I’ve written a few blog posts lately discussing the aesthetic of cyberpunk media. In particular I’ve written about cyberpunk as an expression of late 20th century tensions between individual freedom of expression and progressive technological utopianism. But where did these tensions come from in the first place?
This question was on my mind when I read a blog post about the Olympics by Signore Galilei. Big events often express aesthetic values in their design choices, and the Olympics is no exception. Aside from individual design choices that vary between each event, there is also an overall background feel to the olympic games. A feel I would describe as a “post-war, cosmopolitan, monumentalism”. (though these days I think that aesthetic often gets simplified to something more like a “preppy, sporty, internationalism”).
I think of “prep” as the stylistic opposite of “punk”: a “prep” style normally expresses something safe and traditionalist. The sport of modern pentathlon is an example of this style expressed in the contemporary Olympic games (at least until they implement the official plan to replace horse-riding with ninja-warrior style obstacle courses - no, seriously). Reading Signore Galilei’s blog post reminded me that the Olympics come from a time that predates these styles, and has its roots in something bolder and more daring. It’s the same aesthetic you see expressed in the architecture of UN buildings, in the design of Great Exhibitions, and in the writings of golden age sci-fi authors like Isaac Asimov.
The aesthetic is certainly linked to substantive ideologies like high modernism and cosmopolitanism, but there seemed to be something especially worth characterising in its distinct surface-level vibe and feel. I spoke to a few people about the lack of a name for this, and eventually Signore Galilei suggested one: “Peacecore”.
You can read Signore Galilei’s blog post characterising that aesthetic here. This post is about where peacecore came from, and where it went.
Roots of the peacecore aesthetic
I think the best place to start is the 1851 Great Exhibition. The Great Exhibition was a first of its kind international trade fair hosted in London. Unlike the niche conferences and trade fairs of today, its scope was outrageously broad: covering any kind of technology or trade from any country on earth. There had been other trade fairs hosted Europe before it, however these were mostly limited to showcasing the industrial outputs of just one country. What makes the Great Exhibition (and the events which followed it) unique is that it had a stated aim to celebrate the industrial and technological outputs of all mankind.
South Kensington, the site of the Great Exhibition remains one of the most developed parts of west London today.
Over 6 million people visited the 1851 Great Exhibition. There were over 13,000 exhibits on display. In order to run the event of this size, architects, engineers and labourers had to be brought together to build huge new structures to house it all. All this construction needed a design language to guide it, a design language whose choices would eternally become associated with the feelings surrounding the event. And the message of that language was unambiguous: this is the end of the era of poverty and wars, and the start of the era of technological progress and unity.
Not everyone was on board with this message. The London of 1851 was also the London of Karl Marx, Marx having recently been exiled there from Germany, along with dozens of revolutionary agitators from all over mainland Europe. As a result, the Exhibition was as much an experiment in event security as it was an experiment in event planning. You can see this for example, in the letters exchanged between police colonels in the run up to the exhibition. In one of the letters I found, you can see them debating what level of force is appropriate to use to manage rowdy crowds, without undermining the emerging peacecore zeitgeist.
It is also no coincidence that the Great Exhibition almost immediately follows the year of revolutions that ran from 1848 to 1849. In fact, those revolutions seem to have been a part of what motivated Prince Albert to lend the Exhibition his support - in order to avoid unrest spilling over to the streets of London, a new, positive vision had to be offered to the world.
This move wasn’t without risk. Anyone with doubts about the ardour of working conditions in Victorian London only needs to read Charles Dickens. Because of this, it was speculated at the time that something as bold and lavish as the Great Exhibition would only serve as a flashpoint for brewing unrest. For example King Ernest of Hannover wrote:
The folly and absurdity of the Queen in allowing this trumpery must strike every sensible and well-thinking mind, and I am astonished the ministers themselves do not insist on her [spending the whole period safe in on the remote Isle of Wight], as no human being can possibly answer for what may occur on the occasion.
Prince Albert and the rest of the organisers of the Exhibition had other ideas. In their minds the Great Exhibition would serve to justify the gritty life of Victorian cities, by providing an optimism for the new future which was being built, again: one of prosperity and peace. It would also firmly put the Napoleonic wars in the past, with a promise to never repeat such atrocities again.
You can see this in Prince Albert’s speeches at the opening of the exhibition:
Firstly, the optimism that progress will lead to increased unity among humanity:
Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of our present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to the accomplishment that great end to which, indeed, all history points — the realisation of the unity of mankind.
Secondly, the idea that human industry should be directed toward bringing about more of this progress:
I conceive it to be the duty of every educated person closely to watch and study the time in which he lives, and, as far as in him lies, to add his humble mite of individual exertion to further the accomplishment of what he believes Providence to have ordained.
And then, both ideas explicitly linked together in his Mansion House address earlier the same year:
Gentlemen — the Exhibition of 1851 is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions. I confidently hope that … the second [impression] … the conviction that they can only be realised in proportion to the help which we are prepared to render each other; therefore, only by peace, love, and ready assistance, not only between individuals, but between the nations of the earth.
