As we pilot our glider from one of the many glass-paneled skyscrapers of Villedor to land on the rooftop of what strikes us as a loose rendition of Pei, Kung and Boada’s Bank of China tower in Hong Kong, we first strike down our machete in the skull of a lone zombie, quickly salvaging whatever loot we can from the unsuspecting victim.

Making our way through this action-packed adventure game, the urban landscapes that surround us are a pastiche of European aesthetics, deliberately anonymous and as interchangeable as many city centers have become. While we start out parkouring between maisonettes with a French flair, neo-Gothic brick churches reminiscent of those in Poland, and Dutch-style canals, we soon leave the downtown area and start climbing the bordering corporate glass towers.

It makes sense that video game Dying Light 21 is staging the zombie apocalypse in an architectural landscape that epitomizes what could be described as a “Third Modernity” or “Postmodern Modernity.” Here, modernist shapes reappear as empty husks of stylistic building blocks, devoid of the idea of social progress that made up the core of post-World War II era architecture. Here is where “the end of history” meets the end of the world.

Modernist in appearance with their indifferent glass facades and panel-cladding, it takes just one step into these structures for it to become clear that these are not architectures designed for human life. They are Excel sheets made of glass and steel; non-places “designed” for capital. It seems obvious why the original cover of Mark Fisher’s 21^st century “Millennial Mao bible” Capitalist Realism (2009, pictured left) featured an equally nondescript glass skyscraper, photographed looking up from a low angle, illustrating his comment that within the cultural logic of neoliberalism modernism returns as mere “frozen aesthetic style.”2

Fredric Jameson prophesied that postmodern culture “would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism”3 due to its failure to conceptualize a future worth striving towards. The various -wave, -core, -goth and -punk subgenres that make up contemporary aesthetics suggest he was right. These oversaturated, almost mythological snapshots of the past point back to a time shortly before the permanent raging presence of Dying Light 2. Art historian Valentina Tanni reflects on Fisher’s concept of hauntology, wherein he observed that “nothing really changes anymore” and that we find ourselves in a certain kind of “nostalgia for past, lost, unrealized futures,” haunted by a “burden of unfulfilled promises.”4 Whereas Fisher’s hauntology project was essentially a search for forms of artistic expression that escape the ideological constriction of neoliberal culture, refusing to give up on the desire for a future beyond postmodernity’s terminal time, we instead find ourselves in a cultural landscape characterized by an “obsession with the recent […] past.”5 The ideological background noise of this cultural stasis was coined by Zygmunt Baumann as “retrotopia” – a regressive, conservative vision of the future. Here, our yearnings are the product of a phantasmatic, mythopoetic view of bygone days. Retrotopia doesn’t promise social progress, but a return to past glory – an era before the “fall of man,” whose space in time can never be grasped fully and which is loosely associated with an absence of complexity and “Ohnmacht.”6 This is crystallized in Donald Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again,” which is similarly malleable in that it doesn’t really give a clear rendition of the past that it is aiming to return to. One could argue that this is precisely why it is so successful in acting as a collecting pond for the economically or culturally disenfranchised masses, produced by decades of neoliberalism.

It is striking how much entertainment media typically portrays our future as dystopian. Here, the apocalypse rules supreme and retrotopian futures are erected on the rubble of catastrophe: Some cataclysmic event has wiped out the complexities of modern life and left us with a blank slate to start over from. The messiness of global social struggles are replaced by the simple questions of survival and heroic individualism. In that sense, the post-apocalypse pushes the “end of history” to its literal extreme: It’s the reset button for a society trapped in a present haunted by its zombified past – the dreams of yesterday reappear again and again as empty pastiches. This process of zombification can be understood aesthetically as well as politically. The political narrative of past decades has similarly been dominated by the negation of democratic progress (austerity, privatization, etc.) as well as the call for a preservation and defense of democracy (as an empty signifier). Our present is thus both futureless and, because of that, “presentless” at once. Like a zombie, democratic society is maintained in an undead state of pure formality.

