Repairing the future: Jon Bois meets Walter Benjamin
"We have been expected on this earth," writes Walter Benjamin in On the Concept of History.1 "For it has been given us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic power, on which the past has a claim." (II) Nobody can say for sure, but I do think Benjamin would have loved Jon Bois' multimedia serial 17776: The future of football.
The titular future of 17776 is so familiar that it's alien. As Ten, one of the three sentient satellites that make up our main cast, puts it:
On April 7th, 2026, people stopped being born. On the same day, people stopped dying, and people stopped aging. (Ch. 3)
Bois' world is a sort of love letter to the adage that "progress happens one funeral at a time". It's a world without those funerals, or any other forces that change the makeup of the 8 billion people that can produce change. And with nothing to disrupt it, 17776 asserts, society coasts on its inertia:
There is also something to be said for the mechanism of human change. It's largely generational. Peoples' wants and hopes and dreams evolved because young people entered the world and took another step forward. But this is the final generation. Yes, it is a 15,000-year-old generation, but just as you wouldn't expect them to grow a third arm, you shouldn't assume they want different things, different lives. They wanted things and they got them all. The end. (Ch. 12)
People solve their problems, and then history just ends. Menial jobs and beat cops haven't been abolished, but their relationship with oppression seems to have dissipated. Football serves as a sort of steam vent for humanity's desire to think in the long term; the game is so arcane and grandiose that in one variant, end zones are state borders. The visuals of the story largely take place within Google Earth, with low-poly versions of the same street names and buildings we know and love today. There's no better way to communicate the rough stasis of humanity in 17776. Every building in the fiction corresponds to a building you could see outside right now. If there's evidence to the contrary, it's blurred beyond recognition.
On the Concept of History rails against what Benjamin calls "homogenous and empty time", fungible hours and minutes that contain events, vessels to be passively filled with facts like a treasure chest. This is unapologetically the timespace of 17776. The story literally opens with a supermassive empty calendar, filled with syncopated pieces of dialogue — there is no better symbol of the positivist, inert time Benjamin is railing against. The mix of horror, pathos, melancholy, and comfort that the story evokes follows from its alien timespace. Why do the characters summon so much grief for the death of a lightbulb (Ch. 19)? Why can a character assert, without fanfare or trepidation or even a pause, that those in the Caribbean "were safely relocated and their cultures remain alive and robust to this day" (Ch. 25)? Hell, why is America intact, state borders and all? Because our perceptions of literally everything are stitched through with age-old inconveniences the characters don't have: the arrow of time, existential anxiety, a fear of entropy, and so forth.
The image Benjamin returns to, over and over, is that of trying and failing to recover the past. This is serious business. Benjamin uses words like "seize", "explode out", "shock", and "shot through"; his most famous image, the Angel of History, sees the past as rubble upon rubble and desires nothing less than to raise the dead. Benjamin believes in non-homogenous time, and is obsessed with attempting to repair the shattered past.
It's fitting, then, that a text that axiomatically assumes homogenous time is obsessed with trying and failing to repair the shattered future. As 17776 puts it:
if you ask me, there's a scarcity of uncertainty on earth. i mean what do you do if you find out you're gonna live forever and you're never gonna live on another world? and you're never gonna see heaven or hell and you're never gonna be a cyborg with laser cannons for arms and shit? your finished form is the one who mows the lawn.
so you sort of snap back into that so that your life can be defined somehow. (Ch. 16)
Here's what Benjamin might say to that:
Surely the time of the soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty. Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way. It is well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance. This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice from the soothsayers... the future did not, however, turn into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter. (Appx. B)
Anyway, I rushed this one out in a night so I could say this: Happy April 7, 2026. I hope you enjoy not dying, aging, or witnessing birth from here on out.
Well, actually, Benjamin was germanophone, so he wrote "Dann sind wir auf der Erde erwartet worden". But unless otherwise stated I'll be using this Andy Blunden translation. Also, keep in mind Benjamin was Jewish when you hear him talk about the messiah and stuff.↩