[wirdnok]

Jerry Holkins of penny-arcade recently shared a similar sentiment.

> You can't operate a deconstruction machine indefinitely; ultimately, the machine is all you have left to take apart. We need to make aspirational shit again so we have something to deconstruct later. It's not a mysterious process, it's just the opposite of what we were doing before.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2025/02/28/opfor

[pessimizer]

The problem with that sentiment is that cynicism isn't deconstruction. It's often an accurate assessment of current trends and a prediction of where they might lead, not a collapse into abstractions.

On the other hand, pining for "aspirational" works is the real collapse into abstractions and magical, associative thinking: get rid of the bad and bring in the good, sad is bad. A lot of people have the aspiration of wiping out entire cultures; idealizing aspirations is nothing but idealizing desires, and in a commercial environment that just means pandering to middle-class power fantasies.

In short, I accuse this sentiment of being a covert desire to deconstruct the present in order to quiet middle class fears. "Actually what we've been doing will work! If we ever need to change course, I'm sure we will. We'll defeat the evil."

[jerf]

The "optimistic" science fiction that people are pining for was written during the World War period, during the social unrest of the 1960s, during the inflation and oil shock of the 1970s, during periods of racial violence, during the heights of the Cold War (the Fallout series came from real societal trama, not just a neat schtick about putting a 1950s face on disaster movies), during environmental scares, nuclear disasters, terrorism, during social upheavals and economic crises and international crises.

The 20th century was not a cakewalk either. I'm not saying it was or was not better than today, I am saying, "gee there's an awful lot of reasons to be depressed" isn't new.

[GoatInGrey]

Applied cynicism is deconstruction in the sense that all that is being offered is criticism and disbelief in a thing. There is no message of doing something else because it is better, only a message to do something else because it isn't the thing the cynicism is targeting. Sometimes not even an alternative is offered. The thing just sucks and it shouldn't be done, according to the critic.

You will notice how in current political conversations that no matter what the problem being discussed is, the solution is almost always the destruction of something or someone. There's this stubborn perspective that X would be resolved if we could just somehow eliminate Y.

To be crude, the pattern I described isn't aspirational, it's bitchy. You'll also notice how very little gets accomplished in the current cynical environment for the same reason that nagging people doesn't motivate them as much as inspiring them does.