To be continued... indefinitely. Elena Marchetti is the author of "The Loop of History: Why the 1990s Never Ended" (University of Chicago Press, 2023).
But here is the terror of the Ostinato: the only reliable way to break a musical loop is to stop playing. Silence. In historical terms, silence is extinction-level collapse or totalitarian enforced peace. Ostinato Destino 1992-
This is why the dash after 1992 is the most violent punctuation mark in history. It suggests that 1992 never ended. We are still living in the aftermath of the Cold War's end, still using the same economic software (neoliberal capitalism), still arguing about the same culture wars (identity vs. class), still watching the same weather get hotter. To be continued
In the 1980s, apocalypse was a movie ( The Day After , Threads ). It had a beginning, a middle, and a radioactive end. In the era of Ostinato Destino, apocalypse is a screensaver. But here is the terror of the Ostinato:
That is the nihilism of the 1992- era. Nothing is cool. Nothing is new. The loop has been spinning for three decades.
The 1992- era is a failure of the cadenza. We have had thirty years of warnings. The Rio Summit was thirty years ago. The Kyoto Protocol (1997) was supposed to be the fix. The Paris Agreement (2015) was supposed to be the fix. Each time, the orchestra plays the same rhythm: deny, delay, deflect, repeat .
Consider the summer of 2024: Floods in the Sahara. Fires in the Arctic. A sitting U.S. president drops out of a race. Assassination attempts livestreamed. Wars expanding in the Middle East and Eastern Europe simultaneously. And yet, the S&P 500 is up. Taylor Swift is on tour. The algorithm serves you a reel of a dancing dog between a missile strike and a heat death graph.