Moving Shadow

What does jungle tell us about the need for more speculative design?

Ever feel like everything new is just a rehash of something that already exists?

“Retromania” has had culture in its thrall for decades. Guitar-based music has always been naturally constrained by what can be done with a guitar, a bass, a drumkit and a vocalist, but the practically limitless world of electronic music has too fallen prey to the trap of the past.

Many of the biggest hits require something that harks back to that which we already know. Peggy Gou’s insanely successful soundtrack to almost every reel your friends made this summer, (It Goes Like) Nanana utilised the same synths heard very fondly in ATB’s 1999 chart hit 9pm (Till I Come) and everybody noticed. The crossover hits of recent years have been well-produced but relatively formulaic reruns of late-90s UK Garage, or yet more remakes of the Stonebridge Club Mix of Robin S’ Show Me Love (which you will absolutely hear in clubs up and down the country thirty years after release). Even outside of the mainstream, producers remain infatuated with recycling the drum patterns of their forebears.

Nowhere has this been more devastating and noticeable than in jungle. Jungle was (still is?) the sound of the future. Producers on very rudimental DAWs pulled breaks from jazz and hip hop records and paired them with samples that reflected a longing for the future to arrive. Samples that hinted at what this future might be, reframing sci-fi movies like Logan’s Run and Blade Runner and the burgeoning field of video games. Their producers dived head first into a speculative world in which Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean culture would no longer be a sideshow, pulling from the techniques of dub music and neon synths of Detroit techno.

They took what came before, dared to yearn for something new. And then everybody largely stopped dead in 1994.

We’re all still in ‘92

14 years later, Zomby would release his debut album Where Were U In ‘92?, an on-the-nose throwback to early 90s hardcore, replete with Blade Runner vocals, dub siren samples and even produced on period pieces like the Atari ST. It was received positively as a slice of nostalgia, an historically accurate recreation for a generation that were largely too young to ever have experienced in first hand.

Where Were U In 92? was a sign of an upcoming cultural stall. Look to the recent works of Nia Archives and Pinkpantheress. The former’s immaculately produced works portray all the same trademarks that became passé 30 years prior to a new generation of eager fans. Familiar breaks. Familiar reggae MC samples. Familiar reese bass. Pinkpantheress’ breakthrough work to hell with it went one step further, flipping previously held sampling principles of crate digging on their head by prominently and obviously sampling some of the culture’s biggest works and then… really not doing much else with it. The sample was no longer an enhancement; It wasn’t to be pored over by dedicated nerds in niche subreddits. It was no longer a seed for something new. The sample became the whole thing.

Of course, this isn’t unique to music. Spiderman: No Way Home did away with the fourth wall entirely, inexplicably pulling all previous Spidermen into one film. There’s a few hackneyed lines about friendship and feelings, but their true appeal comes from two things:

• We can see them now
• We had already seen them

The sample became the whole thing.

This thinking, where the sample must retain supremacy indefinitely, gets us to our current juncture, where all “transformative technologies” really just feel like reruns of reruns. Over 150 years the car has transformed into an electric version of the same solution. Developments in finance amount to digital versions of the gold standard. Changes in social media tastes have amounted to a new version of Vine that’s better at advertising.

Nothing better represents this constrained and stalled future than Generative AI. We have simply automated sampling and remixing. It takes only what already exists and pumps it out again over and over and over. The only enhancements we envisage are actually just replacements. It will write this email for me. It will just replace a call centre. It will generate a UI for me. But of course, it can only utilise what it’s already been given. The sample is becoming the whole thing.

We need to see things you people wouldn’t believe

Neutered speculative design must bear some of the responsibility for this. Constraining our foresight to a Eurocentric, neoliberal lens hasn’t just created a culture that’s largely stuck in the mud, but opens the door for actors that impose their own solutions on the world.

Do electric cars solve the problems of the future? While the vast majority of electricity in the developed world still comes from fossil fuels, they arguably don’t even solve the one obvious problem they claim to. How does it impact the usage of public space? How does it impact the Central African towns that are irredeemably polluted by rare-earth mineral mining? How does it impact traffic levels in populated areas?

When we choose to step outside our constraints and instead ask questions like “Do cars even need to exist?” we begin to understand a few things. We understand who pushed this solution on us, and set these boundaries. We begin to question how the systems we think are immutable were actually intentionally created. We find out that the solutions we need might already exist.

We can take lessons from sci-fi, but contrary to charismatic CEOs hosting TED talks, we shouldn’t be looking to directly copy from the author’s imagination (side note: what sci-fi are these CEOs reading/watching where nothing goes wrong? Do they just switch off as soon as they’ve seen the cool new piece of tech?), we should be looking at the warnings of what can happen when solutions are constrained and imposed.

When we’re participating in speculative design, we need to understand that the world won’t look this way for very long. The US is seeing its cultural hegemony undermined every day, with styles from the likes of Latin America, Korea and West Africa quickly becoming embedded cultural norms in the West. Saudi Arabia is looking to elevate its cultural standing, following the success of the petrostates in the Middle East. G7 politicians are very rapidly coming to the realisation that the Chinese horse has bolted the stable and positioning themselves for a move back to a world with multiple superpowers. We owe it to the world to broaden our horizons or the world will have its horizons broadened for it. Fashion, art, music, cinema, literature, economics, politics… We long for stability but we often struggle to find it. If we our speculation doesn’t cater to fundamental change, it isn’t speculation at all.

Our exercises should consider as much as time allows. We should push to explore radical solutions for worlds outside of the here and now. A world that allows every stakeholder to thrive. With some tasks inevitably being swallowed up by AI, our worth should come increasingly from dreaming up the new new.