Experiments multiplied; the future still won’t budge

experiments without – A filmmaker’s observation about how we watch movies opens into a wider cultural unease: the feeling that history is back, but the ability to test alternative futures has gone missing. From debates on modernism and “experimental culture” to Finland’s basic inco

In the spring of 2009, filmmaker Ruben Östlund was asked about his forthcoming movie Play. He explained that his “attitude” — describing the film’s plot in detail before it had even premiered — came from a change in how people watch. The viewer is no longer asking. “what’s going to happen?” Instead. they ask: “How is it going to happen and what does it look like?”.

That shift sounds like a technical tweak to storytelling. But the longer you look at the years since Östlund laid out his theory. the less it feels like a mere cinematic habit. Since 2008, crisis has followed crisis. The strange part isn’t only that events keep arriving — it’s how they’re absorbed. with people watching history the way they watch a familiar plot they think they already know. while still somehow refusing to believe their eyes.

The “plot,” as described here, was written long ago by political scientists and historians. The end of history was a “silly notion. ” and the Anglo-American and European models of liberal democracy plus capitalism are said to face increasing challenges from other systems. European influence and the role of the United States as the world’s sole superpower are also described as hollowing out. What nobody can say. though. is how it will happen as these events unfold — what it will look like when a present-day empire. the one that has structured lived experience. gradually declines.

For those who became adults in the 1990s, the pull is sharper. The memory of those years is wrapped around the idea that nothing is at stake in history’s unfolding — and the conviction that foundational political institutions can’t be torn up overnight. Fascination and horror, in this telling, come from seeing the familiar structures crack while the outcomes still feel strangely pre-scripted.

Loss sits underneath it all. The proclamation of the end of history brought a reduced ability to experiment with alternative futures. But the return of history has not reestablished that ability. because the alternative futures of the present are articulated either by tech oligarchs or authoritarian governments. The future is back, but it remains out of reach.

That mood — fascination, horror, and loss — is described as widespread enough to count as a general cultural atmosphere. Viewers in Europe and North America follow the familiar plotline but still can’t believe what they see. You can find the feeling, the piece notes, in the business press. The 2025 Financial Times shortlist for the best business books is said to have been dominated by titles exploring one question: why China is the country building the future. and why “the West” is incapable of doing the same.

Two of those books are brought forward by name. One is Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s quest to engineer the future. arguing that the US — governed by lawyers — appears increasingly dysfunctional compared with a “high-functioning China” governed by engineers. The same preference for engineers is described as showing up in another 2025 bestseller of the same genre: The Technological Republic. in which Alex Karp. founder and CEO of Palantir (the controversial defense contractor). argues that the US is not doing a good job managing its engineering expertise. The argument also points to Silicon Valley spending decades building “frivolous apps and addictive algorithms. ” reducing engineering to something “trifling and hollow. ” and it insists engineers need to raise their gazes and. like Palantir. build the technology that strengthens Western civilization.

So the story goes: wealthy classes in Europe and North America feel they’re experiencing a civilizational deceleration. and they suspect it has something to do with engineering. Instead of accepting that suspicion as a diagnosis. the piece asks what happens if you take it at face value — whether a collective capacity to build and try out alternative futures might have faded.

That leads to a blunt question: have people become less adept at conducting social experiments?

The stuckness looks familiar even outside politics. The artworld’s institutional critique debates are said to carry a refrain: Liam Gillick. a British artist. argues that the artworld is stuck in a Catch-22. Art institutions like to invite artists aligned with radical experimentalism, but they rarely allow actual experiments. Or, the other way around: experiments that do take place inside the institution are rarely rooted in radical experimentalism. The piece then asks whether contemporary social experiments are characterized by the same stuckness.

Mark Fisher enters with an older-looking diagnosis but a new shape. In the early 2010s. Fisher is described as laying out stagnation: in the decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. both music and politics were shaped by a gradual “snuffing out” of the experimental culture emblematic for the twentieth century. After the turn of the millennium. fewer and fewer culture workers subscribed to the modernist imperative of breaking with the old to deliberately create something new. Fisher’s point is that twenty-first-century culture doesn’t look toward the future; it keeps referring back.

To make the case, Fisher proposes a thought experiment: imagine “any record” from 2012 and time-machine it back to 1995. Few 1990s listeners would believe it came from the future. If they did. they would ask why so little had happened in seventeen years of cultural evolution — and then likely compare the “stagnated future” with pop inventiveness in the 1960s. 1970s. and 1980s. Fisher sees similar shrinking in the political imaginary on the left after the fall of the Wall: boundaries for what was imaginable kept shrinking. especially when compared with the bold experiments that led to the creation of the welfare state.

