How futurism took an abrupt right turn in the 20th century

The word “futurism” was born in a car crash. At least, that is the story that poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti told back in 1909, when he coined the term in an editorial for French newspaper Le Figaro. He and some friends had spent a wild night drinking and arguing about art when they decided to hop into Marinetti’s 1908 Fiat and speed down an Italian road. Startled by two cyclists, Marinetti lost control of the car and flipped it over into a ditch.

In his editorial, which he called “The Futurist Manifesto“, Marinetti made the startling claim that the crash was fun. There was the thrill of feeling a big, magnificent machine “hurtling at breakneck speed along the racetrack of [Earth’s] orbit”. But more important was his joy in the car’s violent destruction. This latter feeling, he wrote, was the essence of futurism.

In my column last month, I described how ancient humans understood the future. Now, we are zooming forwards into the modern world, where futurism took an abrupt right turn.

Marinetti argued that a truly “modern man” had to embrace aggression and “glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world”, as well as “militarism, patriotism” and total civilisational destruction. War was the only way to abolish the “stinking canker” of history, he wrote, and embrace the technologies of tomorrow.

Perhaps it will come as no surprise that when Marinetti got bored with futurism a decade later, he co-wrote another op-ed, “The Fascist Manifesto“. This work inspired Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist dictator.

Despite his extreme rightward swerve into politics, however, Marinetti’s work still influences Western ideas of the future today. Rose Eveleth, creator of the futurist podcast Flash Forward, wrote in Wired that Silicon Valley leaders often echo Marinetti’s futurist manifesto in their rhetoric. Indeed, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen cites Marinetti in his widely-read “Techno-Optimist Manifesto“, where he argues that unfettered technological development is the only path towards a better future.

But Marinetti wasn’t interested in technology for its own sake. He loved the crash more than the car. For him, technology was wedded to war, which destroyed all in its path to make way for the new. His futurist manifesto anticipated the military-industrial complex of the cold war period, as well as today’s high-tech defence firms like drone maker Anduril and surveillance-tech giant Palantir.

Why did futurists decide that sophisticated war machines represented progress? Marinetti’s own life offers a clue. He spent his entire childhood in Egypt, where his father was a lawyer who worked with European colonial businesses to “modernise” the country.

Thus Marinetti’s first exposure to futuristic social change was inextricably tied to imperialism, a system of economic development shot through with violence and oppression. Colonisers in Egypt and elsewhere were also very keen to chuck the past away, replacing local history and knowledge with their own.

It is little wonder young Marinetti saw the future as a car crash that snuffed out what had gone before.

And yet, Marinetti would argue, the crash also produces better cars. Ultimately his ideas caught on because so many people in the 20th century were eyewitnesses to the deadly innovations of war and colonialism. The idea of futurism we have inherited from that era isn’t just about embracing new tech. It is about how to develop technology, using violence and historical amnesia. This is why I always shudder when I hear Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook motto: “Move fast and break things.”

The problem with this approach to the future is that the things you break and forget always return with a vengeance. Colonised people revolt. Dead automobiles poison the environment. There are always steep costs when the future is purchased by liquidating the past.

Perhaps this is why many of the ideas proposed by futurists in 1909 sound like they were ripped from ancient Roman speeches about war and nationhood, rather than being about something genuinely novel, like renewable energy, universal education or sustainable building materials.

Marinetti’s brand of futurism has reached its apotheosis in today’s AI bubble. The large language models that power products such as ChatGPT are allegedly futuristic tech that will nuke our current economy from orbit. And yet they are fed entirely on historical datasets, so they can never produce anything truly new or original. The faster we go, the more we mire ourselves in the wreckage of our past.

Tune in next month, when I’ll talk about how communications technology fuelled 21st-century ideas about what comes next.

Annalee’s week

What I’m reading

Marion Gibson’s Witchcraft: A history in 13 trials, which reminds us that some women hired lawyers and won their witch trials.

What I’m watching

The Commute, about the daily migration of thousands of crows in Vancouver, Canada.

What I’m working on

Getting to know Vancouver better by riding the SkyTrain.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Stories Are Weapons: Psychological warfare and the American mind. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com