The Future Ain't What It Used to Be

When I was a kid in the early-to-mid 90s, I remember watching, with rapt fascination, the games my brother would play on his Amiga computer. Sometimes I'd play as well, if there was a two-player option, but as I remember I was just as happy to passively observe as he piloted various two-dimensional characters across a multitude of fantastic worlds. The aesthetic imprinting was powerful, and the blocky, pixellated artwork of those games still evokes a sense of cosy nostalgia laced with an undertow of numinous mystery.

Which might seem a bit sad, in retrospect, and I would probably agree. The video-game industry has always been deeply intertwined with the corporate/military-industrial propaganda matrix, and Jasun Horsley's 16 Maps of Hell details the way in which cultural artefacts become vectors for spiritual meaning where none can be found elsewhere. In my review, I mention how this tendency seems to have accelerated in the 1980s, with Millennials being peculiarly prone to cultural nostalgia (Zoomers are probably the same).

Nonetheless, the sense of loss hasn't left me, and I found Thomas Sheridan's recent article on Enya's ‘Caribbean Blue’ to be extremely relatable:

Listening to her sing this song now, with the evocative tones and haunting synth sounds, not to mention her otherworldly vocals, has made me realize something has happened in the world since then and now, and this gut-wrenching extreme nostalgia and hauntological sense of profound loss for that time makes it certainly feel this way.

While Enya's music has never done all that much for me, it was heartening to read Thomas expressing this. Personally, I had a very similar experience when I heard Faith No More's ‘Midlife Crisis’ on Bruce Dickinson's radio show back in 2005; despite having no memory of actually hearing it as a kid, it evoked the feeling of 1992 so specifically that I was immediately reminded of a swimming pool in south-west London that I often visited that year, and I was haunted by how the world had changed since then.

But what is even more interesting is the fact that the visions of the future that I grew up absorbing via a TV screen linked to an Amiga system were actually pretty dark. It was the era of cyberpunk, and the future was already here, it was just unevenly distributed, to paraphrase William Gibson's quip. Megacorporations were taking the place of governments, technology was increasingly invading the human body, and the natural world was being despoiled; it's interesting, then, that the futuristic, noirish cityscapes of my brother's favourite sci-fi games evoke that same sense of longing. One of the games that has haunted me since those halcyon days is a dystopian point-and-click mystical-thriller called DreamWeb.

At various points in my life, I've revisited this game, whether by digging out my brother's Amiga and attempting to load the floppy-disks, listening to the Tangerine Dream-y soundtrack, watching game replays on YouTube, or – most recently – finding an online version on a retro-gaming version and starting to play through it again. As a game, it’s pretty rubbish, but I still get that weird, cosy feeling whenever I think about it.

Thomas Sheridan proposes that something has changed beyond mere cultural fads triggering superficial waves of nostalgia; it certainly feels that way to me. Perhaps that is partly why DreamWeb has stayed with me for so long, because it deals with a very similar idea; a disruption appears in the imaginal realms of dreaming, and an alienated young man (with a cool raincoat and a pair of shades) is chosen to put the world back into its right place. The fact that he does so by simply shooting people is perhaps a defect of the genre as a whole, but one that reminds us that late-90s moral-panic about violent video-games might not have been totally unjustified.

1990s tech-dystopias were surprisingly myopic, in retrospect; even in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, one of the most influential cyberpunk novels, the immersive virtual-reality platform of the Metaverse (yes, Zuckerberg stole the name) exists side-by-side with an apparently-thriving VHS-rental industry.¹ It's very difficult, obviously, to think through all of the implications of any particular technological development, so the fact that ultra-HD visual-information transfer would clearly compromise the financial viability of pre-existing visual-media (such as old-school VHS tapes, which were already old-hat by the end of the 90s) wasn't immediately obvious.

