A leit-motif in my thinking and what I’ve happened to read these past days: modernity and its collapse in the sense of our collective disorientation on which kind of future to strive towards; and by collapse -or perhaps better said crisis- I’m not referring to an inescapable but healthy amount of disagreement, but of the tug-of-war between two significantly contradictory positions.
A synchronicity: A person who spent their youth in the ’70s tells me a story of something that happened to him at the time. Somewhere in his reminiscing he mentions his car’s radio and tuning into stations to occasional find his good songs that he recognised. He comments that life felt freer back then, that there was more room to let your mind breathe. Then he says that today, probably because of digital technologies and transgressing connectivity, somehow everything feels more rushed, dizzying, less crisp to the experience.
That same day, in my feed I come across a video of a small rock concert of an unknown Pearl Jam in 1991, where only one man stands out because of his video-camera. He is a fan documenting the full concert. At the end an enthusiastic fellow concertgoer approaches the camera-man: “Hey man. Did you get all of that? Can I get your address?”.
The third synchronicity happened that very afternoon, when another person brought up an article that they had read about a school that prohibited the carrying of smartphones or computers within school grounds. Surprisingly, it was reported that the experimental measure worked and the students expressed a sense of enjoyment and gratitude for having a space where they can live as if these technologies didn’t exist.
A thought: Why does that documented slice of life feel like another planet 30 years later? And what does that nostalgia tell us about today and what we deep down wished progress turned out to be, instead of our current version?
One of the hallmarks of modernity is the positioning of every attempt at organising values, goals, societies, economies, and everything related to politics within a dichotomy of progress vs. regressiveness. In its most orthodox incarnation, modern progress is all about reasoning and innovating our way to the future. It puts a universal rationality above the weight of tradition, unscientific or irrational beliefs, of the unwillingness to abandon the inefficient for the efficient and functional.
So at the core of modernity there is a vector where the backwards direction is archaism and the forward direction is globalism1. In other words, the driving force of this vector is the great challenge humanity has ahead when confronted with the possible consequences of a global system that increases in complexity and unwieldiness: some people place their bet on organising humanity at a global level for the benefit of everyone, and others are skeptic of this prerogative and prefer reverting to what they see as the manageable local, where consensus and collective action can be more effective thanks to lesser geographical distances, lesser cultural heterogeneity, lesser diversity of needs.
One quality of progress is that it is gradual, it unfolds one innovation and one cultural change at a time. Another quality of progress is that it is technological, which makes it physical, occupying space in the world with its body, and once it is well installed, almost irreversible. At this point in history the entanglement between technologies and the functioning of societies, economies and the everyday is unfathomably dense, seemingly indestructible. No person and no collective, organised action can get rid of all smartphone cameras, remove all non-essential plastics, disintegrate all superfluous roads and highways, turn off the Cloud, denormalise denim jeans as the default piece of clothing and so on. It would require -to employ a cliché- a seismic shift in both the collective perception and daily collective action patterns for this to change. And it would still require a gargantuan effort.
And another quality of the ongoing ‘global progress’ is that it tends towards homogenisation. There are two reasons that contribute to this happening. The first one is that its rational and pragmatic problem-solving quality makes it prone to be replicated in all societies who wish to enter progress. The second one has to do with irreversibility. The technologies that bring with them progress never come alone as a transparently pragmatic life-enhancing solution. As they are incorporated into multiple kinds of societies (with their histories, institutions, person to person associations, beliefs, habits, geography, etc.) they increasingly make not participating in progress or slowing down more difficult. And in addition to this they favour specific kinds of progress that are compatible with them at the expense of others; think of becoming a motorised society and becoming dependent on oil, then using that oil to create plastic, and all the other technologies of progress that are needed to sustain that or that are much more preferable to subscribe to instead of non-oil alternatives; think also of platform technologies and apps increasingly becoming the standard ‘tool’ for addressing problems and inconveniences.
Thus, as I present homogenisation here, it is built within this dynamic of inscribing pragmatic solutions to isolated problems into technologies that then bring with them not only the solution to this problem but clear the path for other solutions that belong to a specific life organisation of ‘progress’, while muddying the path for other visions of progress. Network effects are just one expression of this tendency.
