There is this idea floating around from the cultural sector. The basic premise is that the cultural products like art, music, fashion, movies, tv, pop culture, literature etc are all stuck in this period of unoriginality and repetition.

The usual analysis goes that if you went back in time 50 or 75 or 100 years, there were these decadal fads / trends / movements where a person wearing 1955 clothing in 1965 would look decidedly out of date.

Most of the commenters started to notice that starting around some date that was maybe in the mid 1990s or early 2000s, the decadal sense of progress and change collapsed and ever since we have been more or less in one long "now".

Music, for example, is a bunch of "tribute bands" or "retro acts" that don't label themselves as such. Movies are all about sequel franchises. Fashion is all about 'vintage ' and so on. You get the idea.

So... If you have read this far...

There have been a number of cultures in the history of the planet where politically and culturally the sense of the passing of time is meddled with at a linguistic and cultural level. For example, they could have a bunch of religious beliefs about immortality, or a tweak of the verb tense where you can't refer to the future or past tense, or they have a belief in a deterministic political cycles / dynasties that are super-naturally unavoidable or whatever. Cultural anthropology has a bunch of examples, often where these seemingly unstable power relationships get propped up and perpetuated and stabilized simply because the passage of time becomes unknowable, unspeakable, loses salience and so on -- the population can't imaginethe possibility of a deep change in society.

For me, this all connects. We had Bush I, Baby Bush, Clinton, the Other Clinton, Trump I, Obama's VP came back, Trump II. Like all these repeats of reruns...

What decade is this? We are in this societal state where it's like the snooze alarm keeps going off and being reset and the limbo state continues to play...

My personal thought is that this is a bottom - up phenomenon. I don't think Trump is a mastermind puppeteer keeping time from passing. Rather he is the beneficiary of the popular vibe that people prefer to keep sleeping away the years. Trumps decade of significance is the 1980s. People, on some level, would rather go back in time than forward to the future.

And the "why" of it is that waking up, you wake up to a kind of waking nightmare. We have no ready made cultural narrative to comprehend what's really happening.

The climate picture is clearly moving ahead, but culturally we have taken a step away into this abstraction. "The climate in 2100". " 2 degrees". "Net zero in 2050". Nothing is about right now.

Cynically and pessimistically, I think when we reach 2° the headlines will have already been about 3° for years as we cross that line. We will never be present to our lives. We can never be horrified or alerted. The worse it becomes the greater the disconnectedness...

double post but what post could be more important to double post than this post?

This chart from the article hit me in the civic-duty feels

Even this article, despite repeating over and over how we have already crossed the "it's too late" thresholds, ends with a call to action, as if we can still do something about it.

And as long as we go with their mendacious flow, hundreds of millions, and then billions will die well before “Net Zero by 2050” or “our great grandkids’ future” arrive. Because we are out of time. And we need to get to work immediately. There are a million things to do.

What is there to do? Let's say we shut down fossil fuel infrastructure. What goes with it? Fertilizer production, farm equipment, transportation, refrigeration, all the requirements to sustain the lives we worry will be lost due to climate change. Let's replace it with renewables, then. The cost in energy, production, and resources to replace the current world-wide farming, transportation, and energy infrastructure with renewables is somewhere in the high trillions of dollars and who knows how many years (decades) of time to make it happen. Of course we should still try to do it. But it's not going to save us. The damage is already done. The patient is fatally poisoned. We could maybe stop the flow of poison, but they'll still die. The hard pill to swallow here is there is no solution. We've painted ourselves into a corner and we're going to die here. You can blame the oligarch class. They deserve it. But remember how hard it was to do even a partial shutdown during covid? The level of shutdown required to stop poisoning our planet is way more severe than that. It's not going to happen, not willingly. Not until there is literally no way to deny what's happening. And by then it will be far too late.

The sad reality is that humans simply can’t ingest let alone digest the level of fatalism heading our way.

So this hopium you can find at the end of every mainstream article and in most government promises is almost a prerequisite in order to be able to simply reach a form of consciousness that’s simply not capable of seeing the very dire truth.

I believe it is the same reason we’re doing this massive gamble on AI, while saner minds already know that LLMs are incapable of possessing true intelligence. Very similar to a person in depth finding at $100 note and instantly spending it all on the lottery. It’s not rational behaviour, and that’s telling something pretty dark about our common unconscious state.

Exellent article. Nothing to add.

The sad reality is that humans simply can’t ingest let alone digest the level of fatalism heading our way.

So this hopium you can find at the end of every mainstream article and in most government promises is almost a prerequisite in order to be able to simply reach a form of consciousness that’s simply not capable of seeing the very dire truth.

I believe it is the same reason we’re doing this massive gamble on AI, while saner minds already know that LLMs are incapable of possessing true intelligence. Very similar to a person in depth finding at $100 note and instantly spending it all on the lottery. It’s not rational behaviour, and that’s telling something pretty dark about our common unconscious state.

I feel like killing off 4 billion people is sort of the game plan at this point for the elite. Theyve convinced themselves they can vibe code their way to utopia after the annoyingly hungry masses have died out.