A thatched spaceship drifts in the direction of the celebrities. A Union Jack-emblazoned high-speed practice powers by way of a rainforest. A rocket takes off in entrance of Huge Ben. This isn’t science fiction, that is Anglofuturism. Effervescent up from the collective consciousness of the net proper, for years it existed largely as AI-generated photographs. Whereas the settings are various, they share a typical thread: imagining a homogenous and high-tech Britain, one that mixes the demographics and cultural dominance of the 1850s with the know-how of the 2050s. In a 2022 essay in UnHerd the author Aris Roussinos proposed “Anglofuturism” as an answer to nationwide stagnation, arguing that Britain wants a daring programme of nationwide renewal, however one that’s rooted in “the perfect of the previous”. Just lately the concept has gained momentum. In June on the “Now and England” convention, Robert Jenrick, the possible subsequent Tory chief, advised an viewers: “I’m what may be described as an Anglofuturist”. There’s no Anglofuturist manifesto, however supporters envision a world the place know-how and custom coexist. Within the thought’s broader implications, it’s additionally a world during which a distinctly white British cultural identification is preserved.
Anglofuturism owes a lot to Afrofuturism, an aesthetic motion that depicts different realities and futures as a approach for black folks to think about another system, one which centres their company and freedom. Whereas Afrofuturism seeks to offer a traditionally oppressed minority a approach of imagining a greater world, Anglofuturism is the alternative. It’s basically a philosophy of self-pity. The Anglofuturist goals of returning to the Victorian period, when Britain bestrode the world as a colossus, the solar by no means setting on its empire, and so on. That such dominance got here on the expense of its colonial topics is glossed over. They demand that “the long run is made in Britain”, on the identical time arguing that the nation’s heritage have to be completely preserved. In that sense Anglofuturism incorporates the very paradox paralysing Britain: how can a rustic whose identification is so grounded in previous glories obtain new ones? Or, to place it plainly, how can a multicultural society hook up with a previous the place it wasn’t one?
There’s an odd melancholy operating by way of all of it, one thing near what Orhan Pamuk calls hüzün in his e book Istanbul: Reminiscences and the Metropolis. Pamuk describes hüzün as a shared, collective disappointment, a sort of civic grief that lingers after an empire’s fall. The sensation is just not particular person however ambient – a delight turned inward, a grandeur curdled into gloom. Anglofuturism is a British hüzün: the ache of a former empire that can’t fairly admit it has fallen, the consolation of decline disguised as future. It turns nostalgia into an aesthetic and paralysis right into a mood-board.
Anglofuturists are acutely apprehensive that Britain has turn out to be “museum island” or “butler to the world”. However their response to that anxiousness is just not reflection however reconstruction. Within the language of the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym that is “restorative nostalgia”: the idea that the misplaced dwelling may be rebuilt, that the previous may be restored to working order if solely the precise aesthetic is utilized. Reflective nostalgia, in contrast, lingers within the loss and recognises its impossibility. Anglofuturism can’t do this. It refuses to mourn so it mythologises. It errors self-pity for delight and aesthetic for imaginative and prescient.
For some adherents, Anglofuturism is a primarily white Anglo future, a fantasy of cultural and racial dominance masquerading as technocratic renewal. Anglofuturism is typical of the brand new on-line proper, skilfully mixing so-called scorching takes with heavy irony. It’s additionally a broad church, with each nasty adherents (nameless X accounts calling for mass deportations) and innocent, nerdy ones (a current episode of the Anglofuturism podcast made the case for Pingu as a illustration of English settler colonialism). The error made by a current article on Hope Not Hate’s web site was to lump all of them collectively. If one one that shares the identical views as you is racist, the pondering goes, then it’s essential to denounce these views. If racists like brutalist buildings, then all brutalist buildings have to be torn down. It’s a drained tactic that elicits the psychological picture of a quivering man hiding behind the sofa whereas Pingu performs on the tv. Anglofuturism dares you to take it critically, then arches an eyebrow while you do.
