I'm going to use this post as an opportunity to post some shit I found browsing /leftypol/ and found a thread that so far isn't sectarian shit-throwing (so far). And there was a post that inspired me to double check and cross reference with the earlier graph of UK election turnouts. I'll copy-pasta the posts here up until the one that discusses a particular UK election and let it hang, or go one after.

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"The thing that initially got me into leftism, more than anything else, was a weird sense of a future lost. That sense has become much more acute as time went on - definitively, I'd say it petered out in the 1980s as the social democratic consensus collapsed, but as time has gone on the situation has only become more severe - in the 90s there were still some scarce promises for the future, or at least some vision of it via the internet, perhaps caused by the misguided euphoria of the collapse of the USSR. In the popular imagination you could see a United States of Europe, and so on. Now? Everything seems locked into the present. Sure, we've got an abundance of nostalgia, but there's little attempt to actually articulate the present in the manner we've seen from the past. Perhaps it's too awful for us to comprehend? Or perhaps simply too dull.
It's very strange. This runs through all sorts of fields, from architecture to politics to the bizarre question of what the Zeitgeist is. The sheen has even come off third-way managerialism, now there's nothing but dismay. And Trump, the human spectacle. 
So I dug back into social democracy to see how I could recover the future, and instead found that capitalism cannot be recovered. But it brings me to my primary question: Do you feel it too? The haunting resonance of futures that simply never came. (I believe this is called "hauntology") For me, I feel it most profoundly as a haunting by the 1970s. The loathed middle-child between the 60s and the 80s is the one I find myself most drawn to spend time with. It's not a deep nostalgia, or an idealisation of the period - the 1970s were miserable - yet they hang over me, the last decade before the year-zero of neoliberalism, the last decade with some vision of the future. Apollo, Concorde. Some vision of science as an engine of progress. To try and put a point on it, perhaps the longing is not for the 1970s, but for the post-1970s promised by the 1970s. Then there's our sense of time being warped - the 80s much closer to now than the 60s felt in the 80s, even though they were now much longer ago… Neoliberalism has driven all of the senses crazy. The end of history does nothing but confuse. 
(Mark Fisher's stuff really kickstarted my desire to articulate this feeling, both Capitalist Realism, his blog and Ghosts of my Life. Adam Curtis also seems to get into the same general area, that sense of lost postwar-modernism. Still, much of it goes over my head. Intrinsically I think it's linked to the style of postwar Britain, a sort of utopian, dystopian horror in the way Scarfolk parodies, but I can't see why the rest of the world shouldn't also be haunted by these lost futures.)
I'm sure I had this neatly folded into an essay question, but basically it's just a request for exposition of anything you think is vaguely related, stories, your own thoughts or whatever. I'm fascinated by it, particularly from a perspective that goes outside my own lukewarm social-democratic "roots"."

"There's some of what you talk about for me too op, but since I'm a millenial what haunts me are the 90's, not really the 90's per se, but a vague undefined time between the 90's and the early 00's, a time without broadband internet, social networks etc.
I do not wish to go into details, but my childhood and adolescence were rather dull, I think Fisher talks about it, about how the new generations don't know what it is like to be bored, things are boring, but you're never bored. My nostalgia is for a time period in which you could spend an entire afternoon playing vydia, not just without being disturbed by the outside world, but also being rather content. Again, I do not wish to go back to such a life, 90% of the time it was drudgery and boredoom, but it's strange how the memory of it continues to haunt me, now I find videogames pointless and spend my days on leftist websites and reading more leftist books that I can process, this brings me no joy or satisfaction, but I cannot stop, it is as if I know I have to absorb as much theory as possible for the harsh times ahead.
Have you read book related? It is inspired by Fisher and goes into the same themes."

