Great essay! But I can't not link to my essay where I preemptively disagreed with you four years ago :) hopefulmons.com/p/retro…

I think this paragraph captures what I was trying to say:

> Trying not to remix creates boring art. The reason is that you’ll remix things anyway, but you won’t be intentional about it. So you’ll just use whatever is most immediate to your mind: clichés and scenes from your daily life. And so we get the equation again: your vision of the future is the present (because that’s what you’re familiar with) minus the past (because you are not remixing!), plus some cliché futuristic tech, like flying cars.

I definitely agree that we'll discover new aesthetics of progress and it's worth having people work on this problem, but trying to *avoid* retrofuturism is a mistake, I suspect.