The Last Showgirl, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Soft Sounds From Another Planet, Magnolia
Striving for goodness
while the cruel men win.
How do you recover an irrecoverable defeat? How do you undo the past?
In 2026, this is an increasingly urgent question, not just for individual persons, but for America and the world as a whole: as one era comes crashing down, and another, perhaps, prepares to begin.
The most uncanny thing to me about living in 2026 is simply the way that everyone, elite and ordinary, Right and Left, talks--which is simply the way characters used to talk in Star Trek episodes about time travel.
Captain Picard takes Captain Garrett and aside and confides to her in a rushed, furtive tone, his eyes lowered: "The war is going very badly for the Federation, far worse than is generally known. Starfleet Command believes defeat is inevitable. Within six months we may have no choice but to surrender." The point of this intervention, though, is not to help prepare her or the public for inevitable defeat, or even to reverse the tide of war and give the Federation victory after all--it is to convince her to go back in time and change the past. "One more ship will make no difference in the here and now. But twenty two years ago, one ship could have stopped this war before it started."
To stop the war before it started. This is the real or concealed preoccupation, it seems to me, of almost every American today. Certainly, it is the main preoccupation of the American President, whose entire political program at present consists of making or pretending to make it so the war he started with the Islamic Republic of Iran was never started, the global energy crisis he caused was never caused, the critical munitions shortage he precipitated was never precipitated, the economic bubble he inflated was never inflated, or, in short, that pretty much everything he has done since taking office in 2024 was never done. Meanwhile, in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu works overtime to pretend that the never-ending genocidal campaign and never-ending security crisis and accelerating collapse of the Israeli state that he himself has caused is all simply a bad dream. In Iran, meanwhile, a predatory military elite works continually to unravel their entire state and economy in real time, in the desperate homicidal hope that, somewhere across the world, all the other states and economies are unraveling faster.
This sense of desperate undoing, though, extends far beyond the halls of power: indeed, it is hardly too much to say that it has become a kind of manic leitmotif for almost all institutions everywhere. I spoke recently of a desire for death, for annihilation, as a driver behind the institutional chaos we see around us--and I still believe this is true. Before that, I talked about the remarkable dominance of nostalgia in politics and culture--and I still think that is true. Increasingly, though, I think the most immediate desire animating America is not so much death or nostalgia as time travel. Whatever was done in the last five years, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, must be undone: including sometimes the very existence of the institutions and movements and beliefs that ruled those times.
And really, people have a point! Since at least the financial crisis of 2008-2009, political and economic and academic elites the world over have worked very hard, and invested enormous amounts of resources, in building up a new, all-encompassing economic, political, social, and cultural infrastructure centered in tech companies and the Internet--an effort that has only very recently and belatedly been given the terribly inaccurate moniker of AI. Looking back, more or less everyone now agrees that effort was, by and large, a mistake: that it has made the world poorer, lonelier, less populated, more frightened, weaker, more divided, more fragile, and more unhappy.
It is in fact true that unimaginable resources and time and effort and belief that might have been spent on any number of other things--including, say, the American munitions stockpile, or the American transportation infrastructure, or clean energy, or prison reform, or housing, or mental health care, or physical health care, actually effective welfare systems, or poverty relief, or community-building, or parental support, or mass redistribution of resources, or even movies that people wanted to watch and games they wanted to play, have instead been plowed wholesale into a metastatizing Soviet-style private-public tech bureaucracy whose ultimate goal and telos and outcome all along, it turns out, was unemployed homeless people sitting on crumbling streets beneath mansions watching AI-generated pornography on individual smartphones to the deafening tones of data center cooling systems. This is a hyperbole--but one that is nevertheless truer to the actual present reality of catastrophic American economic and cultural collapse than any statistical statement.
The real trouble, though, is that this effort was never, at any time, confined to American elites--it was, at one time or another, not only supported but fervently trusted and hoped in by Americans of every class and race and party. Even those who never consciously believed in it, though, have had their lives entirely transformed by its efforts--and not just economically. We all, techno-optimist or techno-pessimist, Christian or secular, have walked around these last years with a little phone in our pockets--most of us have felt the ghostly, preternatural touch of the technical regime on our daily habits, our imaginations, our dreams, our deepest desires, our most intimate and interior selves. What is to be undone is not just political, not just economic, not even just technological, but profoundly, deeply, devastatingly personal.
Most people, of course, would not say in so many words that they actually want to undo the last twenty years of technological development; nevertheless, if you ask them what they want, what they fear, what they support, and what they oppose, it mostly centers on changing the past.
For a huge part of America today, that involves a pretty much explicit desire to go back in time ten years and make it so that Donald Trump was never elected President--or at the very least, make it so that absolutely no trace of any effect of his Presidency remains. Meanwhile, Trumpism 2.0 has largely consisted of various flailing efforts to undo, uncreate, and unmake--beginning with the 2020 election and Biden's Presidency, but extending rapidly to the US aid and development policy that began in the 1960s, the free trade policies crystallized since the 1990s, the immigration surge of the 2000s onward, and at times extending to more or less the entire Federal government and nearly everything that has happened since WW2.
Culturally, things are if anything even clearer--with AI acting as both the hostile provoker and force multiplier of an unprecedented turn towards nostalgia and simulation as the prevailing notes of culture. From music to movies to television to video games to food, people love most what no longer exists.
To repeat, then: in the year 2026, every major issue, every pressing concern, every fundamental debate, and nearly every passion and hope and desire centers straightforwardly on how we can change the past.
But can we change the past? And if so, how?
To examine this question, in best Adventures of Captain Peabody fashion, I will be writing about a historical tragedy, an indie album, a Las Vegas show, and a movie about regret.
