on our way to an enlightened tomorrow. Sound crazy? Stupid? Dangerous, even? Possibly. But you know what else sounds crazy, stupid, fucked-up and dangerous? The fact that we’re blithely skipping on the precipe of the biggest catastrophes mankind has ever faced without taking necessary steps to fix things. That’s literally the dumbest shit I’ve ever heard. With that in mind, I’ll take what I can get, quite frankly. And if David Lynch believes TM might provide some kind of structure or solution that makes everyone unite and come together, who am I to disagree? Some people might call it grasping for straws. I call it actively looking for alternatives to a mindset with a proven track record in failure.

2) We fucking need it

Pardon my potty mouth, but I can’t think of a time in history when we’ve needed utopianism more than the present moment. Nuclear war, the impending collapse of ecosystems, the cannibalization of resources, loose cannons at the helm of the military-industrial complex; these are all very real threats to our way of life occurring right now in my present, while we’re sitting idly by, feeling smug about impotent Trump-roasting tweets, garnering 4 hearts and a retweet. Utopianism might feel dangerous and difficult to control, which, I suspect, is why so many are apprehensive about letting the utopian genie out of the lamp, as it were. But quite frankly: the shit is, by qualified accounts, so close to hitting the fan that you can practically smell the contents of last night’s dinner being wafted in your direction by a cool fanning system on a globally-warmed summer’s day. As prominent braniac Stephen Hawking isn’t shy about pointing out in the Guardian:

‘Now, more than at any time in our history, our species needs to work together. We face awesome environmental challenges: climate change, food production, overpopulation, the decimation of other species, epidemic disease, acidification of the oceans. Together, they are a reminder that we are at the most dangerous moment in the development of humanity. We now have the technology to destroy the planet on which we live, but have not yet developed the ability to escape it.‘

Adding to this dire clusterfuck is the fact that the hottest 17 years on record have all occurred since 2000. In other words, there’s literally no other way out. We have to step up. It won’t be easy or pretty, but, in my opinion, the grand, sweeping utopian, narratives of positive change need to be invoked if we’re to have a shot in hell at turning things around. For all their dewy-eyed corniness, imagined utopias are pretty much all we have at this point.

3) Contemporary Visions of Utopia Don’t Suck in the Slightest

Are contemporary visions of utopia really that untenable and/or quixotic as certain people claim they are? Whenever I see the proposition of a radically new model of civilization, like The Venus Project you get the inevitable cynical, smartass on social media commenting how humans are inherently selfish and that ‘communism doesn’t work.’ I’m sorry, but it’s not a case of ‘communism vs. capitalism.’ We need to break out of this reductive, simplistic, binary, fift-grade conceptualization of societal modes and get more nuanced about the essential matters determining our future.

The Venus Project isn’t without its flaws, but in the light of the rapid, accelerating decline of everything we hold dear, this bold attempt at transforming the world, has to be admired and encouraged. It has to better, in any case, than making snide, inconsequential remarks on Facebook? Or posting resigned, fatalist articles on the coming ecocide?I love you, Motherboard, but this kind of thing is doing infinitely more harm than it can ever do good

4) It might even give some of us a sense of where we’re going

If anything does actually give me a sense of purpose it’s utopianism. The notion that we’ll eventually overcome our primitive, moronic barbarisms and create a world where we function as reflective caretakers instead of mindless locusts, makes me feel like I’m taking part in something bigger than myself.

Today, part of the problem and one of the reasons, I think, that clinical depression statistics in the well-off, industrialized world are soaring is that we’re left to our own devices in personalized, atomized bubbles facilitated by intimacy-faking social media. We’ve been individualized and trapped in our own little algorithm-orchestrated worlds, which runs counter to the sense of cohesion, characterizing earlier models of society. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating a return to feudalism, or anything like that, but maybe there’s a way to incorporate the productive, collectivist social dynamics of history into our own behavior and letting it work to our advantage? It would be pretty arrogant to assume that our ancestors were all hapless cretins and that we are, in every way, the apex of civilization. As an atheist, I can even find it within myself to listen to Alain de Botton when he tells me to borrow from religion from time to time. Maybe it’s time to do some serious Spring cleaning in our inventory of ideas and philosophies.

5) Capitalist realism is obstructing our view – dismantle it and we’re free to dream big

Within the all-encompassing sphere of capitalist realism, all radicalism and novel ideas are inevitably stunted, assimilated and rendered toothless. Robbed of their original intent and radical potential, and transformed into novel ideas fuelling the voracious engine of capitalism. This is a very important point, I think. As Slavoj Zizek puts it in his Occupy Wall Street speech:

‘Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent to work in East Germany from Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends, ‘Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say; if it is written in red ink, it is false.’ After a month, his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The stores are full of good food, movie theatres show good films from the West, apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot find is red ink.’ This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want, but what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom.‘

In today’s seemingly endless cycle of newness and appropriation, those who dare to dream big, agents and actors whom I would consider the utopianists of our age, like Elon Musk, David Lynch and Holly Herndon are easily reduced by cynics to savvy marketers whose ideas, new and potentially transformative as they may be, lend themselves well to the assimilation of capital – that amorphous, omnipresent system without a face that devours our resources and seems hell-bent on sending humanity on a precipitous descent into Mad Max-like instability. But here’s the thing; imagining life outside this system is crucial to the betterment of our future. Our survival as a species, even. Bringing Zizek’s red ink into existence, the language and culture in which we can express ideas that fall manifestly outside the current paradigm is a matter of life and death. As the electronic artist and self-proclaimed optimist Holly Herndon says it:

“If society is ever going to progress, and move beyond certain oppressive institutions and infrastructure, then the idea of fantasy is essential.”

