Retrofuturism And The Days Of Futures Passed
It’s hard not to find a certain allure towards the past visions of the future we created, and I’ve become somewhat fascinated by it. It’s a heady mixture of retrofuturism and hauntology but what does this mean exactly?
Retrofuturism according to Wiki is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. If futurism is sometimes called a “science” bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation. If you add in Hauntology is a term coined to describe a cultural movement where society mourned for lost futures, where collectively and consciously time collapses and our past memories and associations haunt our minds, like a ghost.
Put these two together then essentially there is a multiplying of the feeling of the anticipation of futures we were promised and the haunting by the spectres of their loss. If you trace retrofuturism as an art form then you reach the earlier half of the 20th century where World War II and the end of economic depression gave way to the atomic age and the Cold War, where there was hope, optimism and anxiety in equal measures.
That’s primarily why I decided to create Days of Futures Passed, the publication and soon-to-be-launched podcast where I examine not only those fantastical predictions and what happened to them but also discuss with guests the future visions that inspired them as children.
We can find parallels between that bygone era and today still even though they appear starkly contrasting. Society in the 50s saw huge advances in nuclear science, leading to expectations that atomic energy would power everything in the future. There was great optimism around technological progress more broadly, a belief in an automated, nuclear-powered utopia. Automated kitchens, flying and self-driving cars, robot butlers, underwater cities, space travel — it was every sci-fi lover's dream come true then. The space race itself was the epitome and culmination of technological convergence, it seemed there was nothing we couldn’t do. Consumerism and mass consumption kicked into high gear as the economy bounced on its way up.
Of course, all that optimism was against a backdrop of fear and the threat of nuclear annihilation as the Cold War loomed large and an arms race developed, and in the midst of that anxiety civil rights movements took hold as more conservative gender roles were being pushed.
Today, it seems that the more things changed the more they stayed the same.
We still retain that optimism about technology and its march of progress but the anxiety is less about straight-up nuclear war as the geopolitical climate is more fractured and less a single them vs us situation. The threat of someone lobbing a nuke over the border is still very much alive and kicking but its prominence is the lesser of existential risks on the agenda with climate change, resource scarcity and artificial intelligence taking centre stage.
We have a new space race now but with broader international collaboration in some respects and an increase in commercial and private involvement. This era’s race is less about US vs USSR and more about Rest of the World vs China, SpaceX vs Blue Origin. AI and automation are on the rise and in the political agenda but concerns about job displacement and ethical implications exist.
Societal movements are now more liberal, shifting towards a more diverse and inclusive community and removing the handcuffs of the 50s stereotypes and prejudices (well, I think we’d like to convince ourselves of this anyway)
And what we can achieve with technology is judged with realism and not optimism. There’s enthusiasm and hope for technological advances in AI, biotech, and renewable energy, but equally concern over their use, more so than before.
The 50s were generally more optimistic, while today’s mood is more realistic and complex. We may have advanced technology, but we’re also more aware of its potential downsides and yet both eras are characterised by a mix of optimism about technology’s potential and anxiety about its dangers. Cold War fears in the 50s find a parallel in today’s geopolitical uncertainties and cyber threats, we’ve just swapped one big enemy for lots of smaller ones and some we can’t even see. And just as the space race captivated audiences back then today’s tech advancements thanks to the collaboration between NASA and SpaceX generate a similar excitement (although there is a huge amount of normalisation in this, as SpaceX aims for hundreds of launches a year there comes with it the feeling of watching another bus drive by the window with it)
Why is my obsession with retrofuturism important? Well, as I pointed out in two previous articles (Where Have All The Futurists Gone?, Science Fiction Can Still Deliver Visions Of The Future) there is a lot to learn from that optimism of the past because it was unbridled, we did not know what was possible and what was not and we’ve lost that ability to envisage futures beyond what we know can be delivered.
The sad fact is, Futurism the profession has become as obsessed with numbers as a Six Sigma Black Belt and less concerned with imagining what a future could look like.
This publication and accompanying podcast are the antithesis of the current direction of future studies. We must return to the past and not only re-examine that unconstrained optimism with a new lens but also retain it and use it to build future scenarios that go well beyond what we know is possible today.
I’m excited to pour as much energy and passion into this as I can muster, and I want to find as many as possible who also believe in this to do the same. As Editor of Days Of Futures Passed I’ll be hunting for people who want to write about those lost futures and project forward how we can not only learn from them but also find ways to incorporate those past visions against the backdrop of today.
If you’re interested in being a writer and have as much passion as I do then get in touch (I’m on LinkedIn, Twitter/ X mostly). My only criteria are that you love to write long-form, love retrofuturism and science fiction and won’t use AI to write articles for you (using it as a research assistant is fine though).
I can’t wait to make this something big. I can’t wait to move the world of futurism in a new direction.
And I can’t wait to, maybe, inspire others that the past still has value for the future of us all.
