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.
You're so right about this. modern techbro culture claims to embody The Future™ but their "future" stinks of nostalgia and an unhealthful fixation on a small handful of old sci-fi entertainments from past decades. Merciful stars—they actually think that Blade Runner is something to aspire to, instead of a nightmare dystopia, because they all imagine they'll be in the elite class that gets to have flying cars while everyone else is living in squalor.
But anything that's genuinely new, anything that doesn't obviously line up with their nostalgia, sends all these purported futurists into a panic. I think of how (to pick an obvious example) even though gender transition has been a feature of much written science fiction for decades, it's not an aspect of the mass-market pop sci-fi that furnishes the techbros with the only ideas they have (except perhaps as a cruel joke) and they pop fuses in their brains when confronted with the idea. Same with the notion that people might want to extensively modify their bodies—they panic and start burbling thinly disguised your-body-is-a-temple bullshit.
There's a clear kinship between the stale nostalgic "futurism" of techbro culture and the eschatological daydreams of evangelical Christians who clearly seem to think that their reward for being on Jesus's team is going to be...more of the same. They want an afterlife that's merely a continuation of their present life, but with no enemies around and nothing getting in the way of their desires. Is there any doubt that if the techbros get what they want out of Elon Musk, their high-IQ Martian paradise, they'll be doing all the same shit on Mars that they're already doing?
~Chara
A cyberpunk story where a pack of anthro wolves and coyotes feast on Elon Musk and his acolytes would be a best seller.
