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(okay, not countless and not eons, but long enough.)

But today I want to talk about the march of time.

For a moment, please indulge me while I talk about bowling for Soup.

Many of you who are my age will remember the release of the song 1985.

It was released in 2004.

We're now further from the song 1985 than the song 1985 was from the year 1985.

When I heard this song for the first time, 1985 seemed like an impossibly long time ago.

(How silly!)

Because we're horrible at quantifying times before our own existence.

We're just really bad at it.

Everything that happened before we were born is Old and before our parents were born is Ancient and anything beyond that is probably irrelevant, right?

(no!)

@djsundog said something yesterday-- while we were discussing (among other things) what it would take to reboot a much missed and beloved relic of the old web (and all the reasons we should not do that)-- about the seeming irrelevance of the writing and people of the industrial revolution to the modern age.

Now, we moved on from that topic and down another rabbit hole so quickly that he did not have the chance to explore the potential general relevance or irrelevance of the industrial revolution to the modern age. He made an offhand comment that we both recognized as, at least partially, factitious and we moved on in the conversation to the bit that actually mattered.

(the part that mattered, for reference: https://toot-lab.reclaim.technology/@djsundog/113577640476010660 )

But this loosened a stitch, and so now I'm going to pull at that thread.

So now we're going to talk about fascism.

Sortof

We'll actually talk about the industrial revolution in a bit, but before that we have to talk about OG Italian Fascism.

See, the Fascists were obsessed with the whole RETVRN ideology, rejecting modernity for a half remembered and mostly untrue idealized version of the past. But this was just an appeal to to nostalgia in almost the exact same way that those who bowl in order to acquire soup appealed to nostalgia.

Remind people of the last time they felt hope, and tell them that you will deliver them back to that time. It's a powerful tactic, and it's why that last A in MAGA is there.

But along the way there was another related movement which was far more honest, although no less dangerous.

The Fascist Manifesto was written by two people. One of them was a classical RETVRN fascist, but the other was a Futurist.

(It's all connected, I promise.)

I'll make this quick, in order to talk about the industrial revolution and our relationship to it today I have to talk about the futurists and their relationship to fascism and their goals.

Futurism was an art movement, or at least that's how it's remembered today.

It was a social movement that swept up a lot of artists, and the art that they produced was stunning.

I'm more than a little embarrassed to say that I really admire it aesthetically and, even worse, that I was pretty sympathetic to a lot of professed futurist ideals in my younger years.

The core tenets of Futurism were basically: Go Fast, Break Things, reject the past. Push Push Push.

The futurists were really just a bunch of young folks convinced that the world they lived in was too different from the world their parents had lived in for anything their parents had to say to matter (it didn't help that they emerged in the wake of the first world war.)

It goes a lot deeper than that, and the Futurist political party had some pretty weird views (Full gender equality, abolish marriage, tax "free love", but only sometimes.)

Mostly they just took whatever stance put them most at odds with the past.

And somehow they found a perfect mate in the past obsessed Fascists.

Well, not "somehow". Both groups benefited from alienating people from their history. The fascists did that by promising a return to an idealized past that never existed and could never exist. The futurists did it by rejecting the past wholesale in favor of the New. They were obsessed with speed, violence, and destroying the order of the world.

They had an unease alliance with the fascists because they were essentially accelerationists who wanted everything to burn down and everyone to die, so that they'd be left to rebuild a new and glorious future.

The upshot here is that these two groups were, in practice, one group.

Their methods, ideals, and composition were different, but they served the same goal and eventually the futurists were subsumed in to the fascist party, and any good ideas that were hiding among their very bad ideas were subverted in the pursuit of power.

The fascists "lost" the second world war and were "defeated".

And then the US turned on the USSR, and hired a bunch of nazis to build their future.

While the politicians of the day would never acknowledge futurism, it was a very futurist methodology. (That is to say "give up on even the appearance of a set of morals or values in the name of progress for progresses sake" might as well have been the futurist motto.)

And so we've lived in a world in which the futurists are long gone, but also where their thinking has influenced so much.

The modern tech-bro movement, the FOEs (Friends of Elon), the people who put their technological might an progress among everything else, they're just second rate futurists.

(second rate, because they don't even have artists to lend them an air of credibility.)

(it's also unfair of me to say that the futurists were young folks. They were mostly middle aged men. Just like the tech bros.)