Punk was fun, but No Future isn’t interesting. You can’t deny the future. My favourite line from the fine piece of postmodernism that is DEADWOOD is “You do not fuck the future, sir. The future fucks you.” No Future is fear of the future, inability to cope with the future, the inability to desire — desire was a key postpunk word, as in the politics of desire, the philosophy of desire — and is ultimately fuckless. And no-one wants a fuckless future.

Paul Gravett, who has written brilliantly of the Atom Style (as he has of so many things, remaining, to my mind, the pre-eminent Anglophone commentator on the medium), provides the following definition of its energy: “Suddenly, we are in the 21st century and we are living in the future. Now more than ever, we need the playful vision and liberating spirit of the ‘Atom Style’ to help us look back to the futures that might have been, and look ahead to the futures still to come.”

I got to flip through a copy of Geoff Manaugh’s THE BLDGBLOG BOOK, print annex to the fine BLDGBLOG blog at bldgblog.blogspot.com, the other month. You need this book. I mean, you need to be reading the blog, too, but you need to look for this book. It is a book about architecture. Which means it’s a book about everything, including but not limited to all of history, all of the future, being completely mad, living in all things at all times and the death and also the saving of science fiction. Geoff Manaugh writes and thinks like some unholy hybrid of Umberto Eco, Paul Morley, William Gibson and an unhinged ayahuascero dressed only in pages from a furniture catalogue dated 10 December 2012. The book is a mad wunderkammer of mad and lovely things, making the real world into science fiction and making science fiction into the real world. The great joy of BLDGBLOG is when a discovered thing sends Geoff’s brain into some lunatic alternate world of possibility, and then folds the whole the back on to the present day.

I found Lili crosslegged on her bed earlier, her guitar in her hands, earbuds in, watching something on her open laptop. I suspect it was either a guitar lesson, some tabs she’s been looking for, or listening to Theory Of A Dead Man and trying to detune her guitar to C-sharp to capture their tone. That’s how she treats the laptop — what else does it do? And the very conjuring of all those elements in the first line illustrates that her generation do not live with their heads in a laptop or a DS Lite or whatever. Less so, even, than the previous generation. It’s a fully integrated part of their lives, a Swiss army knife for the world. What else does it do?

Yet even when the people of Petrograd and Moscow had nearly nothing, the black market still thrived, trumping doctrine. The anarchist Emma Goldman reported of the open-air markets that “Here gathered proletarian and aristocrat, Communist and bourgeois, peasant and intellectual. Here they were bound by a common desire to sell and buy.”