In another blog post I’ve written about Kant’s essay on perpetual peace, I touch a bit on how the roots of these ideas themselves go back to the late Enlightenment. The difference in Prince Albert’s speech is that industry and technological progress have been elevated to play a crucial role in delivering material wealth to accompany the cosmopolitan peace promised by the application of Kantian moral reasoning.
The Great Exhibition was an overwhelming success, and its aesthetics made their way into the League of Nations via the Peace Conferences of the late Victorian era, and into the Olympics via sporting unions of England's industrial cities. The Crystal Palace itself became a symbol for the triumph of human reason displayed in the industrial revolution, to be celebrated in Chernechevsky’s utopian dreams in What is to be done?. Dostoyevsky’s response to these dreams in Notes from Underground, would also foreshadow the aesthetic’s later fall.
Peak peacecore
In 1951, exactly 100 years after the Great Exhibition, the soviet space program was started. A few years later, Sputnik’s spaceborne beeps would “thrill and terrify” FM radio listeners around the world. The promised perpetual peace did not follow the Great Exhibition, instead two deadly wars did. And while revolution would not reach the streets of London, it was well underway dismantling the colonies of the British Empire - the labour and natural resources of which had helped make the Great Exhibition possible.
The terrors of modern warfare, and the dropping of the atomic bomb would also make it difficult to have the same easy optimism about the peacemaking forces of technological progress expressed in Prince Albert’s 1851 speeches. Sputnik was not just a symbol of human achievement, it was also a symbol of new ways for your adversaries to gather intelligence and drop bombs. In a piece of absurd and effective voice acting which still haunts me to this day, Leonard Nimoy, portrays the satellite with four consecutive beeps: first as innocent, then bold, then frightening.
And yet, while its scaffolding ideologies were being pulled apart, aesthetically, peacecore was reaching its peak. Perhaps it provided a natural language for the period of rebuilding which followed the second world war, or perhaps it served as a convenient and unobjectionable common ground with which international organisations like UNESCO and the Olympics could paper over cold-war era ideological differences. Capitalist or Communist - a vision of unity and technological progress for all mankind remains a broadly acceptable, if not actively good, form of PR.
These same stories form the backbone for the golden age of science fiction, with a utopian future for humanity being prophesied that was essentially a modernised version of the vision that ran from the late enlightenment through to the Crystal Palace, but with one further twist. Kant’s 18th century vision was one where perpetual peace and prosperity were provided by human reason. Prince Albert’s 19th century vision was one where peace came from reason, but prosperity came from technology. The 20th century vision would be one where both peace and prosperity might be provided entirely by technology. One influential example - Asimov’s The Evitable Conflict demonstrates this shift especially well:
In the twentieth century, Susan, we started a new cycle of wars -- what shall I call them? Ideological wars? The emotions of religion applied to economic systems, rather than to extra-natural ones? Again the wars were ‘inevitable’ and this time there were atomic weapons, so that mankind could no longer live through its torment to the inevitable wasting away of inevitability. -- And positronic robots came. “They came in time, and, with it and alongside it, interplanetary travel. -- So that it no longer seemed so important whether the world was Adam Smith or Karl Marx.
Neither made very much sense under the new circumstances. Both had to adapt and they ended in almost the same place.” “A deus ex machina, then, in a double sense,” said Dr. Calvin, dryly. The Co-ordinator smiled gently,
“I have never heard you pun before, Susan, but you are correct. And yet there was another danger. The ending of every other problem had merely given birth to another. Our new worldwide robot economy may develop its own problems, and for that reason we have the Machines. The Earth’s economy is stable, and will remain stable, because it is based upon the decisions of calculating machines that have the good of humanity at heart through the overwhelming force of the First Law of Robotics.” Stephen Byerley continued, “And although the Machines are nothing but the vastest conglomeration of calculating circuits ever invented, they are still robots within the meaning of the First Law, and so our Earth-wide economy is in accord with the best interests of Man. The population of Earth knows that there will be no unemployment, no over-production or shortages. Waste and famine are words in history books. And so the question of ownership of the means of production becomes obsolescent. Whoever owned them (if such a phrase has meaning), a man, a group, a nation, or all mankind, they could be utilized only as the Machines directed. -- Not because men were forced to but because it was the wisest course and men knew it. “It puts an end to war -- not only to the last cycle of wars, but to the next and to all of them.
Unless-” A long pause, and Dr. Calvin encouraged him by repetition. “Unless-” The fire crouched and skittered along a log, then popped up. “Unless,” said the Co-ordinator, “the Machines don’t fulfill their function.”
With the substantive improvements in US-USSR relations which followed the end of the Vietnam War, truly internationalist technological projects would become more than works of fiction. Two notable examples are the internet and the international space station. These projects would once more require a design language for their implementation, and peacecore was a natural choice. In a 1975 mission which laid the groundwork for the ISS the Apollo and Soyuz programmes would conduct the first “handshake” between two spacecraft, depicted by Alexei Leonov in his work “Apollo-Soyuz Docking”
It’s at this point that the use of globes, circles and spheres in peacecore visuals really takes off, cementing the pattern started by the Olympic rings. I wonder how much of it comes from space-age photographs of earth from space - and the lonely sense they brought that floating out in the cold of space, humans have much more in common with each other, than with uncaring universe that stretches out beyond the outer atmosphere.