It’s not the primary time Britain has been misplaced previously . The Victorians themselves had been obsessive about ruins, with gothic revivalism and the romance of decay. They constructed neo-medieval cathedrals in the midst of the commercial age and dreamed of a legendary Albion. Even William Blake’s “Jerusalem” – “and was Jerusalem builded right here” (reply: no it wasn’t) – is similar impulse in poetic type: a eager for a previous that by no means was, dressed as a want to construct a kingdom of heaven on Earth. Anglofuturism is their descendant, besides the ruins are actually digital, rendered by AI and shared on Discord. The craving has merely discovered a brand new medium.
In Time Shelter, the novelist Georgi Gospodinov describes a clinic the place dementia sufferers dwell inside rooms recreating completely different a long time of the previous. Ultimately wholesome folks start to verify in. Complete nations maintain referendums to determine which decade they are going to dwell in. Anglofuturism is one such time shelter. Its proponents declare to think about the long run, however in fact Britain is so contaminated with nostalgia that even its younger can’t think about a future that isn’t only a simulacrum of the previous. The thinker Jean Baudrillard described the simulacrum as a replica with out an unique. Anglofuturism is exactly that: a future constructed from reproductions of fantasies that by no means existed. Its gleaming rockets and thatched spaceships usually are not symbols of progress however signs of confusion.
We dwell in an age of fixed change – technological, ecological, social – but Britain’s creativeness strikes in circles. It replaces chance with replication, innovation with irony. Pamuk’s hüzün no less than carries dignity, a sort of mournful self-awareness. Britain’s model turns inward and defensive, as if the one method to shield identification is to freeze it. Anglofuturism’s tragedy is that it errors reminiscence for future. It longs for a world that has already disappeared, one which maybe by no means actually existed. Its rockets by no means go away the launchpad; its high-speed trains circle endlessly by way of the identical panorama of heritage and decline. It’s not science fiction however the theatre of arrested improvement.
When Jenrick known as himself an Anglofuturist this summer season, the comment could have been wry, however it reveals how the motion has seeped into the corridors of energy. But his personal occasion’s coverage equipment persistently fails at infrastructure supply. The Conservative Social gathering has turn out to be the occasion of the gerontocracy. As one evaluation places it, the Tory management and parliamentary majority replicate a society the place older voters dominate, the place planning is frozen, the place new properties are blocked and funding is delayed. A celebration beholden to pensioners, landowners and Nimby-activists has little curiosity in constructing the long run. Thus the nostalgia of Anglofuturism appeals: it guarantees a Britain that “as soon as did nice issues” and may once more. For a gerontocratic occasion inert in its precise supply of high-speed rail traces, clear energy stations and new cities, the fantasy of a high-tech Victorian empire performs to snug prejudices relatively than to disruptive transformation. The distinction between the rhetoric of a “future made in Britain” and the document of delayed infrastructure is stark.
Nostalgia guarantees consolation however thrives on absence. The extra we attempt to rebuild what’s gone, the extra its loss defines us. Anglofuturism is what occurs when nostalgia stops being reflective and turns into restorative – when reminiscence turns into mission. It rebuilds the ruins relatively than mourning them, believing that if the previous symbols may be made shiny once more the previous certainties will return with them. Pamuk’s hüzün permits sorrow to be shared; Anglofuturism denies sorrow altogether. Baudrillard may need stated it produces copies of a future that by no means existed. It’s not hope that drives it however the refusal to grieve. The Victorians as soon as seemed again on medieval England with craving, and Blake imagined Jerusalem amongst darkish satanic mills. Anglofuturism stands in that very same lineage of longing. In the long run its retro rockets and thatched spaceships level to not the long run however to a nation circling its personal ruins, uncertain whether or not to rebuild them or lastly allow them to go.
[Further reading: The prophet of the new right]