To connect those dots to a wider narrative about what happened to the modernist project. the piece shifts to design and urbanism. citing Richard Sennett’s Designing Disorder (2020). Sennett discusses his first book, published in 1970, when architects and planners still believed in modernist architecture. Since then, “doubt about that modernist project” has become widespread because it “failed in its commitment to experimentation.”.

Modernism promised to break with the old by experimenting with the new, dispelling the need for political revolution. So the piece presses again: is the failure of modernism actually a failure of experimentalism?

Marshall Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air is brought in to argue that the relationship between modernization and modernist expression across art. literature. and social thinking is dialectical. The title may echo Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ manifesto. but the central message is said to come from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground.

In Berman’s view, Dostoevsky is described as the first prophet to articulate the impending fate of modern experimentalism. The Russian author’s pro-existentialist novella is said to be in conversation with modern urban landscapes in Saint Petersburg and with modern buildings like London’s Crystal Palace. The Crystal Palace matters because standard readings dwell on how Dostoevsky associates it with rationalization and scientification of human existence.

Berman’s nuance. though. is the pivot that matters: the critique isn’t directed at the real-world Crystal Palace but at representation of the Crystal Palace in fiction — specifically in stories praised by Russian utopian socialists. These utopians dreamed of a civilization molded by science. where the new man leaves the chaotic modern metropolis for an exurban geometric landscape organized around standardized crystal palaces.

That is the utopia Dostoevsky is said to have in mind when he writes that the crystal palace represents the crushing of free will. In that building. everything will “be so accurately calculated and specified that there will no longer be either independent actions or adventures in this world”. The construction of the Crystal Palace marks the end of the adventure of progress — and, therefore, the end of history.

Even so. Berman notes that London’s Crystal Palace was in fact an expression of the adventurous ideals defended in Notes From Underground. The building is described as designed by engineers, not classically trained architects, and the project’s speculative aspect was explicit. It was built with the intention of seeing whether it was possible to construct a building entirely in glass and wrought iron — an experiment allowed to be experimental.

The piece then places a longer passage attributed in the source material to Berman’s use of Dostoevsky’s thinking about what it means to be human in a modern world. It ends on the line: “… man is. above all. a predominantly creative animal. condemned consciously to strive towards a goal and to engage in the art of engineering. that is. eternally. unceasingly construct a road for himself. wherever it may lead.”.

“Wherever it may lead” is described as the key sentence in italics for both Dostoevsky and Berman. Engineering is deeply human and can represent unpredictability and adventurousness. but it can also be captured by scientism and standardization promoted by utopian socialists. In this framing, engineering can break open new futures — and it can also foreclose them.

The twentieth century, the piece says, turned the story from adventure into routine. Ultimately, the scientific socialists’ version of the Crystal Palace won out. A routinized modernization of the living environment was introduced in the Soviet Union. and in the West the glass-and-wrought-iron experiment degenerated into an “overpopulation” of standardized glass boxes as shopping malls and office buildings. Modernist architecture, on this account, abandoned its “commitment to experimentation.”.

That brings the article into the world of welfare policy — and into the Swedish debate about “the Swedish model,” described as also being “the Swedish experiment” because social engineers dared to try welfare solutions that diverged significantly from other countries.

But the Nordic welfare experiment drawing the most attention in recent years is Finland’s basic income trial.

The piece details the timeline and structure. In 2015. Juha Sipilä’s government launched the initiative “Experimental Finland.” Sipilä. said to be trained as a civil engineer. launched a flagship Finnish basic income experiment during a two-year period between January 2017 and December 2018. Under the trial, 2,000 randomly selected job seekers were offered a monthly basic income of €560. The amount corresponded to regular unemployment benefit and was provided unconditionally, without means testing. It wasn’t reduced if new job income was earned.

Because the study was set up as a randomized controlled trial (RCT), the trial’s 2,200 “treated” individuals were compared with a “non-treated” control group consisting of 178,000 regular employment seekers, who received traditional unemployment benefits.

Complications, the piece says, delayed the project’s design. The lead scientist was sociologist Olli Kangas. and the government was described as not interested in studying effects of basic income on wellbeing and health — outcomes often highlighted by proponents of universal basic income. Instead. the focus was exclusively on employment: how the basic income scheme affected participants’ tendency to apply for and land new jobs.

Scientific standards also complicated matters. To meet the highest RCT standard, Kangas decided participation would be obligatory. That meant the 2,000 randomly selected individuals weren’t “offered” a basic income; they were obligated to participate. The Finnish Constitutional Law Committee then had to find a way to circumvent Article 7 of the UN International Convention on Civil and Political Rights. which prohibits governments from performing medical and scientific experiments without free consent.

