What is the Future?

Well, what is it?

I feel like it’s hard to imagine a positive future in this day and age, gone are the days of space age optimism or 20th century utopianism, the coming climate catastrophe and depressive conditions of the present have already taken most of the optimism from us. What remains is a dreadful future, that lies either dead, cancelled or as a nightmare waiting for us at the end of the road. In her text Submersion¹ n1x imagines a future of nightmarish making, with the world flooding, nation-states in totality turning to totalitarianism as organic life begins to decay and artificial life begins to awaken. It’s speculative fiction, yes, but I think it’s telling, for all the solarpunk utopias or communist ends of history that still circulate the future at its most connected to the present seems to always end up grim. Of course, it must be noted that n1x does not actually propose a future:

“For cyber-nihilists, there is no future. We don’t aim to build a new world, but to destroy the present one in the most thorough of ways by radically transforming it through creative destructive pure negation.”²

But I find this to be somewhat erroneous in the way that it constructs the future, of course it does not posit a specific way of the future, it purely negates, but Cyber-Nihilism still operates in a way that it plays on the imagination of the future. It destroys the present, yes, but it does so in such a way as to leave the destroyed present in a specific “future-shape”. The accelerationist view of things, even if they do not have a prescriptive statement, creates, in the way of imagination and analysis, a specific view of the future. “Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.”³ is a very prescriptive statement in the way in which it informs a view of the future. That view of the future, which is ideological, as in, informed by ideological prescriptions, then comes back to the past to colonise the present as a fixed idea. n1x says in Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper:

“It both recognizes the obsolescence of a human future and aligns itself with the production of inhuman intelligences and an inhuman future. This makes the pink pill not merely the thrust of technocapital and futurity on a human scale, but rather a cosmic development that has its materialistic realization on the planetary micro level.”⁴

Thus, says the accelerationist, we must be possessed by the future, as inevitable as the future is we must simply accept it, flow with it, be it.

I believe this calls for a comparison with the futurists, which didn’t have a specific future in mind, not in the way utopians do, but rather prioritised the destruction of the past, Marinetti says, in the Futurist Manifesto:

“And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!”⁵

Though of course, an ideal wasn’t set up, but the futurists did have a project they wished to impart, that was the point of the manifesto. They were openly prescriptive in their making of the future, the future was to be something made by action, and it is with their will to power that they will make it. Futurism differs from Accelerationism in that it grants agency, while Accelerationism is concerned with being alienated and accepting that alienation. The futurist’s open prescription came from their assertion of the aesthetic ways to do things, the futurist ways will make the future, thus the future didn’t come back to the past to colonise it, rather the present constantly broke through the past, and thus made a future.

What relates to the future then, is the present, it is the political presumptions of the present that create the ideal future. As with the multiple different ends of history and the multiple different utopias, the political project is to be deemed complete and universal when the wheels of history turn in their axis. As such the future is to bend for the past and present, become to it a tool that justify present praxis, the future finds itself at the end of political projects. Only that this movement then goes backwards, once the future is decided, once the ideal is made, once the idea is fixed, the suggestive power of the future comes to possess the present. The imaginary, holy utopia or dystopia of the future becomes itself a political project, a phantasmagorical spectre that takes possession of all those that sacrifice themselves to it. Just as the past haunts, so too does the future.

The future, thus, is itself just an ideal, even when it is seen as “not ideal”, it becomes alienating in this way, a colonising force like any other. Stirner says:

“I never believed in me, I never believed in my present, I saw myself only in the future. The boy believes that he’ll only become a proper I, a proper guy, when he becomes a man; the man thinks that only in the afterlife will he be something proper.”⁶

In its creation of a phantasm the future becomes an ideal to aspire, it sacrifices the present, and subordinates the entire construction of the now, of the actual, into its idealist suppositions. When we deal with the future we deal not with actuality, but with a colonising phantasm. But the future will still be there of course, there will be something after this present, some other present, only that whatever that will be, we can only reach towards it through imagination, not ever in actuality. Whatever the future is we must deal with it as the present, live in the only place we can live, the present. The future will never be futuristic, only by disregarding the past can the future be independent, but we can only make the future with the past and the present, thus it will forever be imagination. Where true creation of the future lies is in action, not in an action, but within actions themselves, movement and dynamism brings forth the future, and it brings it without regard for imagination or idealism.

Somewhere there is the future, behind me is the past, above me is the sky and below is the ground, but my heart is here. It is the present, the here and now that creates and destroys, any capitulation to the future is a capitulation to phantasm, to an engineered political project that vassalizes the next present into being the future in order to control the present. A future will not be imagined or prescribed, it will only be done.

“Come, my friends!' I said. `Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.”

-Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto

1. n1x 2019. Submersion

2. n1x 2016. Hello From the Wired

3. Land, Nick 1994. Meltdown

4.  n1x 2018. Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper

5. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 1909. The Futurist Manifesto

6. Stirner, Max 1844. The Unique and It’s Property