The Future is not Lost: On Music, Technology, and the Creation of New Worlds

Mark Fisher taught a generation to hear the future’s disappearance in contemporary music, as if the rhythm of the world was synchronised to the periodic flowering of new creative forms. His diagnosis was devastating: stagnation in music was akin to a venous insufficiency, or worse, some kind of nuclear winter that would ward off the spring for endless generations to come.

Drawing on musicians like SOPHIE, Arca and Iglooghost, Matt Bluemink declares that the future is not lost; it still speaks to us through music. If Fisher’s Hauntology—dwelling on ghosts of the past—is the logic of depression, then Bluemink’s Anti-Hauntology posits a logic of hope where voices from the future continue to guide the development of the present.

Island-hopping through Stiegler’s philosophy of technics, Simondon’s theory of individuation, and the spatial imaginaries of cyberpunk and solarpunk, Bluemink builds a theoretical framework equal to the times — one that takes seriously our capacity to, not only to diagnose the world, but to remake it. In order to create a new future we must re-imagine our relationship with music, with technology, and with culture. The world of tomorrow is a blank canvas; an open book. New beginnings are always possible.

Matt Bluemink is the founder and editor-in-chief of Blue Labyrinths online magazine. His research is focused on the relationship between the philosophy of technology, media theory and urbanism. He also writes on contemporary music, literature, and digital culture.