260712: Autobiography
I was born in the Provinces. I was raised reading dispatches from the Eastern Core, catching the musical shockwaves on delay; playing catch-up.
When I came of age, I set out for the famous city, global capital of culture. I expected to hear the sounds of tomorrow, as Pound, arriving from false-front, gunslinging Idaho, had met the new century in London's electrified vortex.
Instead I found lukewarm nostalgia and sentiment, Polaroid memories and mandolin strummers, and a man who sang like Van Morrison.
Parents have always told their sons and daughters that culture had fallen from the heights of their own childhoods. But now, it seemed, the younger generation agreed. Culture had stagnated. I found that many of the children of elites did not even believe in the concept of progress.
For many of us, the early 21st Century cursed us, by granting our wishes. We were bored by the end of history, and the triumph of liberal democracy, as if the inevitable endzone of terran evolution. We were frustrated by what seemed like a slowing pace of scientific advancement. As children, we'd believed we'd never die. As adults, we wrote books like Where's My Jetpack?, and asked why the War on Cancer was still ongoing. Many of us remember the emergence of Progress Studies in the 2010s. The stagnation, it seemed, was total: not only artistic, cinematic, musical; but moral, and technological.
The world looks quite different now. China has risen to industrial and energetic dominance. And artificial technology, to many observers, is in an accelerating technological takeoff. Just as the progressed we wished for returns, so we begin to wonder whether we want it, after all.