Circles also feature prominently in the logistical-diplomatic design language of UN meeting rooms - presumably out of a distaste for any seat that appears prominently as the "head" of the gathering... a tradition going back to the round tables of Arthurian legend.
Finally, the rise of the world wide web would yank these motifs of clean lines, flags and spheres into the internet-age iconography that exemplifies late-peacecore work.
The decline
As Signore Galeili describes, near-peacecore aesthetics live on in a few places - though those examples also go to show that much of its artistic expression has also been co-opted into nationalist movements. Similarly World Fairs and Great Exhibitions continue to take place but as the historian Tjaco Walvis observes, they've increasingly lost their message of international unity, leaving only a thin veneer of jet-setting cosmopolitanism on top of a core of individual national branding. They have also faded into irrelevance. There was a 2025 world expo this year - had you heard about it?
The international space station itself is set to be decommissioned soon. The bulk of its mass will be "deorbited" into the pacific ocean, while other parts of it will be recycled into projects run by national space programmes and a few regional coalitions. If this goes ahead, it'll be a fitting end to what was perhaps peacecore's greatest monument.
I’m conflicted about whether we should find the decline of peacecore surprising. On the one hand, the conflict of the 20th century makes it clear that the techno-utopian ideologies which spawned peacecore had overplayed their position. On the other hand, it is not clear to me whether an aesthetic like this could have been so thoroughly dismantled as it seems to have been by simply showing that it is inaccurate. Peacecore is not an artistic statement about how the world is but an artistic statement about how the world could be. Showing that the world does not live up to a set of ideals rarely destroys those ideals, if anything it just serves as part of their call to action.
The kind of aesthetic critique that was required then was one which would show that peacecore was not just false, but hypocritical, naive, or perhaps even fundamentally barbaric. All three of these attacks were levelled as part of the broader critique of modernism we see in writers such as Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. In his prescience, Dostoyevsky was also levelling critiques along these same lines at the 1850s optimism surrounding The Great Exhibition. As Jenn, of the blog JenneralHQ pointed out to me, Notes From Underground has remained core to the cultural zeitgeist, while memories of Chernyshevsky and even the 1951 Crystal Palace itself have faded away into footnotes for its introduction.
I think the reason why these critiques were so disastrous is that 19th century foundations on which 20th century peacecore was built were shaky at best. While, perhaps in a preemptive response to Marx, a great effort was made to make the Great Exhibition accessible to people across social classes, even as Prince Albert's speeches were being made arms dealers and colonial trading companies were setting up exhibits of new techniques for building cannons and new loot brought home from colonies. In the end, this superficial attempt to replace war with industry resulted instead in a new form of hyper-industrialised war, and by the time Asimov was writing the Evitable Conflict, he had evidently lost so much faith that human reason could avoid conflict, that the international peace he imagines is one implemented by machine reason at the expense of human empowerment.
Alongside this all was a valid worry that in the name of peace, human individuality was being subsumed into the one cold grey blob of modernity. It turned out that peacecore's tolerance for a diversity of cultures and views lasted only so long as they confine themselves harmlessly to their allotted booths in the exhibition, and didn't ask too many difficult questions about how the workers who built the Crystal Palace were treated.
And so peacecore lost its charm. It remains alive in its preppy form in a few places today (the lounges of international airports, the pages of Monocle Magazine) catering to ambivalent, jet-setting travellers. I personally also think there is a lot to love in the ruins that peacecore has left behind. Perhaps fittingly, the Crystal Palace itself burnt down long ago, but the World Expos which followed it left us The Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, and the Atomium in Brussels. I think these monuments serve to remind us that there was something substantive which peacecore was striving towards. The very fact they were constructed at all reminds us of an optimism that was once possible.
Maybe instead of being allowed to crash into the ocean the ISS should be brought down into the desert, so that people can go visit it to remind themselves that a project like that was once possible too.
If I were to characterise peacecore's fundamental flaw, its that it was a kind of inverse kayfabe. In professional wrestling, kayfabe is the term for the staged and scripted displays of violence which keep the audience riled up and exited about the main event. Peacecore is inverse-kayfabe in the sense that it was being used to paper over the violence of the 20th century, by organising staged and scripted displays of peace.
If this was its flaw, then the fault with peacecore is not with the concepts of peace or technological utopianism themselves, but with the way those concepts were being used to borrow glory from an unbuilt future, to pay the debts of an unjust present. The Great Exhibition was beautiful, but it was also a tool to repress a brewing revolution, rather than engage with the tensions which made that revolution possible. Perhaps, eventually, it will be possible to do both.
And so, to the extent that we can hope that someday a version of its design language can be deployed in good faith, we might say that peacecore has often been the aesthetic we needed, but has not yet been the one we deserve.
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