In Response to Silvo Lorusso's “Late Futurism”

Our (we, late futurists??) greatest obstacle in trying to establish a meaningful basis for Imagining futures (yes, I’ll use the word — maybe that makes me a late futurist) is often ourselves — the ones who call ourselves futurists, and the ones who critique those who do.

(Parenthetically: maybe we retire Mark Fisher for a while — at least until someone can Imagine something other than the end of the world or the end of capitalism, rather than repeating (his derivation of Jameson) that now-tired phrase we’ve all come to wallow in. Ideally, we’ll do better than Fisher did at correcting it in our lifetimes.)

What we need is more time spent collaborating in rich, generative, embodied ways — walking arm-in-arm — and less time debating the semantics of what we call ourselves, or whether our framing is historically rigorous, or whether our hustle disqualifies us from being taken seriously. It’s a tough world. People gotta eat.

Sure, the hustle has a stink to it sometimes. But it’s not snake oil or lip gloss or ED cream we’re pushing. (And most people can smell the difference anyway.)

Most of us are in this because we sense something in this work — something that might help. And if it helps even one person imagine “the future” differently and helps pay the rent, that’s a win-win.

Less yammering. More hammering.

I loved the essay. Thank you, Silvio. You know I admire your work — and often feel a kind of fraternal, professional jealousy of your output. But maybe most of all, I loved it because it gave me the impulse to write this.