I've been on a kick lately about how people are all people and we've all been people for thousands of years, and our desires and motivations and goals are not unique to us but have been shared by other people stretching back countless eons.
(long thread)
(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.
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.
@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?