"I'm familiar with the feeling of the 90s as well. (To some degree I think it's actually more tangible, as I'm also a millennial but the wonders of charity shops and grandparents mean that much of the things I was seeing in the early 2000s on VHS were from the mid-90s.) It sort of hovers around - when I'm bigger, that is, when I'm a teenager of some unclear age (Probably 17. Sony marketing executives identified it as the age everyone wants to be - 10 year olds can't wait for it and 25 year olds want to be 17 again.) then I'm going to own a Nokia 3310, play around on dial-up internet on a Toshiba Tecra running Windows 95-8, and so on. No worries that age 17 is in the increasingly distant past - I'm not bigger yet. If I was, I'd have those, have done those things. Sure, I physically own them now, but that's neither here nor there… I think on the 70s, it's perhaps rooted in the very palpable unease of the era. Hammer Horror and disaster films. Hauntology feels like such an appropriate term because there's something generally off about it - which Scarfolk nails. You could genuinely believe there were witches lurking down the road in (this "remembered" version of) the 70s. Perhaps it's partially linked to early consumerism. The Uncanny valley. This is modern society, this is not quite modern society. 
The vidya point is quite interesting. It is a perverse situation, that now one has access to nearly the entire library of everything up to about the PS2 for free, but in turn finds each game less enjoyable and has less to play when constrained to perhaps 20-30 games at home. These are more difficult to relate to politically, though. Weirdly, what I associate with the late 90s technologically is the mid-90s - the early world wide web is that of John Smith or perhaps even of Election 92*, that conspicuous absence from most official histories - not Tony Blair. Talk about futures lost…
I've not read the book, I'm currently working through When the lights went out, a history of Britain in the seventies. I will look into it though. (Vaporwave has always slightly fascinated me, since at once it seems to be ironic and completely comprehensible as a thing about consumerism. Like vodka, consumable both straight or with the awkward burning sensation dulled by a coca cola logo.) 
*There's something fascinating about that actually - the introduction, etc, seem so totally set up for a Labour government. Give it a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QY8MxR1yRnE It's the first election of a new decade a very shiny looking set… and then John Major wins. Bang. Every time I watch it, it never fails to excite - the same is true of all of them (I think it's the tune) but underlying election 92 there's a constant feeling that somehow, somewhere This time Kinnock will win or the SNP will have their breakthrough and be Free by 93 - but never. Nope. We live in the John Major world. I've heard it hypothesised, though I forget the source, that this moment was so depressing that it explains why people like Cameron and Miliband got ahead - the true political talent in waiting of their age just plain gave up on politics, so we're stuck with the wonks who kept at it. I'm sure particularly of Miliband/Balls (though it could've been Cameron, who was helping the Tories in election 92.) someone said "They are of their generation, but not representative of their generation" or something to that extent."

[url=https://media.8ch.net/file_store/833a3f0429e51c81928d74d55d8694aff14d9049db528b1e0fe2c720430a9aaf.webm/Adam%20Curtis%20-%20Change%20(Cha%E2%80%A6.webm][This WEBM was posted in conjunction with the following post][/url]
">Sure, we've got an abundance of nostalgia, but there's little attempt to actually articulate the present in the manner we've seen from the past. Perhaps it's too awful for us to comprehend? Or perhaps simply too dull.
You mentioned Adam Curtis. He hypothesizes that we lack the kind of Absolute Idea that drove history, so it's a case of plus ça change, plus ça meme chose, you know? sniffs, rubs nose History hasn't ended, we're just in a weird cultural period where neoliberal Capital promised us a bright future if we defeated "communism" yet undermines it at every turn while selling us back its image. From the US to Russia we can find a latent psychosis and alienation that seems inescapable without drugging yourself literally or metaphorically by drinking various brands of [s]Kool Aid[/s] ideology. But much of it is an illusion. Negating current social relations remains possible, the difficulty is realizing that and keeping your head together, because it seems so unlikely.
Trump is just a US Berlusconi btw. Zizek had him figured out long ago."

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This thread is spooky as fuck, and not in a Stirner way either
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