In his critique of modern history-telling, Walter Benjamin argued against an understanding of history “in which people and epochs advance along the path of progress.”7 Instead, he perceived history through the eyes of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920), incorporating it into his theory of “the angel of history,” as “a melancholy view of historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair.”8 This angel, no longer capable of heralding the bright light of God, stares at the rubble of the past “wreckage upon wreckage”9 at his feet. In Dying Light 2, we see no angel of history. Instead, we find a rumbling avatar staring at “realms of memory,” as Pierra Nora calls it,10 or: Ruins of the future’s past, of former excesses and transgressions. As the story so often goes, hubris and corporate greed have caused a global pandemic. Other games also tell this story of original sin – like Horizon Zero Dawn11 or Tom Clancy’s The Division 2.12 Their condemnation of modern progress narratives is twisted, as it offers no utopia rather than just a wormhole to archaic fantasies: Tribalism, hunting, gathering, killing – or being killed. Indeed, these games harbor no visions of progress within their ruins. On the contrary: The digital ruins in entertainment media are the answer to our lack of vision. The medial dominance of the post-apocalypse is the product of the psychological state of “reflexive impotence”13 that Fisher diagnosed for the millennial generation. They are well aware of how bad things are but also believe that they can’t do anything about it. This certainly is a deviation from the progress narrative – though probably not the one that Benjamin had in mind.

The late 1960s and 1970s saw the emergence of “critical utopias,” inspired by ecological and feminist ideas that offered self-reflective visions of better but imperfect futures. Novelists such as Ursula K. LeGuin challenged traditional utopias and called for radical social change.14 It is only when utopia, or rather, any image of an emancipatory future is no longer available to us that we fantasize about the apocalypse as a form of liberation.

Media researcher Óliver Pérez-Latorre writes that “post-apocalyptic videogames reflect certain tensions and dilemmas characteristic of contemporary society, between promoting a ‘retro-modern’ ecologist and communitarian utopia or a nostalgic urge to return to and “take refuge” in more traditional/conservative social models and lifestyles.”15 Retrotopia has become a dream forge for post-apocalyptic games like the Fallout series, whose ruin-porn imagery flirts heavily with a midcentury USA vibe. Barbara Gurr writes that “the frequent reliance of post-apocalyptic science fiction on the mythohistory of the American past reveals a cultural yearning for a collective identity of American-ness that has been only incompletely realized.”16 One of the reasons for the success of today‘s MAGA movement is that it can feed on this yearning. Moreover, a “speculative future continues to rely on and define the very shape and function of the frontier: a vast and violent place that provides apocalyptic versions of the Marlboro Man with the freedom to determine their own destinies in an unforgiving world in which everyone is at war with everyone else. Who are these brave, indomitable men? They are, of course, the cowboys.”17 The survivors in post-apocalyptic games are often white men of means. Like cowboys, they are romantic figures or – to use Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s term – “solitary walkers.”18 They are fighting and wrestling through an infested landscape. But above all, they are killing and looting from humans and zombies alike, stocking up their inventories, bartering for better weapons to kill more efficiently and eliminate more dangerous enemies, and reselling their precious spoils for higher prices.

In Dying Light 2, our avatar makes his way from safe-zone to safe-zone. Here he rests, waits out the night, trades goods, or collects quests. As zombies lurk on the streets or inside of houses, these hubs are often rooftop settlements or easily defensible buildings like churches, where the survivors form small, hierarchical societies. Rooftops, formerly reserved for the rich, are now populated by macho men in leather jackets, hoodies, and denim pants with blades dangling from their belts. Apart from three or four side characters, all inhabitants are millennials. Most of the men are bearded and look well-trained. Female residents often correspond to stereotypical ‘cool girl’ tropes, blending traditionally masculine traits with normative beauty standards. They lean casually against walls, beer in hand, or manspread on chairs in their role as “badass” yet attractive set dressing for these dens of hypermasculinity. While it is fair to say that recent years have seen many female-driven stories of dystopia, many of these women adhere to the same cowboy pattern as our male avatar. In any case, in Dying Light 2 no one steals the player’s show, who sticks out as a hard-boiled warrior with his colorful outfits and flamboyant survival gear.

