Back

(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!)

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.)

Which brings me back to the industrial revolution.

The futurists were mostly born in the 1870s and 1880s. They were born in to the midst of the "second" industrial revolution. They came of age during the first world war.

Their parents would have been born at the tail end of the "first" industrial revolution.

Their grandparents would have lived the effects of the "first" industrial revolution first hand.

Over two or three generations, these people watched the world go from "pre-industrial" to "industrial" and they were desperate to bring it to "post-industrial"

I won't make the argument for the ways the industrial revolution(s) mirror the digital/information revolution(s?) of the 20th and early 21st century. There's an argument to be made there, but someone else can make it. People are the same as ever.

But the fights we're fighting today, about AI and automation and labor?

Those fights have been ongoing since the 19th century. The Luddites were fighting that fight.

The recording artists union was fighting that fight in the 1930s and 1940s.

We have a lot more in common with the average person living in gaslight era london than you might expect! The things they wrote, the things they thought, the fights they fought... all of it is as relevant as ever

So, who stands to benefit from alienating us from our history? From making it seem ancient and settled?

(Those who benefit from the current status quo! Those who would suffer if we stopped acting like we fell out of a coconut tree.)

My parents did not raise me to fight. They did not have to fight. The Vietnam war was over by the time they were old enough to care.

Their parents had the opportunity to fight, but mostly they did not.

Well, that's not true.

My maternal grandmother ran away from home as a teenager and spent her teen years living with a black family in Chicago. She lived through a lot of racist violence, and she fought against it along side her adopted family.

But the others had the chance to fight, and chose not to.

My maternal grandfather ... well, he's got charisma, and that's about it. I don't know how he avoided military service. I don't know his thoughts on the Vietnam war. I do know that he was more interested in keeping peace than making progress.

My paternal grandparents were very Status Quo reinforcing white southern baptists. My grandfather enlisted in the coast guard at one point, and thus avoided being deployed to Vietnam.

But my great grandparents lived through the depression. Some of them were born in the midst of the first world war. And their parents? Well, they were children of the industrial revolution.

I was raised in a world that respected the status quo, and that taught me that history was settled.

My point with all of this family history is to say that the fact that my parents (and many of your parents) did not fight, and did not raise us to fight, does not mean that these questions are settled.

We are not that far removed from The Industrial Revolution. In the grand scheme of things, the modern world is an anomaly, a blip, and very much an unanswered question.

A human lifespan is pretty short. Our parents' fights, and their parents' fights, and their parents' fights... they haven't just disappeared. They are still being fought.

(please understand that when I say "fight" in this context, I do not mean "use violence." Sometimes the fight will demand violence, mostly the fight simply demands intention.)

Anyway, the way history is taught in American schools is a travesty. These conflicts are not settled. Don't let the billionaires trick you.

@ajroach42

I grew up with my gma (DOB 1919), and saw a lot of this first hand in her mindset/behaviors. It's a great thread; would you consider editing your first toot to reflect that it's the first of many so that people can read everything you have to say?

@ajroach42 I was at their 20 eyars concert for that album for 1985 lmfao

@ajroach42 on being enamored of the futurists: i wouldn't be too hard on yourself about that. the way it was taught to me it was all positive, just like neo-clasisisim and plenty others

@ajroach42 When I was in high school my dad had me read _Maus_ and _The Futurist Cookbook_ back to back and that was educational in ways I am not smart enough to articulate this morning except to say that the combination made it very obvious _why_ "break from the past and embrace the future" was such a useful (to Mussolini) complement to "break from the future and embrace the past".

@ajroach42 @zwol s this not what Trump has just sold to America?

@Rickd6 @zwol https://retro.social/@ajroach42/113578285808440143

@zwol Astounding that none of the product pages I can find for that mention that the author also wrote the fascist manifesto.

@ajroach42 @djsundog Project Gutenberg, that early Internet star before the Web was even a thing! @gutenberg_org