STUDENTS. AND STUDIOS * : MASTER GLOBAL ESSAY

 

'' FUTURE LOSS " : GENERATION ALPHA followed Generation Z, and they are naming the generation of now being born Generation Beta. This sounds like textbook late-capitalism dark humour.

In online subcultures, '' beta male '' men who lack masculinity. Why would anybody choose such a loaded word for an entire generation if it were not dark humour ? Not fair.

STUDENTS/YOUTH and late capitalism have been debated for a very long time, especially since the market crash of 2008. That fateful crisis turned countless lives upside down.

I HAVE not read a better encapsulation of the tragedy faced by the students / youth than the late Mark Fisher's '' Ghosts Of My Life Writings '' on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures [ 2014 ].

A chapter titled ' A Slow cancellation of the future ' describes a cultural and social condition in late capitalism where the ability to imagine, create or move toward genuinely new futures has been eroded.

Instead of progress, marked by radical shifts in art, music, technology or politics, society is trapped in a state of inertia, endlessly recycling the past.

Fisher argues this is not a sudden collapse but a gradual, almost imperceptible process, where the expectation of novelty and transformation has been replaced by nostalgia, repetition, and a haunting sense of '' what could have been''.

Fisher borrows '' Hauntology '' from Jacques Derrida, using it to describe a cultural mood where the present is haunted by ''lost futures'' visions of progress for example, space travel, utopian societies once promised but never materialised.

Those ghosts linger in art and media, evoking a melancholic sense of absence.

Building on Fredric Jameson's ideas of late capitalism, Fisher sees this stagnation as a symptom of neoliberalism triumph is the 1980s and 1990s.

The system prioritises profit and stability over innovation, flattening time into an eternal 'now' where radical change feels impossible.

This is where we may need the help of another author, Kurt Andersen's 'Evil Geniuses'. The Unmaking of America : A Recent History is custom built to explain this stagnation.

Published in 2020, it is a cultural, economic and political chronicle of how America transitioned from a relatively equitable society in the mid-20th century to one marked by extreme inequality and stagnation by the early 21st century.

The World Students Society thanks Farrukh Khan Pitafi.