In its essence, the post-apocalyptic avatar is a cowboy-entrepreneur, hoarding wealth to expand his arsenal of extraction tools. Sociologists Craig Jenkins and Teri Shumate studied ultraconservative post-war entrepreneurs in the US Sunbelt who proclaimed themselves “frontiersmen and self-made conquerors.” They called these figures “cowboy capitalists.”19

Accumulating wealth in various industries like tourism, technology, and agriculture, they stuck to a get-your-hands-dirty approach, cowboying up and ridin’ them horses across the wide-open prairie. Often excluded from elite networks at first, cowboy entrepreneurs strongly identify with the myth of the frontier – a space devoid of strong regulatory social powers and free for the taking. They see government intervention as a threat to personal freedom rooted in “self-made” success. Similarly, as Pérez-Latorre points out in their analysis of games like Fallout 4 (2015), The Last of Us (2013), and Infamous (2009), cowboy characters of the post-apocalypse “are forged into heroes by their acquisition or accentuation of certain neoliberal and patriarchal characteristics, including leadership skills, an extraordinary adaptability to changes and to the ceaseless emergence of new risks, a dominant personality and a conquering spirit, as well as the expression of power through strength and aggressiveness.”20 All of these traits hold true for most game avatars, which epitomize the notion of the lone hyper-individualist actor in a world waiting to be dominated. Particularly in the post-apocalypse, where the halls of government are no more, it’s time for the self-made cowboy capitalist and their retrotopian order.

On an idyllic overgrown terrace in one of the makeshift human settlements in Dying Light 2, where people are cultivating vegetables, there are large pumpkins reminiscent of the prototypical Puritan colonies of the 17^th century. We hear birds singing and the sounds of other animals too – but the game doesn’t render any fauna at all. Solar panels and windmills supply the local power grid. Were it not for the infested land reaching as far as the eye can see, the settlement would almost have a utopian feel to it. Dying Light 2 creates a sort of fractured Solarpunk scenario here, foiled by the retrotopian motifs of a conservative and war-driven society.

Solarpunk sticks out as the only significant punk pastiche that doesn’t dwell in fractured, speculative pasts or dystopian futures. On the Solarpunk subreddit, where most information about this genre is currently collected, it is described as an ecological and joyful narrative of the future: “Solarpunk is a genre and aesthetic that envisions collective futures that are vibrant with life, as well as all the actions, policies, and technologies that make them real: Science fiction, social movements, engineering, style, and anything else that inspires a future society that’s just and in complement with its ecology.”21

Solarpunk rejects capitalism, eco-fascism, and greenwashing, in imagining new futures in art and literature. Nurtured by Afrofuturism and indigenous, anti-imperial, and feminist literature, it challenges conventional science fiction by placing decolonization and ecology at its core. Solarpunk views nature as a category outside of the capitalist matrix. It’s an emancipatory concept in that it doesn’t just challenge capitalism on the level of critique but dares to envision an alternative.

All the post-apocalyptic retrotopian games with their hyper-individualist, heavily armed cowboy-entrepreneurs totally make sense when economic and political structures fail to equip society with agency, meaning, and a future. But we would be wrong to read these dystopian stories as critiques of capitalism. They provide a simulation of criticism at best, promoting a return to frontier-thinking, transposed into the brutal scapes of the “unavoidable” post-apocalypse. What these games do achieve is a perfect articulation of what Mark Fisher called “the aesthetic poverty that is so much a feature of late capitalist life.”22 They alienate us from visions of alternative futures that are better for the many, not the few. What we need (perhaps now more than ever) is a collective engagement in the task of imagining such alternatives. A task that will no doubt be messy, but also what’s necessary to turn that idiotic motto of capitalist realism on its head: There are alternatives. They just mustn’t include capitalism.