Most people I know are fighting severe anxiety about their individual and our collective future right now, struggling to picture a life worth planning. It is paralysing, also for me.
It is also a lie. Not that reality isn’t grim (ignoring that will only make things worse) but paralysis is neither inevitable nor warranted. Yet, the question remains: How to remain hopeful in times like these? The wonderful Laurie Penny wrote an article about just that in 2019. The article is titled “On Hope (in a Time of Hopelessness)” and was published in Wired magazine in the midst of the first US presidency of Donald Trump. Penny writes about the collective, political depression of a generation that not only lacks the ability to imagine anything good happening ever again but being unable to imagine a future at all. This feeling of powerlessness and fundamental pointlessness makes it nearly impossible to imagine a future worth fighting for. Penny’s answer is a heartwarming call to keep kicking even where there is no sight of land. Hope – as Penny writes – is getting up every day in full knowledge that things are bad but getting up anyways and eventually feeling better. It was Penny’s article where I heard the phrase “hope is a muscle” for the first time. The phrase remained an inspiration ever since and I have referenced, recommended and shared the article countless times.
Beyond defending the status quo
Having said all of that, there always was one thing missing from Penny’s article for me. While I deeply share her perspective, she delivers it with a radical rawness that can be challenging. Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing that will make the fight less scary. Yet, I do feel that training your hope muscle is easier when you feed it with specific pictures of desirable futures. To explain this I would like to reference another favourite text of mine: Mark Fisher’s “Capitalist Realism” from 2009. Very early in his book, Fisher recalls Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Žižek’s famous saying that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan, Fisher writes, captures precisely what he means by ‘capitalist realism’: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. For me it is this collective inability to imagine a future beyond capitalism that lies at the heart of the cultural depression that Penny describes in her 2019 article.
Of course, the return of fascism and the patriarchal, racist violence that it brings are very much on my mind as well. But fighting fascism is not what I struggle with. Most people I know have experienced a life in democratic and liberal societies. We can all very vividly picture what we are fighting for because we experienced it first-hand. This status quo, however, is exactly that state of desperate numbness that we fail to picture alternatives to. Winning the fight against fascism obviously is a short-term priority, but it is by no means the horizon of what we should hope for. The reality we in the west are living in is of course preferable to the fascist authoritarianism that is approaching. But neoliberal loneliness, colonial violence as well as racist and sexist exploitation of humans for profit are very real today. Facism always found fertile ground in these inherent traits of capitalism to blossom on. Nevertheless, the liberal democratic societies built around capitalism must be preserved. But not because capitalist democracies are the only viable social order but because they at least offers a path to move beyond the suffocating limitations of the status quo. These possible futures beyond the status quo is what it really is all about. Picturing these futures is what actually helps me get up every morning. It is a much more powerful motivational tool for fighting the lie of capitalism’s inevitability than merely criticising its exploitative and destructive nature as Samia Mohammed writes in her 2023 book “Zukunft jenseits des Marktes” (Future beyond the market). The more specific and the more tangible alternatives become, the more power they get and the more hope they induce..
Cybernetic revolutionaries
This brings me to what I really want to talk about: Project Cybersyn and how reading about it in Eden Medina’s 2014 book “Cybernetic Revolutionaries” is exactly that kind of hope-inducing alternative I just talked about.
Cybersyn was a socio-technological project to manage, connect and synchronise industrial production in Chile’s socialism under President Allende from 1970 to 1973. It is also the story of Stafford Beer. Most people may know Beer from his quote “The purpose of a system is what it does”. He was one of the leading theorists of cybernetics in the 1960s and 1970s, a scientific field that combined aspects of biology, neuroscience, technology and management into theories of self-regulation of complex systems. Project Cybersyn was an attempt at using computer technology to manage the economy of a nation in a decentralised and non-hierarchal manner. It was explicitly designed to differentiate Chile’s political and economic system from the authoritarian, centralised planned economy of the Soviet Union. This reflected the ambitions of Allende’s government to respect civil liberties and freedoms, setting it apart from both western capitalist nations and authoritarian socialist nations.
In practice, Cybersyn was a futuristic conference room, an economic simulator and a network of telex-machines that communicated with a single mid-tier IBM mainframe computer. It was neither state of the art nor did it ever prove its viability. It was also undoubtedly a child of its time, as Medina explains. It reproduced sexist stereotypes and did not empower workers to the degree it was supposed to. Anyway, the viability of Cybersyn is not the point here. The point is not that it failed, that it had flaws or that it remained more vision than practice. The point is that it was an attempt to use technology in radically different ways to help build a world of cooperation and solidarity. There is inspirational power in actually trying. Reading Medina’s book was a very welcome training for my hope-muscle. Reading about technicians and engineers that used their skills, imagination and passion to work on a truly visionary socio-technological project made me realise how much I personally thrive in surroundings where people do just that.
In many situations I can sense how neoliberalism has monopolised thinking about the future. Ideas end up being forced into logics of profitability and start-up-potential. Young minds are forced to adhere to narrow corridors of commercial viability. New hypes are forced on us constantly, only to sell us the latest desperate attempt of venture capitalists to capture our imagination for their profits. I can see the hopelessness in the eyes of digital enthusiasts and hear the imaginative defeat in their words. But there is always a true desire to be inspired to think differently, too. Cybersyn and any other tangible visions of futures beyond capitalism are my answers to that expressed desire. At one point Medina quotes Stafford Beer saying “I feel liberated as a person. For the first time in my life, I have real friends; for the first time in my professional career, I am not staggering under the weight of frustration and bitterness”. I deeply share this sentiment. I feel most alive when I am among people that truly dare to think outside the limitations of the present, not in a fantastical manner but as part of specific political activism and practical implementation. Seeing people resisting against their passion for tech, solidarity and change being choked by our unimaginative, neoliberal present, is most precious to me. It truly is giving me hope.