Each era dreams the next, as Michelet once said.
The century failed to answer its technical possibilities with a new social order, as Walter Benjamin reminded us.
In other words, we live within the dreams and myths of our ancestors.
Since reading the Notes and Materials of The Arcades Project and Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, this theme has haunted me.
The nineteenth century bequeathed us images and desires that still populate our urban landscapes and technological imaginaries.
From this, one essential lesson emerges: progress is not an ascending line, but a sedimentation of unfinished dreams. Each technical invention opens a breach, a horizon of expectation, but also a melancholy—the melancholy of failed utopias. What we call modernity may well be nothing more than a palimpsest of ancient aspirations which, never realized, continue to return as specters.
Thus, when we think we are moving forward, we often only reactivate earlier myths: the automaton, the phantom, the ideal city, the universal marketplace. Artificial intelligence, for example, is not merely a contemporary technical feat; it also actualizes centuries-old dreams: animating inert matter, creating a double of man, delegating thought.
In this sense, to inhabit our time is to accept that we walk among the ruins of once-hoped-for futures. But it is also to understand that within these ruined imaginaries still lie dormant shards of possibility.
Megalopolis
