Post-3/11-protest in Tokyo. Redwolf, leading activist. Author's own photos. cc by sa 4.0After 200 years of relentless growth and rampant acceleration industrialized countries seem to have reached an end point. After living under near constant mobilization with one foot in tomorrow land we are sensing limits all over the place. From limited natural resources to our limited capabilities in handling larger than life technologies (e.g. nuclear power). Some call it "peak everything" (Heinberg). Others refer to it as "after future" (Berrardi). In other words: 200 years after the "futurist turn" (Sloterdijk) almost everything that was launched in the name of gloomy progress reaches an ideological and operational deadend.
Take Japan as an example. Since the 1980s it has represented the future like no other country on this planet. Now it is deeply burdened by all projects, all movements and all the policies that created its futuristic appeal: toxic waste, mountains of national debt, ideological shipwreck. At this juncture a decision is needed: Could the future begin anew after all the burdens are left behind? – although hardly anyone can imagine when that will be. Or does the future begin in the here and now? – this place and time, where we are potentially able to envision another place and another time.
As the historian Eiji Oguma suggests, the most important insight of the moment is: "We can't go back to the 1980s". Naturally, people are still struggling with what this implies. Looking at it from a global perspective, two things seem clear. Firstly: a new tale of the future cannot be implanted top down. Not again. It must emerge bottom-up.
