US_AFTER_ALL

Our project’s core concept stems from what is commonly termed “post-Sovietness.” When the USSR imported democracy as an alternative way of “being together,” the West was already debating its crisis. Today, we find ourselves in a world of post-politics. We are speaking of a world that has lost a sense of directed progress, a regulating idea, and, with it, the very infrastructure that has sustained it. Much like the Roman Empire, which began to crumble with the adoption of Christianity, today’s world lives under conditions where a certain Grand Truth is no longer institutionalized; it exists on its own. As for alternatives, we are left only with the calculations of capitalism, forecasts, and post-truth (steered not only by those who call themselves right-wingers, but also by those who call themselves left-wingers).

Thus, we would call this condition a post-apocalypse. However, we want to focus not so much on the world in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, but on a reality that has already learned to live by new rules or is actively inventing them—that is, a post-post-apocalyptic world.

Consequently, our research charts the disappearance of the old world—divided into left and right, defined by the modernist and postmodernist eras, and marked by a religious devotion to either the suffering of the oppressed or imperial universalism—and the subsequent birth of a new world. This new reality is ruled by AI, brainrot, populists, memes, and a parade of new nationalisms (both right and left), while a new emancipatory project is yet to be born. U-topia does not exist, but, after all, that is precisely its most accurate definition.