In the Wake of the End of the World: Introduction to The Future is Not Lost (2026)
We’re watching time-lapsed ghosts
And you’re watching flowers grow
(And die).”
— Clarence Clarity, Off My Grid
“Decapitated reality
And it's underneath the world that we see
It's a new world, new state of mind
New ghosts leaving all these worlds behind, worlds behind.”
— MSPAINT, Decapitated Reality
A lot can change in five years. A lot has changed. We’ve changed. The world has too.
Many of the ideas in this book were conceived in the wake of the pandemic, which now seems like a distant memory, but at the time felt to many, despite the overall horror of the situation, like a new beginning. The slate was being wiped clean. The old world was over. What would the new future bring?
In fact, the pandemic created the conditions that would force many people, myself included, to start taking the future seriously. In the run-up to 2020, I had already become fascinated with questions of time and space – not in the sense of physics and mathematics, but in terms of culture and technology. As the quadrivium teaches us, music is number in time, geometry is number in space. Technologically, therefore, music and architecture are the byproducts of exteriorisations of human consciousness into the world around us. They are quite literally human consciousness inscribed in time and space.
This lesson, taught to me by the philosopher Bernard Stiegler, underlies a large portion of my thinking, but it was years of living in Asia that opened my eyes to how these exteriorisations could allow for a multiplicity of technological and cultural possibilities, both in the spatial and temporal realms. There I saw the positives and negatives of an increasingly de-centred worldview; I saw an echo of what I once thought the future could be, but this echo was depleting with each repetition.
Upon returning to Europe and being uprooted once again by the uncertainty of the ever-changing global pandemic, I found my home in multiple different cities across the continent. The spheres of my existence, once stationary and enclosed, had been expanded and divided. Peter Sloterdijk claims that life “unfolds multifocally, multiperspectivally and heterarchically” (Sloterdijk 2016, 23), and this was undoubtedly true for me during these years of change and transition. My ‘world-bubble’ had become a foam in Sloterdijk’s sense of the word.
This sentiment is also echoed by philosopher Yuk Hui, who takes Stiegler’s theory of technics as an externalised form of human memory, and adds a dimension of locality to it. Hui agrees with Sloterdijk in the necessity of a multi-perspective unfolding of life. He claims in order to move beyond the western-industrial hegemony, we must understand that there is not one universal and homogenous concept of technology that encompasses all technical practices. Instead, there are multiple cosmotechnics, defined as “the unification of moral order and cosmic order through technical activities” (Hui 2021, 41). To Hui, each culture has its own cosmology, and this cosmology is a product of its geographical location and the imagination of the people within it. As he continues: “Cosmologies are not purely scientific theories about space like astral physics, but embedded in daily life, in the way our selves relate to other humans, to non-humans, to other natural resources and the environment as a whole” (ibid.).
I came to realise that the cities I’d been living in are themselves cosmotechnical spheres of becoming. Each city, each country, and each global location has its own culture, its own multiplicitous cosmology, which defines its being in the world. As Italo Calvino writes, “the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there” (Calvino 1997, 24). Yet, in the 21st Century, with global tensions at an all time high and the threat of climate change looming over us, we cannot forget universalism and the shared common culture of all humanity. Cosmotechnics puts equal value on the local and the universal, rather than prioritising a Western industrial worldview that has come to dominate local cultures since the 19th Century. Indeed, to Sloterdijk, one of the few positives of the pandemic was this explication of the shared living world we inhabit and the cross-cultural collaboration that was fostered by it. As he wrote in 2020:
The sublime nature of interconnectivity and cosmopolitanism is something that must be remembered and encouraged, even when giving locality its rightful place in cultural understanding. However, it’s not just viruses that ignore national borders, fences, and walls. Music, that most fundamental human technology, also has the power to break down any arbitrary boundaries we build for ourselves; it shoots across state lines and finds its way across the strictest borders. As Bernard Stiegler writes, music “weaves itself into the thread of time” (2010b, 36). It is the technology of the ‘soul’.
However, to Stiegler, music’s power is a double-edged sword, a pharmakon. While music has the unusual ability to synchronise the time of consciousness, the music industry, like all culture industries, extends this power until it becomes global; it uses its power to standardise behaviour and enhance consumption of its own products. In the lead-up to the pandemic years, the scope of music criticism within the field of critical theory was stuck in echoes of the past. Perhaps music’s revolutionary potential was still there, waiting in the wings, but its wings had been clipped by the homogenising tendencies of 21st Century capitalism. If this was true, what would happen to the music of the future?