Eventually, the experiment did go ahead, performed with “impeccable scientific rigour.” But the results were “ambiguous.” Basic income’s effect on employment remained unclear, and the experiment did not inform the policy work that followed.

The moral drawn here is the one that connects back to Gillick’s critique. This could be described as “an experiment without experimentalism. ” because the experiment wasn’t allowed to serve as the basis for alternative futures. Since effects on health and wellbeing weren’t considered. the stakes were described as relatively low — and the trial wasn’t about testing basic income as a permanent feature of the welfare system. It became, instead, an experiment in experimentation, claims Finnish political scientist Mona Mannevuo. In her analysis, the primary effect was tied to RCT experimentation itself.

The piece also includes what Finnish national economists highlight: the experiment was, above all, “a real breakthrough for field experiments.”

From there, the story shifts to governance and behavior. Because the survey of citizens’ behavioral patterns is described as sophisticated. it’s said to be viewable as a milestone in what’s becoming known as “neuroliberal” governance. Neuroliberalism is framed as a continuation of neoliberalism with its own characteristics: it exploits the fact that the human subject doesn’t always act rationally. It brings together perspectives and practices from behavioral economics, behavioral science, and UX design. Rather than shaping the human subject. governing becomes modulating behaviors “gently.” Mannevuo is cited in the source material as arguing that it’s “the logic of experimentation” that enables this kind of governing.

So the decline of experimentalism is paired with the “ascension” of behavioralism.

The piece then connects that to literature and political discourse through Berman’s framing of modernity shifting from adventure to routine. In Berman’s story, the 1950s are described as a transition point. Modernist authors previously wrote the modern environment into their works. but in Albert Camus’ The Fall (1956) the modern environment is barely present. Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition goes further by presenting the modern environment as something to think against, not with.

When Arendt discusses technology, it’s said to be framed as a threat. The satellite and the supercomputer become dangers; engineering isn’t treated as Dostoevsky’s deeply human experimentalism. Arendt’s exploration of creating artifacts is overshadowed by antipathy toward Thomas Hobbes and his mechanical view of the state. The piece then says Arendt ultimately argues that Hobbes is responsible for reducing the political to a kind of engineering practice whose goal is building state institutions.

Arendt is described as formalizing a split between the creation of artifacts (work) and imaginative powers (action). Critical social theorists who distanced themselves from postwar modernism are said to have echoed this split. separating political imagination from techno-scientific remaking. the experimental way of thinking from the organizational capacity to perform experiments.

But Arendt is also said to warn about behaviorism’s treachery. She writes that behaviorists might end up being right. The problem with behaviorists isn’t only that their claim about malleability is wrong; the problem is that in the future it might be right. The text quotes Arendt: “It is quite conceivable. ” she writes. that the modern age may end in “the most sterile passivity history has ever known”.

Arendt. written in a time of “giant” computers. is said not to have imagined how “petite and pleasantly well designed” modern technology would become. But the piece suggests she also wouldn’t be surprised by black mirrors in our hands being programmed like Skinner boxes. Digitalization is framed as a form of experimentalization.

That leads to the everyday mechanics of A/B experiments. In the digital world, the piece says, people are constantly slotted into A or B groups. User experience is varied in small ways and data is produced for tech companies. It states that Google is said to run more than 10. 000 different A/B tests every year. and that the same is true for Microsoft and other tech giants — with experimentation likely increasing as automated by AI.

The article describes a paradox: social experiments with real stakes and alternative futures are missing, while other experiments multiply. Digital experiments are made of tiny. insignificant. fleeting tests that don’t leave a mark like Crystal Palace was supposed to. Yet the explosion is made possible by a new technostructure for computing power described as an exoskeleton slowly growing to encase Earth.

Then comes a cultural line attributed to Nina Björk in the source material: capitalist consumer desires were described as “shit dreams.” The piece adapts that register to the problem at hand. arguing that society has become one of “shit experiments.” It asks what people should feel when confronted with that fact: resignation is one option. Those who mourn the experimentalism of days past could sketch a “politics of decline. ” leaning on attempts to think beyond progress and radically reassess modernism’s relationship to technology and science.

But it also insists on a different possibility. Yes, the plot people watch can feel familiar — empires fall, geopolitical maps are redrawn. Yet that story is said to be disconnected from experimentalism as idea and practice. Even inside great powers in decline. the piece argues. adventure over routine remains possible. free will remains possible. and roads into the future can still be built — “wherever it may lead.”.

This article, the source material adds, was first published in Swedish journal Glänta 3-4/2026.

Ruben Östlund Play experimentalism Mark Fisher Marshall Berman modernism Crystal Palace Finland basic income trial Juha Sipilä Olli Kangas Mona Mannevuo neuroliberalism A/B testing behavioralism Glänta