UNCANCELLING THE FUTURE

by Luigi Vitali

DUST Issue 26 Editor’s Letter

The future hasn’t vanished from our horizon due to fears, crises, or uncertainty—it’s gone because we gave up imagining it.

As climate collapse looms, wars escalate, inequality deepens, unchecked technology threatens, and liberal democracies falter, we remain fixated on the past, trapped in a nostalgic loop, unable to envision anything better or different. The future hasn’t been stolen—it’s been quietly erased from our aspirations. Once a realm of boundless possibilities, it has become a source of anxiety—reduced to a fractured extension of our present, leaving us unable to confront it or imagine anything beyond its collapse. Yet, despite the dangers we face, our present probably isn’t more terrifying than other moments in history—it’s our perspective on the future, devoid of direction, narrative, and a collective horizon, that is scarier.

Imagining a hopeful future isn’t naive—it’s radical. Stuck in stagnation, as we are, the only way forward is to reclaim a vision rooted in shared values, where hope is not a palliative response but a deliberate strategy. A vision fueled by cooperation focused on solutions and driven not by fear but by the determination to rise above it. Uncancelling the future means affirming that change is unavoidable, that hope is not an optimistic approach but an act of survival, and that the future is the place where the idea of victory takes hold. If we want to move forward, we should commit to the audacity of imagining again.

Uncancelling the future is the title of our 26th issue, embodying the spirit that has driven this project since 2011 and the ideas we have explored issue after issue. At its core, this journey has always been about challenging how we perceive the future—and our place within it.

This title, in particular, refers to the discourse on the concept of the cancellation of the future shaped by some of the brightest thinkers and theorists of the past decades. These cult figures—Mark Fisher, before his passing, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and more recently Benjamin Tallis—feel familiar here, having been featured in interviews and articles in past issues and continue to resonate on these pages.

The first to have used the expression “slow cancellation of the future” was Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi to describe how Neoliberal capitalism, prioritising short-term gains over long-term vision, has made the future a flat extension of the present, eroding the belief in a transformative future, and the willingness to look for alternatives. He linked this loss of imagination to the end of cultural avant-gardes and the inability to produce anything radically new.

Mark Fisher expanded on this idea, drawing from music and pop culture and identifying a cultural industry trapped in nostalgia and pastiche. For Fisher, the cancellation of the future manifests in music and media recycling the past instead of creating new sounds or ideas. Arguing that the 21st century lacks the experimental energy of the 20th—leaving us with a “crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion”—he highlights a creeping paralysis in our collective imagination. More broadly, this reflects how the bold visions of progress that once drove Western societies—equality, innovation, liberal democracy—have turned into empty clichés drowned out by relentless nostalgia. His point was that we live in the shadow of lost futures, haunted by the ghosts of possibilities that never ended up materialising.

For both thinkers, the disappearance of the future is not merely a material condition but a psychological and cultural phenomenon—rooted in political failures, the absence of visionary leadership, and a lack of cultural will to summon the new, afraid of what might happen if we do. The loss of trust in progress and proclaimed promises has led to cultural paralysis. They argue that we’ve abandoned forward-thinking because long-term goals no longer fit the political game, and every attempt to look ahead is rooted in looking back. This contemporary mindset is shaped by a type of capitalism that offers only more of the same: an accelerated, wealthier version of today—a hollow promise undermined by growing inequality, unsustainability, and ecological disaster. Even so, we can add, the mindset feels so inescapable that it’s easier to envision societal collapse as an inevitable conclusion than to imagine alternative ways of living or paths forward.

Let’s also add that this inability to look forward underpins the rise of populism and authoritarianism, which draw their appeal from looking backwards—repackaging outdated models and an imagined golden past as answers to today’s complexities. This political nostalgia thrives on the vacuum left by the absence of a shared vision for the future.

Benjamin Tallis, an international relations strategist whose voice frequently appears on these pages, flipped the script in a 2020 essay urging us to “uncancel the future.” In a proactive extension of Fisher and Bifo’s theories, yet reversing their politics, he shifts the emphasis from critique to strategy. For him, the challenge is political: recognising that the path out of stagnation lies in revitalising and rebirthing liberal societies. After all, liberal societies thrive only when they possess the ability to imagine and create diverse futures—an essential contrast to the rigid, imposed narratives of authoritarian regimes. This is where we must begin. Imagining a future that resists populist, regressive forces is not just about protecting democracy; it’s about expanding its boundaries, understanding that our values—creativity, innovation, freedom, diversity, and collective responsibility, are the true driving forces of progress and should be treated as national interests to protect. Hope, for Tallis, isn’t passive; it’s a tool to reclaim our agency and reignite the belief that change isn’t just possible—it’s inevitable. ‘Uncancelling the future’ is the only viable option for this generation.

