The pervasive sense that "everything new is bad" and the culture-wide obsession with past aesthetics are indications of an era with deep-rooted reactionary brainworms I think. Give me a future I haven't seen before. Futurism that is not retrofuturism.
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in reply to @Gyro's post:
i have an obsession with past aesthetics because in the past things had an aesthetic.
look at an old TV set from the 1960s though 80s. there is so much freedom for different shapes, different textures, different layouts of controls. chrome, plastic, wood, metal. does it have tuning dials or push buttons? are the push buttons big satisfyingly clunky mechanical ones or are they electrical? is there an LED display or is there a moving needle on a gauge? what does it smell like when it gets warm?
buy a tv in 2024 and congratulations it’s just a black glossy border on an image. there’s nothing there. no human being expressed themselves in the creation of this object.
i am so desperately craving Something instead of nothing. nothing new has been made since like, the iPod?
you say “give me a future” but we don’t even have a present. there is no vibe to anything anymore. Come watch ghostbusters 5. you have no choice, new ideas no longer exist
Minimalism is an aesthetic choice. It is a bad one, it is one I'm tired of. It's possible to come up with new things, but corporations have become obsessed with not looking "cringe" or stupid so they're insistent that everything be done in the style associated with being intellectual, stylish, upper-class in 1997. Do you see it? How this is stuck in the past too, a bygone idea of "classy"?
But in part the effect you're talking about is exactly what I'm complaining about.
Difference, uniqueness, sense-of-place are conceived of as only possible within the past or nostalgic throwbacks to the past. I want a new new. I want a new difference, a new uniqueness, that is not contingent on some earlier decade.
I feel like at this point, we have to make the future ourselves. Getting away from contemporary aesthetics is difficult to say the least, as we're all compelled to interact with these UX/UI experiences to function in society. We won't get any help.
It's difficult to envision anything else. Most any futuristic interface Hollywood puts out tends to be absolutely unusable for more than a minute, and most common folk aren't designers, so all we can do is look to the past where we had wild themes of disembodied heads with speakers for ears for our media players, and think about when gas was way cheaper.
So yeah, the future is up to us, and I don't know what it looks like, though I feel that any honest artistic expression, even if it does lean on past aesthetics, is better than the bland corporate sludge pushed to our phones every day.
I'm a boomershooter enjoyer and I love low-poly stuff, I take part in this as much as anybody and I think a lot of it is good art, too. We kinda can't individually help living in the zeitgeist we're living in, and lots of things are downstream of this.
IDK, there's a lot of good artistic expression that is retro. I just think the fact that so much of it is retro is a bad sign in an abstract way. Like we've given up and we're retreating inward.
I guess it feels like a retreat because it kinda is. Like you've mentioned elsewhere, a group of really shitty people stood up and said, "We are the future" and we've all been suffering because of it, so natural instincts are to "hide" against this aggression into every aspect of our lives.
I have faith it will end, though. Like, it's that whole "we once thought the divine right of kings would never end" sort of thing. There's hard physical limits in this universe, and at some point we're going to have to create something that's post-capitalist. I like to think that I'll see it.