Going back to my pessimist friends and acquaintances, the people who were skeptical of my utopianism, I’ll grant them that complexity comes with the territory when discussing the future of everything. However, building a better future, a future that’s fair and just with the potential to liberate all of humanity from the seen and unseen reins impeding progress, doesn’t necessarily require complex, ideological frameworks. It is, quite simply, a matter of collective will. Of daring to dream the collective dream and instilling a collective fantasy – a utopia accommodating the entirety of the human experience. It’s that thing where if everyone got off their asses right now and demanded that their government took real action against climate change, we’d be on the right path tomorrow. Call me naïve or one-dimensional, but in my view, it really is that simple. In the end it’s about faith. Faith in the Tolstoyan sense that we’ll get on top of it all despite grim-looking prognoses and statistics. As a concept, faith tends to get a shitty rep with my friends because of its religious overtones. But quite honestly, what do we have if we don’t have faith? Feelings of superiority by playing the jaded misanthope at dinner parties? Also, if you think about it, why would you get up in the morning if you believe that humanity is doomed – and that it’s bound to end pretty soon? Personally, I can’t really get my head around that.

6) It’s a phase – a very scary, apocalyptic-seeming phase but a phase all the same

Look at history; you’ll find that most civilizations from the Mayans until today have been obsessed with the apocalypse. It’s very human to think that we’re special enough to be the last humans on Earth. However, being the optimist that I am, I can’t help but think that the present moment of uncertainty and instability, represents a transition phase in our history. That what we’re seeing is the death throes of the old paradigm anticipating the next stage of evolution. Whether that’s some form of Ray Kurzweil’s singularity I don’t feel brave enough to predict. I do feel brave enough, however, to show you a video featuring Terrence McKenna that sees him elucidate his leftfield take on the intensification of our world using cosmology, thermodynamics, the Mayan Calendar and other phantasmagorical, imagination-fuelling agents. McKenna’s worldview, warped as it may seem to some people – particularly the cynics of this world – is enticing to say the least. For those of you with an attention span as compromised as my own, I’ve taken the liberty of highlighting one, important point:

‘Human technologies, languages, migrations, art movements, ideologies, are not something different from nature. They’re the same download of process that we see in the movement of continents, the evolution of new species of animals – except that these human, novel emergent situations are happening much more quickly. So, I see the cosmos, if you will, as a kind of novelty-producing engine. A kind of machine, which produces complexity in all realms: physical, chemical, social, whatever. And then uses that achieved level of complexity as a platform for further complexity. Well, this explains our present circumstance. It explains the rush towards new technology and all forms of social organization in the new millennium.’

What uncle Terrence is saying here, I think, is basically that we’re not separated from nature. That the nature/culture divide is elaborately orchestrated bullshit. And that the fact that everything is speeding up and complexifying is intense as hell, but a natural process, which means that we’re not an exponentially procreating virus, but an integral part the planet. For me, that puts a different, very productive perspective on things. But I highly recommend sitting through as much his ingenious rant you have time for. I promise that’s it’s thought-provoking. Consider it psychedelic poetry, if that makes it more palatable.

Speaking of rants, that was one of the longer ones one my part. If you’re there in 2120 and you made it to the end, a tipping of the hat is in order. Brevity has never been my strong suit. What’s more, a lot of this stuff is probably so self-evident to you that it’s making you embarrassed for me. The thing is that in my time this needs to be said over and over. And the people who I think should be saying it, people who have the ears of the influencers and decision-makers of the next generation, aren’t saying it nearly enough. With brilliant, lucid and capable people like Jonathan Safran Foer holed up in a navel-gazing midlife crisis, less brilliant, less eloquent people have to step up and give it a go. This is me giving it a go. Curious as that sounds, even to me.

So if you’re listening, I’d like it noted somewhere for your future record that I gave it a try. If it all goes south, contrary to my utopian hopes and dreams, here’s written proof that I actually did something.

Another Monday in Late Capitalism at the Ass-End of the Workweek

April 24, 2017June 4, 2017 lettersto2120Leave a comment

Dear 2120,

I’ve got a case of ‘the Mondays.’ Here in my time, you see, a lot of us spend Monday to Friday toiling, restless and beaver-like, in undignified hierarchical command structures with the weekend as the week’s only saving grace, the light at the end of a treacherous tunnel filled with passive/aggressive confrontation and mediocre coffee. In the 10s, the weekend is widely regarded as the time to unwind. We ‘let off some steam,’ and forget our woes through stimulant-driven, physical exorcise like raving or, if you’re slightly older, going to a bar and shouting directly into someone’s eardrum over loud music while simultaneously keeping an anxious, watchful eye on the fickle attention of the alcohol-dispensing bartender.

I could write long-winded diatribes on the oppressive nature of capitalist realism (and don’t worry, I shall), but having had my energy and joi de vivre depleted by alcolhol-fuelled, dopamine-stealing activity and the afore-mentioned shouting, I’ll take the typical, lazy shortcut of my post-reflective generation by conveying my Monday melancholy and escapist yearning in easily disgestable sound, image and, of course, GIFs: