{"id":3509790,"date":"2025-02-28T10:47:41","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T10:47:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3509790"},"modified":"2025-02-28T10:47:41","modified_gmt":"2025-02-28T10:47:41","slug":"why-the-war-on-dreams-must-inspire-us-to-build-the-greatest-desire-machines-the-world-has-ever-seen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-02-28\/why-the-war-on-dreams-must-inspire-us-to-build-the-greatest-desire-machines-the-world-has-ever-seen\/","title":{"rendered":"Why The War on Dreams Must Inspire Us to Build the Greatest Desire Machines the World Has Ever Seen"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was about 18, I read Angela Carter\u2019s extraordinary 1972 novel\u00a0\u2018The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman<\/em>\u2019<\/a>, and in these dark days as my 57th<\/sup>\u00a0birthday approaches it comes back into my imagination often. It tells the story of the diabolical evil genius Doctor Hoffman who, at war with an unnamed South American city, has developed a weapon, a kind of ray gun which when fired at the city, unleashes mass hallucinations, causing the dreams and desires of the population take physical form and the whole city begins to turn mad, what Carter describes as \u201cthis phantasmagoric redefinition of a city\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cCloud palaces erected themselves then silently toppled to reveal for a moment the familiar warehouse beneath them until they were replaced by some fresh audacity\u201d, she writes. \u201cA group of chanting pillars exploded in the middle of a mantra and lo! they were once again street lamps until, with night, they changed to silent flowers. Giant heads in the helmets of conquistadors sailed up like sad, pained kites over the giggling chimney pots. Hardly anything remained the same for more than one second and the city was no longer the conscious production of humanity; it had become the arbitrary realm of dream\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Doctor Hoffman also used his weapon to disrupt time. As Carter writes<\/p>\n

\u201ctricks with watches and clocks were pet devices of his, for so he rubbed home to us how we no longer held a structure of time in common\u201d. \u201cWe\u201d, she added, \u201cthat is, those of us who retained some notion of what was real and what was not \u2013 felt the vertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

When I first immersed myself in the world painted by Carter, a world in which nothing was as it seemed, in which monsters and ghosts appeared from nowhere and distinguishing between reality and nightmare was impossible, it was hard to square that with the real world around me. It felt like something that existed between the pages of the book and nowhere else. I no longer feel like that.<\/p>\n

After just a few weeks of the Trump administration, the world feels very much to me as though Doctor Hoffman, like Trump, has returned from exile, and now we find ourselves in the sights of his new and improved Desire Machine. Nothing seems real anymore. The title of Carter\u2019s book when first published in the US was\u00a0\u2018The War of Dreams\u2019.<\/em>\u00a0Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

Our enemies are now our friends.\u00a0Our friends are our enemies<\/a>. Scientists and government officials in the US\u00a0can\u2019t use the words \u2018climate change\u2019 and \u2018social justice\u2019 anymore<\/a>, as if somehow the existential problems they are naming will magically disappear if we just stop talking about them. Trans and non-binary people are being forced out of public life.<\/p>\n

After a summer of the worst forest fires in US history, the people who protect the nation from those fires are\u00a0being laid off en masse<\/a>, like the people who detect pandemics early, or the people who protect us from the predations of billionaires and large corporations. And that\u2019s just this week!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a 1+1=3 world, where Presidents turn into Emperors, where \u2018alternative facts\u2019 are prioritised over actual facts, where Nazi salutes pop up in the middle of talks as if it\u2019s completely normal. It\u2019s bewildering, and exhausting. It\u2019s classic Doctor Hoffman, that \u201cvertigo of those teetering on the edge of a magic precipice\u201d Carter wrote of. David Graeber\u00a0once said<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cthis feeling of hopelessness that everyone has is a manufactured product, and that\u2019s what Neo-Liberalism is really about \u2026 it\u2019s a political program designed to produce hopelessness and kill any future alternatives\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What we\u2019re experiencing is that on steroids. It\u2019s a punch-drunk feeling of overwhelm, the result of what Steve Bannon once referred to as\u00a0\u201cflooding the zone with shit\u201d<\/a>, or what Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, calls\u00a0\u201cpsychological overwhelming\u201d<\/a>, a \u2018shock and awe\u2019 approach which leaves us all reeling.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re left clutching for the familiar, unable to cling to even the basic things we assumed we would always be able to take for granted as insane Executive Order after insane Executive Order fly past us. Putin is now the good guy, and which bathroom trans people get to use is of far greater importance than the collapse of the\u00a0Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation<\/a>. Oh, and Ukraine started the war apparently. Is it us going mad, or the world around us? What can we cling onto as being real anymore?<\/p>\n

Resistance to this\u00a0is taking many forms<\/a>. Challenging the Trump administration in the courts is going to be vital, as is organising by trades unions and many different parts of civil society. Boycotts of Elon Musk and Trump\u2019s enterprises will hurt for sure (do support\u00a0\u2018Everyone Hates Elon\u2019s crowdfunder<\/a>\u00a0to expand on their brilliant \u20180-1939 in 3 seconds\u2019 posters across London recently). But I want to suggest something else that needs to sit alongside those things.<\/p>\n

In Carter\u2019s novel, the protagonist Desiderio is sent on a secret mission to find Doctor Hoffman and destroy his Desire Machines. I can\u2019t helping wondering how the book might have played out if, instead, he had decided to stay put and pull together the city\u2019s finest minds to build a Desire Machine of his own. We need to out-engineer Doctor Hoffman and find the new ways to work together to create the most powerful desire machines the world has yet seen. It\u2019s true that we don\u2019t have platforms like X and Facebook at our disposal, but that doesn\u2019t mean we are powerless.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve spent the past 2 years writing a book called \u2018How to Fall in Love with the Future: a time traveller\u2019s guide to changing the world\u2019\u00a0<\/em>(to be published in May 2025) which argues that one of the key shifts that those of us in the resistance need to make is to become far better at the cultivation of longing, or what Prentis Hemphill, in her book\u00a0What It Takes to Heal<\/em>, describes as \u2018that vulnerable, stomach-dropping craving\u2019. How can we, urgently and at scale, bring alive for people what a future rooted in care, compassion, equality, social justice and doing everything we can to rapidly reduce our carbon emissions would look like, smell like, taste like? And how can we tell stories of that future that help people create a new North Star in their lives?<\/p>\n

I already see glimpses of what this could look like in the work of activist and artists like\u00a0Black Quantum Futurism<\/a>,\u00a0Moral Imaginations<\/a>\u2019 \u2018Imagination Activism\u2019, in the work of artists like\u00a0Camille Turner<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Cauleen Smith<\/a>, in movements like Afrofuturism,\u00a0Muslim Futures<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Black Utopias<\/a>, in artists like Sun Ra who talked of being an angel from Saturn who travelled through space with\u00a0\u201cboth unshakable certainty and deadpan humour\u201d<\/a>, Aisha Shillingford\u2019s\u00a0writing on the Black Imagination<\/a>, in local authorities and\u00a0schools building time machines<\/a>, in activists\u00a0crewing imaginary spacecraft<\/a>,\u00a0Thrutopian storytelling<\/a>\u00a0such as Manda Scott\u2019s novel \u2018Any Human Power\u2019<\/a><\/em>, in community organisations\u00a0creating and holding powerful \u2018What If\u2019 spaces<\/a>. A positive futurism movement is emerging, and at pace. I already get people sending me photos of time machines they\u2019d building. Here\u2019s one created by my friend Annaig in France.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My friend Annaig\u2019s time machine\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

My own contribution to the building of Desire Machines is working with ambient music artist Mr Kit and light projection wizard Tim Dollimore on a project called \u2018Field Recordings from the Future<\/a>\u2019, where we are creating an immersive multimedia Time Portal which combines live music and real recordings we captured on recent time travels with video projections in order to create a tear in the fabric of time to allow people to step through into the future that turned out the best it possibly could. A world of car-free neighbourhoods, bicycle rush hours, landscapes rewilded by beavers, of the urgent installation of community renewables on every street, of regenerative farms, of underground mushroom farms that are transforming urban economies.<\/p>\n

I feel like we are working to build an optimist-generating machine in a time desperate for optimists. We think of it as \u2018a Cirque du Soleil for the Radical Imagination\u2019. We want it to be staged everywhere, for time portals to be created everywhere, and fast. \u00a0We will very soon be launching a crowdfunding campaign to enable the unleashing of this powerful device \u2026 watch this space.<\/p>\n

We believe that if humanity is to hospice modernity and race towards a future we\u2019d be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn, a critical mass of us need to experience something so profound, so genuinely mind-blowing, so awesome and multi-sensory, that it rips apart the \u2018yes, but\u2026\u2019 narratives that tell us there is no alternative to the current system\u2014and sweeps open doorways to a new way of being. This is the level of ambition we\u2019re working at.<\/p>\n

The nurturing of longing is not necessarily an approach or a skillset that comes naturally to those of us in the resistance. Our work is usually rooted in the present (\u201cWhat do we want? When do we want it? Now!\u201d) rather than in the future or the past, or in moving at will between temporalities. The people in our culture who are great at nurturing imagination tend not to be activists, rather they are street artists, poets, designers, people who write TV series, people who work in advertising, people who design wildly imaginative festivals such as\u00a0Boomtown<\/a>. If we are to build Desire Machines more powerful than those that currently have us bewitched, bewildered and bedazzled, we need to encourage a communion of artists (in the widest sense of that word) and activists on a scale we\u2019ve never seen before.<\/p>\n

We might imagine actors in public spaces, acting out scenarios from the future that turned out OK, \u2018pop up tomorrows\u2019 that touch people emotionally, creating \u2018utopian moments\u2019 in which,\u00a0as Ben Anderson puts it<\/a>, the present \u201coverflows with what is not-yet\u201d, providing tastes, glimpses, infusions of utopias in the present, through music, art, activist events\u2026all manner of creative expressions that show us how our future could be so much better than anything we\u2019re living through now.<\/p>\n

Street art can bring that future into the present. Street artists like\u00a0Sophie Mess<\/a>,\u00a0ATM<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Mona Caron<\/a>, to name just three, use large, vibrant, beautiful murals to create images Doctor Hoffman would be proud of; images that give us a taste of a different future in the here and now. As the great jazz musician and space traveller Sun Ra put it,<\/p>\n

\u2018The future is obvious, but the potential impossible is calling softly and knocking gently.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We\u2019re done with dystopias. We\u2019re awash with them. They paralyse us: we\u2019ve had enough. Cast them out of our cinemas and toss them from the bookshelves. Rather, let\u2019s turn to political theorist Wendy Brown\u00a0who says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cOnly a compelling vision of a less frightening and insecure future will recruit anyone to a progressive or revolutionary alternative future \u2013 or rouse apolitical citizens for the project of making that future. This vision must be seductive and exciting, and it must be embodied in seductive and exciting leadership and movements\u2026\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fascists like Musk and Trump hate creativity, imagination, daring, playfulness, people who speak of dreams and build pictures of a future predicated in decency, compassion, courage, connection. Our ability to organise and resist is vital, but I believe now more than ever that our true strength lies in our ability to cultivate longing, to build awesome Desire Machines.<\/p>\n

After all, as Don Delillo once wrote,<\/p>\n

\u201clonging, on a large scale, is what makes history\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Don\u2019t you ever forget that. I\u2019m digging out my toolbox and heading to the garage to start building a Desire Machine. Who\u2019s joining me?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our ability to organise and resist is vital, but I believe now more than ever that our true strength lies in our ability to cultivate longing, to build awesome Desire Machines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3509799,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79720,213535],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3509790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","category-society-featured"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3509790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3509790"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3509790\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3509802,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3509790\/revisions\/3509802"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3509799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3509790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3509790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3509790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}