The Last Flowering of the Future

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Corpsey said:
it is possible to step out of the line of fire maybe, but i think most of us who use social media, have smartphones etc are addicts really
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You can do it even if you don't get offline, tbh. Just change your focus.

Corpsey said:
yes i suppose that returns us to thirdform's point about not being able to imagine the future
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What effect do you think being able to imagine it had in the past? There was all the flying car sort of stuff in the 1950s, but I don't get the sense the ability to imagine that future resulted in the majority of people seriously working towards it. They just lived as normal.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
If you see your kids - various ages - digging through music constantly (both old and new), you realise a haunted last flowering of the future in music is bollocks, unless it’s cricket or cricket highlights in which case sssshhh

Change is blend of +/- creative stagnation +/- creative breakthroughs. However, if you look back at the downturn in Greek political power with stagnation in its cultural output and forms, it appears a direct correlation existed

How your man here tried to articulate the point to youse in the context of the meaning of 90’s

WashYourHands said:
There are approx three 90’s - early, middle and late.

Early archaic - no-one can quite believe the Berlin Wall is down and Thatcher is out. The music is peak era for the period, 88-92/93 really. Carnage still in NI, but you could go out and hear Frankie Bones and some of the finest House ever made at the same shindig. The blends and range of music at the time under one roof/marquee has never been matched. Add S.A.W’s, the horizontal tent finding and founding new musical experiences, plus buying bags of pills off ex-ICF that funded a footloose lifestyle.

Middle classical - oh, we’re back to the usual bs, Balkans erupts but Bill Clinton‘s hugging black babies and then, to cap it all off, Britpop hits. Hardcore warps into jungle and the mood darkens considerably. Criminal Justice Bill passes and a night out with mates and strangers under the stars becomes a decidedly political act of resistance. R1 have Tong and One in the Jungle, something is beginning to rot but the smell and source haven’t been isolated yet. It could be an outbreak of Westbrook Nostril.

Late Hellenistic - Ketamine smashes everything to bits, crack and heroin surge back and start to kill off those of us who got through the first 80’s smack apocalypse. Tony Blair arrives to add a false sense of hope and, right before the millennium, the GFA passes, akin to another wall partially coming down. DiY 10th birthday bash in Nov 99 near Tower Bridge was immense (easily one of their best) and then their millennium bash near Peterborough surpassed your best hopes. I drove home with mates thinking it ain’t over yet, but it kinda was.
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When I was twelve, I wanted nothing more than to be a science fiction writer. Today, I'm not sure I ever really became one. I suspect I was already something else when I began - probably what Donald Theall (1928-2008) defined as "paramodernist", meaning any cultural text that is neither modern nor postmodern, but can be classified as either/both. I took it for granted that the present moment is always infinitely stranger and more complex than any "future" I could imagine. My craft would be (for a while, anyway) one of importing steamingly weird fragments of the ever-alien present into "worlds" (as we say in science fiction) that purported to be "the future".

-- William Gibson, 2008
 
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