IN THE DARK TIMES, WILL THERE ALSO BE SINGING? FUCK YEAH!

by Luigi Vitali

DUST Issue 27 Editor’s Letter

Everything becomes a new line of code in the feedback loop—even our enthusiasm, indignation, and counter-narratives, circulates within the same circuit, feeding a system that has already anticipated every reaction and mapped every escape route.

It is a system that has learned not to repress but to metabolise resistance—turning critique into content and repetition into noise. Messages are echoed until their meaning dissolves. Urgency becomes pattern. Agency becomes impulse. Hidden in plain sight, this system adapts, mimics, and embeds itself in everything we do. It is everywhere. It scrolls with you. It laughs with you. It mirrors your desires—and calls it freedom.

This is the shape of our present: nothing lands, everything loops. And the more we try to escape—by denouncing, subverting, posting—the more we reinforce its architecture. This is algorithmic governance—a power that doesn’t try to impose a single narrative but overwhelms you with so many that the truth becomes irrelevant. It’s a system with no epicentre, and no outside left to turn to. It expands with us. It expands through us, and the further we run, the more we become agents of its growth. This is how the future is cancelled—not through control but exhaustion.

Far-right populism has seamlessly adapted to the hypnotic logic of the present. It no longer seeks to silence democracy, but to exhaust it by overloading the public sphere with distraction, spectacle, and symbolic excess. It doesn’t argue; it performs. Its strategy is not persuasion but saturation. Not coherence, but rhythm. Not fulfilment, but the endless deferral of meaning. Its greatest success? Weaponising confusion, turning crisis into mood, mood into identity, and identity into a loop. We might ask whether we’ve already crossed the threshold into a new type of fascism—one we’ll eventually find another name for—but the signs of a post-democratic, ethnonationalist, authoritarian, oligarchic, reactionary global front are all there already. Meanwhile, progressive forces still speak the language of reason: procedural, measured, and out of sync with the emotional rhythm of the public sphere today. One side engineers perception; the other still plays by the Enlightenment rules, unaware that they’ve already been rewritten.

“In the dark times, will there also be singing?” Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” (“Im Dunkeln wird da auch gesungen? Da wird auch gesungen. Vom Dunkeln.”) Bertolt Brecht wrote this line in exile in the 1930s, as fascism was spreading across Europe and the idea of a shared political future was collapsing. For its meaning and context, this phrase became one of Brecht’s most well-known quotes—only to be gradually flattened into a slogan of cultural resilience, shared online as if ‘singing’ alone could redeem or protect. But Brecht meant something more demanding, and far less comforting. He wasn’t offering escape. He was outlining a method of resistance: intellectual, lucid, unflinching. You don’t sing despite the darkness. You sing within it. To be able to name it. To stay awake inside it. To resist erasure. That, for Brecht, was the point of art.

Darkness today no longer shocks—it numbs, through manipulation, through images that blur more than they reveal, through algorithmic distortions that feel more credible than truth. Politics becomes performance. Mood replaces analysis. And critique dissolves before it has the chance to take shape. To have the ability to sing in these dark times is to resist that state of trance. To hold form where meaning is flattened—not by offering comfort, inspiration, or performative hope, but by being present and centred enough to recognise the loop, while  remaining lucid inside of it.

Singing in the dark today is not about declaring a revolution or waiting for one. It’s about simply continuing to do what you do, what you’re good at, and doing it well. It starts from here: a commitment to attention, to presence, to something that does not resolve, but insists on holding. To place this kind of care at the centre of your practice is to find your own centre in a present that has none, and to allow meaning to return to the things you choose to touch. Care is not performance. It is not branding. It is slow, unscalable, and inherently human. It is an act of conscious presence—something that lives in whatever you do, however small, if done with intention.

If we are to speak about ourselves, in our small way, what we do is this magazine. It may be minor, even anachronistic, to keep producing an independent publication today. Yet, it still matters to us in a digital landscape defined by acceleration, saturation, and endless feedback loops, to hold the line—committing to visual depth, narrative continuity, and intellectual autonomy—even if that means remaining marginal, unprofitable, and often overlooked. It matters because it offers something the screen cannot: silence, friction, duration. A narration that unfolds across 500 pages, not asking to please but to hold your attention, to stay with you. 

This magazine is not the product of optimisation. It is the result of affection, built through conversation, collaboration, and trust. It’s our way of seeking beauty—what stirs us to think and feel—across disciplines and differences: fashion, art, politics, ecology, spirituality, philosophy. All in the name of a different way of being together. More than a product, it’s a gesture of care—something made to last, be held, and be returned to. And for this, we’re grateful for the care our collaborators bring to the work—care that makes this possible, issue after issue.

To place this within a wider story: we are a generation that longs for something to hold onto—not as fantasies, but as frameworks of meaning. We long for languages that help us stay within complexity, hold empathy without collapsing, and remind us that despair is not engagement, that good is not the enemy of perfect. We don’t need answers—we need to stay grounded in our questions. Singing in the dark times won’t be an act of hope, but refusal—an insistence on care in a world that has automated its attention elsewhere. It is a low signal in a noisy system. So let us tune in—and sing together through the loop. It might not trend. But it will hold.