Anachronisms aside, the biggest failure of the 1980s and 90s futurists was their tacit assumption that technology would make life more interesting, even if it was horrific and dystopian; at the furthest extent, they believed that technology could become more interesting than life itself. Snow Crash, as mentioned, has inspired at least two attempts to replicate the novel's VR 'Metaverse', which is described as so compelling that some users opt to remain permanently connected: Second Life, released in 2003, and the aforementioned Metaverse of Zuckerberg, launched in 2021 to widespread derision. Both have been failures, compared to the addictive world of Stephenson's metaverse; Second Life peaked after a decade, and the Zuckerverse has been a non-starter.

The invasion of the body by technology was described by Bruce Sterling, in his foreword to the 1986 anthology Mirrorshades, as a “central theme” of cyberpunk:

...prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry – techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self.

From a futurological perspective, one mistake that Sterling and his contemporaries perhaps made was in assuming that, despite generally being aware of the dubious nature of these technologies, the results would still be aesthetically interesting, and make for good stories – in essence, that they could be kind of cool. In William Gibson's Neuromancer, gangs of subcultural street-kids known as Panther Moderns engage in nihilistic terrorism while augmenting their bodies with weird bio-technological upgrades, such as cat-eyes or shark-jaws. In the 2020s, the reality is no less grotesque, but saturated with banality and bathos. An infamous tweet made the rounds last year, in which a 'trans-woman' bragged about the use of reconstituted tissue from human cadavers in his impending surgical mutilation, which he described as “so fucking cool and cyberpunk?”. The cyberpunk-dystopia we were expecting featured cyborg-mercenaries roaming the rain-soaked streets of Neo-Tokyo doing hits for the Yakuza; the one we got contained hopeless, porn-addled men opting for surgical castration in order to live out their sexual fetishes.

In other words, the future turned out to be duller, but in some ways, more dystopian. It's revealing that, one of the more prominent sci-fi video-games of the past decade, Cyberpunk 2077, was basically a 90s-retro nostalgia piece, right down to the casting of Keanu Reeves; in order to come up with a sufficiently interesting aesthetic of the future, the creators had to mine the past. Since the end of the 20^th century, retro-futurism has become far more the order of the day; many of the technologies we were promised and/or warned about have arrived, and the world seems even less interesting than it did back then.

But then, the partial role of science-fiction within our culture has been to charge the high-tech future with a degree of numinosity; that may be presented optimistically, as in Star Trek, or pessimistically, as in Blade Runner, but the presentation in either case is clearly intended to induce a sense of awe and wonder. Now the feasibility of sustained technological progress is, at the very least, questionable, as global oil production has almost certainly peaked, and no economically-viable alternative has appeared to pick up the slack; accordingly, genuinely interesting visions of a high-tech future have become rarer and rarer after the millennium (the last cinematic example I can think of would be Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, released in 2006, and also featuring Keanu).

Any resemblance to the author is purely coincidental.

The future we actually get will most likely be characterised by economical work-arounds, muddle-throughs, and bodge-jobs; not so much cyberpunk, as salvagepunk. Those of us living in the 'developed world' will have further to fall, of course, and the psychological fall-out of waking up one day and realizing we're living in a Third World country will cause a lot of trauma for many people, but with some creativity and flexibility, things could be alright. Now, the challenge for artists, film-makers, and writers is to come up with aesthetically interesting visions of those possible futures; the 'deindustrial SF' zine New Maps, edited by Justin Patrick Moore, is dedicated to precisely that, along with James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand series. Forget Mad Max: Fury Road; diesel will be too expensive for that, and the Australian Outback is rapidly greening anyway.

Like the protagonist of DreamWeb discovers, there has indeed been a corruption of our imaginal life, undoubtedly worsened by the toxicity of so much digital media. Fortunately, the cosmos tends not to need our help in sorting these things out. As the noise of our machines grows silent, and the glare of our electric lighting dims, the nights will become darker and quieter; and mystery will return to the edges of our vision, reminding us that it never really went away in the first place.

1. Stephenson was far from the first to depict such a thing; Red Dwarf beat Stephenson to the punch with “Better Than Life”, expanded in Grant & Naylor's novelization of the series.