I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who…
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I’m a visual artist, so this brief piece about Mark Fisher’s draft introduction to his planned book Acid Communism (sadly never to be realised due to his premature death) examines the concept from an artist’s perspective. As an immediate warning to the curious, I want to make clear that…
The problem with modern democracy is that it has thoroughly convinced everyone that you only get one chance to improve society every five years. Didn’t succeed this time? You’ll have to wait another five years before you can try again - that’s the rules. The way to start to change…
Read the rest of “Albion: utopianism and the post-apocalyptic pastoral”…
I’ve lifted the term “post-apocalyptic pastoral” from a book review by Goodreads user Terry from Toronto who effectively seeded my reading list by citing Richard Jefferies’ After London: or, Wild England (1885), Edgar Pangborn’s Davy (1964), Richard Cowper’s The Road To Corlay (1978),…
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In a recent blogpost Ellen Rogers wrote of her current Gnosis project: It’s taken me 4 years to try and articulate what this project is about, but I felt like I was repeatedly going back to square one… Until recently all I really knew was that I was blindly following a feeling that…
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I’m starting to see more people talking about the need to imagine the future, which is both fantastic and absolutely necessary. What follows is a series of quotes and outward links with some of my own opinions interspersed as segues between them, or, as this format was called back in the…
Back in the 1970s there seemed to be such a myriad of ideas about potential shared futures, exploring all aspects of the political, social, and cultural. The aim of neoliberal capitalism of the 1980s onwards was, and still is, to close down all these possibilities - as someone (Fredric Jameson?…
I have, of late, been wittering on about radical visions of the future. It started in November with No one dreams of England’s future any more, and then The Ghosts of Christmas Futures which was followed the next day by a bit of Twitter fun called The Collective Imagined Future England where…
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2018 has been my most financially successful year as an artist, primarily due to my England's Dark Dreaming book (fewer than 75 copies left at time of writing!). However when I say my most financially successful year as an artist please don't even think that I’m anywhere near close to being…
No one seems to dream of England’s future any more, just its imagined past. When the post-modernists proclaimed (again) “the end of history” what they should have been announcing, in England at least, was the end of the future. The Conservatives have consistently sold a dream of the…
Read the rest of “No one dreams of England’s future any more”…