I wonder if the pattern of homogenisation of life in the whole world as the only response to ‘escaping’ a regressive way of life is something as irreversible as this technological order. Are ‘platforms’ and ‘infrastructures’ really just enablers of anything that our communities can instrumentalise to organise their worlds in their own idiosyncratic ways2? Or are they key contributors of this homogenisation? (I advise to refer to this footnote to understand what I mean by idiosyncratic)
What I mean with all of this is that even if I agree that progress (as opposed to sticking to old ways out of fear of the new) is good, and nostalgia for the better old days usually forms out of idealisations that conveniently overlook all discomforts that we have eradicated today and all conveniences that, were we to consider those good-old times as a baseline, are far superior, it would be better if it didn’t all boil down into a situation of ‘you’re in or you’re out’.
Homogenisation makes our current state of almost irreversible progress inescapable. I reject what it looks like our only option being to subscribe to this specific way of life and join the march towards what today’s progerss has been defined as: ubiquitous AI assistance, mediated connectivity, infinite scroll entertainment, 3D printing, genetic enhancement and so on. It looks as if it’s panning out to be a question of addition and substraction: how much of all these things of progress do you want to add to your life, and how many are you going to skip to continue in your old ways?
But where are all other possible futures? All other manifestations of what as a collectivity we would like the world to look like? Maybe a future consists in the power of remaking the best of different eras and combining them into a better world. Like the Romantics who wished for a medieval revival, tossing aside powdered wigs, industrialisation, stifling social protocols and demure neoclassical buildings in favour of nocturnal escapades along stony canals and bridges, vines hanging from castle-walls, long and unruly hair, glowing wildflowers in dewy nights, mysterious figures in pristine forests, and respecting the mystery of the forces of nature as a reflection of the soul’s unpredictable force.
In our time, some people still yearn for some of that medieval beauty, we can see it in the millions of visitors that spend their holidays visiting places like Edinburgh, Bruges or Kyoto, taking with them photos as proof that they were there and praising the beauty of old times, sometimes even lamenting the state of modern cities.
And the same happens with the still prevalently analogue times of the 80’s and 90’s, and even the pre-smartphone early 00’s. One example is the Pearl Jam video I mentioned in the beginning, it’s only one of innumerable documents of those days which are filled with comments praising the ‘simplicity’ and ‘purity’ of those times. The nostalgic appeal of these more recent decades holds some resemblance to the Romanticist rejection of one version of modernity. If people desire to honour these other times and combines pieces from each era into their lives, this gesture can transcend a mere reference through personal fashion or hobby collection, it can unite people into finding a collective renovation. For example, as I pointed out before the attitudes behind the current triumphant idea of progress are made physical, durable and almost irreversible through technological systems. In the same way, alternative collective desires, such as analogue nostalgia or romanticist scenery (and wherever following the principles behind these worldviews can take us) successfully articulated and incorporated into their common consciousness, can also be treated technologically, and made physical and durable, outsourced into new ways of life.
The point is not to find comfort in reversing progress, abandoning current comforts and idealising the past. On the contrary, the point is to understand why we are collectively drawn to some things of the past and how we can use that to imagine multiple coexisting new futures, made possible by the great advancements of our time,3 of which I at least am very grateful.
Nostalgia is a way of making counterfactuals to envision how progress would have looked some of the best things of those times had developed further instead of being left out as another quaint element of the archaic past.
- Following Latour’s diagram of our current competing narratives of globalism vs. localism: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/693.html ↩︎
- I don’t mean idiosyncratic in a culturally relativistic way, where anything goes as long as it is inscribed within a ‘culture’s’ tradition. I mean it in what communities actually want for their lives -no matter their rituals, or traditions and what not- provided that these communities somehow began to form not arbitrarily, but according to a kind of temperamental, ‘philosophical’ kinship ↩︎
- Not only in science and technology, but in philosophical insight, political thought, educational resources, analytical tools and, not least, the opportunity for an increasing number of people to ideate, develop and realise the contents of their creative imagination ↩︎
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