This is where we stand now. Even when it feels as though nothing can be done, trapped in a narrative that surrenders to the regressive course of time, we must recognise that this is not necessarily the truth. Waking up to our destiny demands deliberate practice—a collective effort to spark forward-thinking and escape the doom that pervades this generation. Reclaiming a path beyond chaos is indeed possible.

Our generation grew up with the comforting illusion of stability, believing the liberal values that defined our world were the inevitable product of progress. Then came the unsettling revelation: we would be the first generation since the late 19th century to live in worse conditions than our parents. Economic crises, geopolitical chaos, and the decay of liberal democracy began to erode the certainties we had taken for granted. Progress, once a given, stalled. The narrative that once bound us together is now fractured. But instead of rising to the occasion, we’ve settled for patching up a present that already belonged to the past without truly understanding why.

It’s a familiar human instinct to believe that our reality and inherited values are central and inevitable. We cling to them for comfort, blind to the cracks forming all around them. We think the system will hold. Then, without warning, the world begins to shift, to unravel, revealing that our conviction was never strength but an act of ongoing denial. We saw it coming—liberal values, once hailed as the path to progress, have lost their appeal, standing no firmer in broad swathes of public opinion than authoritarian populism. The forces we ignored, laughed off, or derided as relics, rose with unexpected power, dismantling the fragile illusions of the world we thought we’d understood all along.

We can convince ourselves that this is a cycle of history repeating itself, but perhaps the pattern is us—questioning how advanced societies embraced authoritarianism in the past, attributing it to foolishness or innocence. The truth is more unsettling: the values we hold as the foundations of our reality endure only through reimagination; left stagnant, they fade into irrelevance. And when they do, it’s not a sudden fall. It’s a slow, deliberate denial of the obvious until it’s too late.

Without the courage to imagine a different future, we have allowed the idea of it to be quietly erased. There were, of course, attempts to resist—brief flashes of hope. We even convinced ourselves that opposing populism might compel us to unite, to form a viable opposition. But it didn’t happen—and it won’t happen—until we truly understand what we are up against. When faced with regressive forces, our responses were neither transformative nor visionary—instead, we panicked. What followed was a desperate patchwork of damage control, a series of reactive gestures that barely held the line. Take, for instance, how a sincere militant effort to protect minorities and defend civil rights against rising political aggression gradually morphed into something else entirely. It became a kind of left-wing populism, labelled ‘wokeism’, that turned ideological purity into a performance, feeding the divisions it was meant to heal and proving incapable of offering a coherent alternative to the chaos. Lacking imagination, we find ourselves stuck in a loop—fixing nothing, stagnating, or only exacerbating the crisis.

Where to re-start? Liberalism’s emphasis on individualism which was once hailed as the key to freedom, has become the very force that isolates us. It liberated us from the constraints of tradition and authority, but in doing so, it trapped us within our own narrow worlds. We became convinced that our personal realities, identities, and microcosms were the only ones worth defending. In this separation, we lost the ability to find each other, trapped in disconnected perspectives, each insisting on its own validity.

Is it still possible to claim a different vision for the future? When survival is at stake, it must be. Can we uncover a deeper truth within ourselves, recognising that we are bound by the same laws of existence and that our destinies are inherently intertwined? Beneath the noise of the world—our small self-interests, subconscious patterns, celebrated individualism, and self-righteousness—we know what connects us, what we can share despite our differences. A political vision for the future must begin here as a daily practice of renewal, recognising that without a shared meaningful perspective, our growing divides will irreparably tear us apart. Only a collective inclusive vision holds the power to reclaim the future. A vision able to contrast the present stagnation and paralysis of short-term thinking; one able to reject the illusion that nothing can change, that power will always prevail, and that ideals are naive.

We need a new pragmatic idealism able to affirm that the basic values of democracy, justice, freedom, and sustainability are not empty words but essential tools to navigate the chaos of our time. These values are no longer a given; they require a fight—and to be worth fighting for, they need to be renewed and reimagined. We don’t need calls for utopias but mindful, steady actions—turning ideals into the very architecture of our upcoming future. Change always begins with the audacity to imagine a future different from the one we’ve been told is inevitable. Yet, the true force that has always been capable of transforming everything lies in the sense of purpose driving it. The question is no longer what we hope for but what we stand for—and how far we’re willing to go to defend it. Reclaiming a positive vision is our collective responsibility because we know the only path forward is for us all to uncancel the future.