Neoliberal Crisis
Over two decades into the establishment of neoliberal hegemony in Britain, its wide reaching transformation of social organisation is clear. Far from just an economic regime which centralises market competition as the driver of human life and activity, the last fifteen years of austerity measures have also demonstrated that neoliberalism is an affective regime which has changed how we relate to the state and each other. Cuts to welfare and social infrastructures has further isolated individuals from one another and from resources, whilst increasing the state’s means of surveillance. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall suggests that historical conjunctures – specific convergences of social, political and economic forces – often emerge from points of crisis which are never merely economic, they are always overdetermined in multiple directions at once.The question for those interested in neoliberal crisis should be, what has this particular configuration of social, economic and political forces done to our sense of ourselves, our sense of history and the temporality we inhabit?
The historical and emotional effects of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom have produced an overwhelming sense of stasis in political subjects, the feeling that no meaningful interventions can be made to stop overlapping catastrophe on multiple scales. Time drags us along with it. We see this sentiment articulated in public discourses related to climate crisis, the ticking-clock which counts down to the earth’s destruction or the rise of so-called “burnout” amongst a millennial population, the creep of ambient television, portmanteaus such as “doomscroll”, even in the term “live-streamed genocide” which assumes an act of passive consumption from the ‘viewer.’ Invocations to ‘hope’ for better conditions fall flat amongst alienated workers and the possibility of meaningfully working across differences without access to shared public spaces such as youth centres, community halls and squatted buildings seems increasingly difficult. The ideological effects of the stasis induced by neoliberalism are historically determinative and stultifying, they collapses all of human history back into a linear timeline and in doing so affirms two versions of historical ‘common sense’: a centre and periphery with regard to historical event in which racialised populations and formerly colonised nations assume a ‘minor’ position in the story of west’s historical progress; and the idea that for those of us with capacious dreams of liberation, history is merely a series of failed revolutions, defeat ad infinitum.
THIS IS A TEMPORAL LANDSCAPE, YOU WILL FIND NO DIRECTION HERE, a research collaboration which we began in 2021, is a digital assemblage and research tool which attempts to intervene inside of this squalid landscape through a focus on a materialist conceptualisation of the imagination. Our experimental collaborative project presents a visual critique of the linear and stadial conceptions of history on which the neoliberal ethos (individualism, privatization, austerity, surveillance) and our responses to it depend. By dehistoricising the archival ephemera of radical social movements we remove the imperative to understand the cultural objects as part of an evolutionary historical timeline. Breaking with the timeline which cosigns us to defeatist position, we open up the possibility for engagement with the temporal distortion that materialist resistance enacts. We return to political subjects a structure of feeling defined by their collective autonomy and the interiority of a belief: that is it possible to transform their own conditions. This distortion pushes us towards certain strategic principles: namely the notion that we can move around crisis, rather than through it, we needn’t be immobilized by the affective environment caused by changes in the world historical order. TIATLYWFNDH suggests that the cultural ephemera emergent from radical social movements contain within them, evidence of the uses of the political imagination, and that this use may be re-engaged using creative methods for the purposes of prompting collective political action.
By symbolically removing the weight of history, it aims to challenge the notion that the history of liberatory movements is simply a history of ‘wins’ and ‘losses’ and reposition it as an ongoing battle against the racialised, gendered and imperial machinations of capitalism. This project uses digital technology as a testing ground for understanding cultural objects as both products of history and products of imaginative potential. In challenging the ideological limits of traditional historiographical methods i.e the overreliance on state archives in the production of historical narrative, in the spirit of the working class archivists and historians who have pushed us to ‘archive from below’, we wish to introduce a new way of understanding objects emergent from class struggle. TIATLYWFNDH presents ephemera outside of their temporal constraints by removing the dates associated with material in order to refocus political subjects on rebuilding affective attachments to the principle of freedom.
It is important to note that the assemblage positions itself against a capital H ‘History,’ the representational power of the discipline, not the requirement to understand the historical development of certain political movements or phenomena. Radical historical traditions, from the writings of historian CLR James to present day formations such as The Young Historians Project, teach us that political subjects are and have always been the drivers of historical transformation, they are agents capable of directing events. We might think of the necessity of cultivating aesthetic and material projects capable of reviving the political animus which powers participation in radical social movements.
