The current world is experiencing a resurgence in fascism. From the GOP in the USA to the AfD in Germany, the Italian Brotherhood in Italy, & France’s precarious position, it seems that the far right is on the rise everywhere.
Meanwhile our cultural touchstones reach back to a time that never exists. From vaporwave to Stranger Things, we are experiencing the nostalgia of GenX for the imagined childhoods of their past and it has robbed our youth of their imagination of the future. The resonant stories of the future (Severance) must be only dystopias because the past is where heroism lives.
These two things, the rise of fascism and nostalgia are deeply intertwined. Anemoia, nostalgia for a time that never existed, is key to the fascist worldview. While we enjoy throwback television and music to an imagined version of the eighties, we enable the “things were better back then” mentality. The way things USED to be is lionized even as the way things use to be were as complicated as things are today.
The fascists in America want to drape themselves in a flag, hoist a cross, and make America great again. When asked when that time was, it is always some amorphous time in the past. There is not generally a rational explanation for why that time and no general loyalty to any aspect of that time. Just a general sense that things were simpler back then.
This extends to the pop culture of the time. We have little to offer that imagines a future. Rather we have constant calls back to the past. Seemingly every big blockbuster is a remake or a sequel. No new stories can be told when we pine for the past.
And the imagination suffers for it.
Remix culture reaches its logical conclusion when it becomes lost in the maze of anemoia. We are now given access to a vast swath of popular culture’s output since its inception through the internet. This is an incredible gift. Yet the side effect is that it is all too easy to be lost in examining the past rather than imagining the future. Solarpunk exists but has not found its resonant work in the zeitgeist. Instead we are inundated with the fascist and religious overtones of the ubermench in superhero movies, the historical reenactments and passion plays to reinforce mythologies that have been thoroughly deconstructed by analysis.
Remix culture can reinterpret and recontextualize the past in a way that is liberating and critiquing of the past. But when we have followed that into empty aesthetic (vaporwave, for instance, of which I am extremely susceptible) it has lost all of its power of critique and only exists to continually reinforce how great things were.
The world is complicated. It is often dark and we have many extreme challenges to meet. Climate change, right wing extremism, kleptocrats in power, mass migration and cultural shifts. These are difficult times and the natural inclination can be to look backwards. But this is an abdication of responsibility. When we play in the past we negate our responsibility to the future. Escapism in anemoia leaves our children with no future at all.
In order to break free of this cycle we have to turn our faces back to the future again. To imagine the brave new worlds that we might inhabit. To wonder and to build and work towards a brighter future.