Seeds of the Future
These ideas resonated strongly with the writing of perhaps the most popular and sharpest cultural theorist of the last twenty years, Mark Fisher. I’d read Fisher a few years before, and despite being interested in his writing and the style of his critique, I was altogether unconvinced by his arguments. As a gateway to continental philosophy and critical theory, he was a master, but many of his writings on culture, in particular music, seemed unnecessarily pessimistic. This pessimism, it felt to me, was not wrong per se, his analysis was extremely astute on a lot of issues, but it was precisely the wrong solution to the problem he presented. ‘The present’ to Fisher had become a boring dystopia; a world that had left the hopeful cultural movements of the early nineties behind. Hauntology was his solution, but it felt limited, constrained, and overall unsatisfying. It had diagnosed a wide ranging cultural malaise without prescribing an antidote; it embodied the logic of depression by trapping the very idea of the future in a constant referential loop with the past. Any potential step forward was just a rehashing of what had come before. A remix or a remake of a time when the future looked brighter. Lost futures, lost futures, lost futures…
It was around this time that I first discovered the electronic music producer SOPHIE. From the very first moment I heard SOPHIE’s music I knew it was something different. It felt fresh. It felt new. Listening to Faceshopping was like being transported into an alternate reality that approached popular music from a radically novel perspective: a transgressive perspective. The old structures and forms were there, but shifted, changed, and morphed into something unrecognisable. Electronic music was finding a way forward, not only in some distant, abstract or academic sense, but in popular culture itself. Aspects of the experimental and avant-garde were being brought into popular consciousness in entirely new ways we couldn’t have expected. I had discovered the music of the future.
The excitement bubbling around SOPHIE (and other forward-thinking electronic music artists) took an unexpected turn in February 2021 when she lost her life in her house in Athens. This tragedy inspired me to finally put down my thoughts on her music and what it stood for. To me, SOPHIE represented the exact opposite of the cultural malaise that Fisher had written about; her album Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides was the antidote I’d been looking for to cure us of the pessimistic diagnosis of hauntology. Even in its most progressive forms, hauntology was still burdened with the weight of a future which never came to pass. Hauntology was the logic of depression, while SOPHIE’s music was filled with hope. As Byung-Chul Han writes: “Depression is the exact opposite of hope, which is passion for the new. Hope is the spring, the zest, that liberates us from our depression, from an exhausted future” (Han 2024,15). This music, the music of the new, the music of the hopeful, the music of the future, would become anti-hauntology.
Five years ago, the term was coined, the stage was set, and the anti-hauntologists began to emerge from another time, stepping into the present one by one until the ghosts of lost futures returned to their spectral abodes. SOPHIE had created her own precursors and their successors. Arca. Iglooghost. How many others? Eartheater. Clarence Clarity? Julmud. Marina Herlop? 33EMYBW. Slikback. Gooooose… Anti-hauntology had ripped apart the conventions that determined what sounds constituted ‘the popular’ and had formed new connections in the most unlikely places. In the midst of the pandemic, in the wake of the end of the world, the pale spectator had been taking photographs of green shoots emerging from the grey rubble…
‘GREY RUBBLE – GREEN SHOOTS’
If this passion for the new and the hopeful could be found in something as innocuous as popular electronic music, perhaps we can trace it back to the very idea of space. ‘Spatial Imaginaries’ shifts our focus from what the future could sound like, to what it could look like. The essays here have been collected from different sources and are written in a variety of different styles; the future unfolds multiperspectivally and heterarchically. However, to understand how this unfolding takes place we must first turn the clock back.
The nineties had fostered an intellectual environment in which urbanised science fiction (SF) genres like cyberpunk would take on an important philosophical significance. To Fisher and the CCRU operating out of the University of Warwick around this time, cyberpunk was an artistic actualisation of a future that had not yet come to pass, but was infiltrating the present as it existed then. This fascination with cyberpunk led to a new kind of movement, fronted by Nick Land, that would eventually become what we now call accelerationism. As Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian write in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader:
Cyberpunk was one vision of the future, a dingy, dark, dystopian vision, but a vision that produced a kind of electric excitement in those who become wrapped up in it. Indeed, the earliest written chapters in this book were conceived out of this excitement towards the end of the 2010s. However, my own travels to Japan and Korea – where I was living at the time – had forced me to rethink exactly how cyberpunk could move forward. At its core it was a projection of the future built from, as Mackay and Avenessian note above, VCRs, videogames, and computers, but in the years since the genre’s inception, these potential futures had themselves become outdated. By 2018, the future we had seen on TV screens in the nineties had slowly integrated itself into the present, but this wasn’t the anarchic escapism of early cyberpunk, it was a sanitised, corporatised version of it.
