Forever Again

What will happen to Europe if the war against Ukraine continues for ten more years? This was the question we asked artists in 2024 as a prompt for the production of the Kyiv Perennial poster project in Berlin, marking the tenth anniversary of the Maidan Revolution and the tenth year of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Today, thinking of how the world may change over the next decade looks even more like an ambitious exercise in futurology, science fiction, and fortune-telling combined. The structural conditions shaping our current predicament prove those types of lore to be deadly serious. And as the future exists only in the present continuous, these longue durée developments will keep on profoundly shaping the world to come.

First is the global logic of war. The confusingly messy US-led Western retreat in Afghanistan, accompanied by an immediate Taliban takeover in 2021, ultimately became NATO’s “brain death” moment – as it betrayed and abandoned a society it had helped to raise and sustain over the previous twenty years. This rupture triggered a new cycle of so-called “special military operation”-style wars, beginning with Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, followed by Azerbaijan’s military seizure of Armenian-controlled Nagorno-Karabakh, the Israeli-Palestinian war, and US attacks on Iran and Venezuela. These conflicts differ in their historical and political contexts, yet they share a common trajectory: initially conceived as Blitzkrieg, they have in most cases evolved into protracted wars of varying intensity with no end in sight. Taken together, they accumulate into what increasingly resembles a global civil war – with Greenland already on the table and Taiwan, among others, on the horizon.

Secondly, it is COVID-19 pandemic. It has largely disappeared from the headlines, yet we continue to underestimate how fundamentally this global emergency has defined our present. The world we inhabit today is – and will remain – post-pandemic per se, shaped by a distinct psychopolitical condition. In this sense, politics itself has become psychical as its direct outcome. On the one hand, the pandemic enforced global isolation, producing a “bunker effect” that altered sensory perception and patterns of human interaction. On the other, the imposition of unprecedented restriction measures demonstrated how quickly entire populations could be deprived of their social rights and everyday habitual practices that constitute society in an existential sense. None of the ongoing wars – at least in their current forms – would have been possible without this prior experience. We all continue to live in this condition of a collective “long COVID” for years to come.

And lastly, but most importantly, the emergence of the first non-human agent in human history: artificial intelligence. The pandemic already subjected humanity to a form of “Zoom dictatorship,” solidifying collective interpassivity. From AI’s perspective, the brutality of ongoing wars functions as an efficient mechanism to clear the path for its own accelerated expansion. AI-enabled lethal autonomous weapons systems now stand at the cutting edge of technological development, epitomizing the ideology of the Dark Enlightenment. It is therefore hardly surprising that those who publicly fantasize about “occupying Mars” – occupy, sic! – also feel comfortable performing the Nazi salutes and actively contribute to turning life on Earth into hell. A monstrous amalgam of feudalism, oligarchy, advanced technology, and fascism is beginning to define the ideological bestiary of an AI-dominated future. In this sense, contemporary political reality does not merely resemble an AI-generated world – it already is one, unfolding according to the logic of its own further evolution.

Violence always starts as a virus, continues as a cancer, and ends up as a desert. In its renewed savage form, war violence now penetrates political procedures, destroys democratic societies, and corrodes all spheres of life with no sign of stopping. We are living through a tremendously reactionary global counter-revolution after a political chance for emancipative change had been lost – the unrealized promise of the intercontinental wave of “square-occupation” uprisings turned into a sweeping wave of hard-right populism, military occupations, and algorithmic polarization of social life. Isn’t it a genuine diagnosis of our present international predicament that those in the political liberal centre, who have been afraid to even pronounce “regime change” applied to authoritarian or outright totalitarian states over the years, are now undergoing indeed a harsh regime change in their home counties themselves?

In response to the time span of ten years of Russia’s war against Ukraine within the Kyiv Perennial question, the graphic design collective Experimental Jetset contributed a poster in the form of the Ten of Spades playing card. In tarot and cartomancy, this card signifies misfortune, grief, pain, and tragic endings; the spade, shaped like a spearhead, is closely associated with weaponry. But the artists chose to literally cross out the ten spades, thereby destabilizing – and symbolically neutralizing – the card's negative meaning. Such a cathartic gesture, a negation of the negation, appears today as one of the most urgent political acts we can still imagine.