Same Old Same Old?
Welcome to the Groundhog Decades.
Here’s a remake of my story about Dune, except not mentioning Dune.
I was upstairs at Good Vibes the other day, wondering who today’s prophets might be. Who’s got the future bang to rights?
And then I realised — I know the answer to that question. And it’s not the future. It’s the present that won’t get out of the way.
In the fantasy/sci-fi novels that I read before bed, I keep coming across the idea that cultures stop developing at the moment when they discover space travel, or magic, or whatever. I’ve seen this named as the Law of Bronwen in Ilona Andrews’ novel Sweep of the Blade (2019), for example, but I’m sure I’ve seen it elsewhere as well.
Get William Essex’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In the YouTube clips I watch before going upstairs to read fantasy/sci-fi novels and fall asleep, I quite often see Kurt Andersen talking about the current state of the USA. Kurt Andersen wrote the book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, which was published in 2017, in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election. The title says it all, but it’s a good read.
Kurt Andersen also wrote an article for the January 2012 issue of Vanity Fair that I’ve had among my bookmarks ever since. You Say You Want a Devolution points out that US [thus, Western] culture has stopped. “For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape … changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological … leaps have continued … popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.”
I’ve just spent a happy five minutes scrolling through the Wikipedia pages 1960s in fashion, 1970s in fashion, 1980s in fashion … you get the idea. Get to the 2010s in fashion, and you’re reading about nostalgia — as you still are in the 2020s in fashion. Oh, and I side-tracked into David Bowie styles by decade, and went no further than the AI overview. I’m not into Latin tags, but — QED. Decade by decade until 2000, and then “retrospective”.
These days, fashion doesn’t innovate; it looks back. If it does anything. “Since 1992,” Andersen wrote in 2012, “as the technological miracles … have propagated … the appearance of the world … has changed hardly at all.” I put “new tech in 1992” into Google, and my my computer told me that the phrase “surfing the internet” was coined in 1992. Yay! Progress.
We’re surfing the internet. But we’re not innovating. Not in fashion, at least. Nor cinema, obviously. [We’re not quite due another Godzilla film, by the way. There was one in 2026, 2023, 2021…] As for music — so many of the bands that get into the big halls around here are tribute bands. [Although — here’s some authentic ‘90s/’00s nostalgia.] We’re not innovating. Not — you can quote me on this — anywhere.
Who are today’s prophets? Oh — yes. I reckon the prophets are anybody who’s ever trad-published, indie-published or self-published anything along the lines of the Law of Bronwen. Credit to Ilona Andrews first, of course. And please may I be forgiven for adapting Ilona Andrews’ Law of Bronwen as follows? [My bit italicised in square brackets.]
“The Law of Bronwen had proven true again and again, so often that it was simply accepted. Once a species is introduced to [digital technology and the internet], it will advance technologically but not socially.”
It’s morning in Cornwall (I’m sure I’ve heard that before), so I think I’ll sit out on the front doorstep, with a mug of coffee this time, and think about Ilona Andrews’ Innkeeper Chronicles series of novels. They’re good reads.
