Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [123]
He had little new to say, he reflected wryly, about what they could do if they did walk away from them. The godless gospels had answers to that, answers he agreed with, which essentially amounted to making the fullest use of the one life that was all and enough. They disagreed about how to do it, of course. From the same starting-point, one lot would suggest we all marched off to the left, another that we raced off to the right, while a substantial body of enlightened opinion held that the best bet was to sort of wander about with our eyes and options open.
Jordan sat up with a jolt, open-eyed himself. There was a name for that attitude, that outlook, a name that had recently gained currency: post-futurism. Pragmatic, disillusioned, refusing to hold up images of an ideal society or to crank out small-scale models of it on patches of contested ground, it had been widely denounced as radically conservative or blindly subversive. There had been a big fuss a few years back when someone had applied the label to the ANR, in some fashionable, controversial book – what was it called?
On a sudden hunch Jordan jumped up and searched through Moh’s collection of political literature, digging through drifts of pamphlets for the solid chunk of the occasional hardbook. And there it was: Towards the End of the Future by Jonathan Wilde, the old space-movement guru. He picked it up and flipped through it, smiling at Moh’s pencilled underlinings and scrawled, misspelt remarks. One proposition which had met with heavy black lines, exclamation marks and ‘Yup’ was Wilde’s comment that:
Aside from the space movement itself (which, paradoxically, is oriented to a former future which has now become merely the present, with all the problems of the present), the thinking which I have provisionally labelled ‘post-futurist’ is most strongly – if unconsciously – embodied in the diverse and ineradicable resistance movements against US/UN hegemony: the Khazakh People’s Front, the ex-neo-Communists of the NVC, the nonexistent but influential conspiracy known as the Last International, the Army of the New Republic, and many more.
No shared ideal unites them – on the contrary. Having every cause to rebel, they need no ideal, no ‘cause’. One stubborn conviction is common to all of them: No More New World Orders.
I will not conceal my own conviction that in this they are right.
For we have seen the future – we have by now centuries of experience of the future – and we know it doesn’t work. It’ll be a great day when the future goes away! It’ll be a great day of liberation, when the armies, the functionaries, the camp-followers, the carpet-baggers of the future go away and leave us in peace to get on with the rest of our lives!
Intrigued, Jordan went back to the beginning of the book and read it the whole way through. It took him about an hour and a half, sitting down or wandering up and down the stairs for coffee, book in hand. When he’d finished he dug out Wilde’s earlier works from Moh’s collection and read them: The Earth is a Harsh Mistress, No More Earthquakes – short, blazing manifestos that he scanned in minutes. Wilde hadn’t changed his principles – he was still the libertarian space nut that he’d been as long as anyone could remember – but his sense of the historical possibilities had subtly altered since the heady, crusading excitement of the space movement’s early days. He no longer seemed to think the ideas he propounded were about to sweep the world, nor did he even want them to: a respect for diversity