So, the world had in some ways become cyberpunk, but just like hauntology, cyberpunk had become a closed circuit, a short-circuit, a self-referential depiction of a future that’s already past its sell-by date. Nonetheless, it seemed that there was a glimmer of light in all the dystopian darkness, a crystal seed from which a new future could emerge. Perhaps we could reconstruct the city and its culture in such a way that would move us away from cyberpunk dystopia towards something brighter. If the cyberpunk of the 21st Century is the spatial embodiment of hauntology, a retro-futuristic vision of the new, hiding in the shadow of eighties and nineties nostalgia, what if we took the logic of hope that is present in anti-hauntology and applied it to this aesthetic vision of the city? Here we arrive at solarpunk.
Solarpunk is an aesthetic vision, a movement, and a virtual source of hope for tomorrow. In the terms of the cyberpunk theorists it can be seen as an eco-technological projection of a future that could still come to pass; a hyperstitional entity, the very existence of which could lead to its own actualisation. Like anti-hauntology, solarpunk embraces the new, the fresh, and the radical. It is the logic of anti-hauntology applied to space; it breaks free of the Western-industrial world order in a way that would satisfy Yuk Hui’s need for a techno-diversity. A truly solarpunk world would embrace vernacular knowledge and practices to build a world that is truly adaptable to its environment.
Indeed, as an idealised form of urban cosmotechnics, solarpunk is inherently anti-colonial. Where the colonial project invokes a sense of displacement, an eeriness (in Fisher’s sense of the word) brought about by forcibly implanting the lived environment of a particular culture into a society that neither wanted it nor asked for it, solarpunk instead grows with the needs of that particular society, not displacing their culture, but adapting to and improving it. Thus, solarpunk itself has a more distinctly utopian-political character than the dystopian anti-humanistic character of cyberpunk. As Alessandro Sbordoni writes:
Yes, solarpunk is a fantasy, but it is a fantasy that brings to light the unnecessary oppositions between nature, culture and technology and imagines the world as it could be. This idea rings true with the work of Gilbert Simondon who, in his 1958 book On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, marked one of the first attempts to provide a fully systematic account of man’s technicity and the genesis of technical objects themselves. As he writes:
Simondon’s insistence on breaking down the opposition between “man” and “machine”, and showing how technical objects operate best in accordance with their environment, allows us to conceptualise the kind of philosophy that embraces technological advancements, whilst staying true to the environmental ethos of movements such as solarpunk. Like Mumford’s theory of ‘democratic technics’ that is discussed in chapter 9, Simondon can give us the tools to create infrastructure as an act of resistance.
Despite this, Simondon’s work on technics is not the subject of this book, yet his central theory of individuation is vital. The actualisation of the present must come from a plurality of possible futures. Whether cyberpunk or solarpunk, hauntology or anti-hauntology, the future is an open book, “a labyrinth of labyrinths, a maze of mazes” as Borges puts it (Borges 1999, 122). But what exactly is the operation of the future becoming present? How does a virtual future of pre-individual potentialities come to be in the here and now?
Individuate!
The theory of individuation is a complex and multifaceted concept that in one way or another underpins many of the ideas in the chapters ahead. From Simondon and Deleuze, to Stiegler and Hui, the reconceptualisation of the individual as a process of individuation is a fundamental cornerstone of this book. However, as we move to the third section, we mark a rupture or a break in the flow of ideas. We move one ontological level down to something more fundamental. Where the first two sections are concerned mostly with cultural analysis, specifically with how our ideas of the future could affect the present, the third and final section returns more specifically to the realm of philosophy proper; it looks to metaphysics to analyse the fundamental processes that allow the present to emerge from a sea of potentialities.
Here I trace a path through Simondon’s work on physical and vital individuation. The path then branches into the social side of Simondon’s theory, which concerns what he calls ‘psychic and collective individuation,’ before working through Bernard Stiegler’s utilisation of this theory in his political work on technics. Our path ends at the point where Deleuze appropriates Simondon’s theory of modulation in his Postscript on the Societies of Control, and shows what this means for a new conception of politics.
From the cultural theory of the future, we have come full circle. Unlike the first two parts of this book, this third section exists somewhat out of time. It is a grounding; a framework. It’s the explication of certain resonances that emerge when bridging the gap between the cultural and the metaphysical. Each of the thinkers discussed here agree in their own way that this divide should be overcome, and to me, the mechanism through which we can do this is the process of individuation.
Thus, both music and cities, anti-hauntology and spatial imaginaries, time and space, are all grounded through this ongoing process. This process is inherently generative and creative; it turns all of us, these creators and theorists of the future, into artists. As Bernard Stiegler writes:
The purpose of this book, therefore, is to provide a theoretical toolkit which facilitates this opening up; it allows for the inventing, composing, sculpting and writing of new futures. In order to create a new future we must re-imagine our relationship with music, with technology, and with culture in general. After all, the world of tomorrow is a blank canvas; an open book. New beginnings are always possible. The future is not lost!
©2026, Berlin/Nicosia
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