What do we do with technology feeling historyless?
Through the process of collaboration on a digital project which seeks to visually represent an ideological problem, we also noted that one of the remarkable things about working in technical spaces is how little interest there tends to be in the history of the field. There are forms of memorial, urban legends, but even these exist on the fringes of the culture. The assumption within engineering — that everything has progressively improved, and that the most important thing to know about is what’s happening right now creates an air of pervasive and inevitable newness, an air which is exploited by the algorithmic nature of neoliberal governmentality.This attitude means that technologies tend to move very rapidly in one direction, and the possibilities, interpretations, debates and alternative uses are either ignored, or repeat in a cycle where the same questions are asked every 10 years. There is a tragic heroism ascribed to individuals like Ted Nelson, who pursue alternatives to dominant technologies (in Ted’s case, the modern internet) long past the moment where their approach has been rejected.
An example of this historylessness relates to the structure of computer operating systems. The current mode of interface design (pioneered by Apple in the 1980s and 1990s) conceals much of what occurs on the computer, insisting that this is simply too challenging for the average user. In the past decade, the rise of the phone has pushed this abstraction further: operations on the computer are now managed entirely by apps, the filesystem is hidden beneath the search function, and physical storage is blended seamlessly with the cloud. These are design decisions that we reckon with every day: most of our students now arrive at university considerably less skilled with digital technologies than their counterparts 5 years ago, despite having spent much more of their lives in contact with these machines. The ‘passivity’ that we observe, is at once mediated and co-created by these technologies.
The affordance of working with a historyless medium is its flexibility. Objects are not bound by their physical manifestations, one is rarely (if ever) forced to reckon with what they really are (ones and zeroes stored on a server in another country, delivered to your screen by pieces of glass buried beneath the ocean). The simultaneous representation of archival objects across past/present/future is suddenly readily available: the idea that one is constantly remaking the world is par for the course within engineering departments.What is obscured by this flexibility is an extraordinary violence, via which the world has been rearranged to make this operation appear mundane. Nick Chavez writes that “Engineering’s capitalist birthright is to turn the commodity fetish into reality: by ruthlessly operating as if it were truth, it is to become truth.” Who laid these cables in the ground in the first place? Where did the silicon in your phone come from?
One aspect of internet history that we talk about in relation to TIATLYWFNDH is its roots in the online archive. In particular, giant pirate libraries like Anna’s Archive and Libgen (links valid as of August 2025 — for up to date links use the Shadow Library Uptime Monitor), the work of Aaron Schwartz, and large open knowledge projects like Wikipedia. In the words of Henry Warwick, “One of the ontological facts of digital storage is that there is no difference between a computer program, a video, mp3-song, or an e-book. They are all composed of voltage represented by ones and zeros. Therefore they are all subject to the same electronic fact: they exist to be copied and can only ever exist as copies.”
These projects make full use of this aspect of digital media ─ its weightlessness ─ and engage it materially, moving information outside of institutions and across borders, shrinking libraries to the size of a memory stick. They also trouble the notion of constant growth: the technologies used to make these sites have not changed in decades, and yet their usefulness and importance persists. To take engineering seriously as a field that can be socially useful (which I think is very important to do), the idea of a relentless and inevitable newness must be questioned. This questioning must involve both the history, and also the actual materiality of computing machinery.
In attempting to intervene into landscapes defined by discourses of neoliberal crisis, without offering a singular solution or directive, our collaboration has provided insight into how the removal of a sense of history from everyday technologies and defeatist notion of History as a linear timeline of events are parallel tracks. Reorientating ourselves requires us to understand historical development as a flexible and dynamic process capable of being manipulated to meet the urgency of the present moment. We understand THIS IS A TEMPORAL LANDSCAPE, YOU WILL FIND NO DIRECTION HERE as an ongoing, ‘endless’ attempt to revive the desire for resistance returning to both concepts, ‘history’ and ‘technology’, a criticality that enables us to reject the notion that the future can be won rather than constructed. We find ourselves, as always, in the middle of history, with more questions than answers. It is what we did yesterday, do today and will do tomorrow that matters most.
