It is the future, and Nanofactories have brought the rest of the universe to our doorstep. Any material object can now be printed directly into our living rooms, granted we have the schema files.

This immediacy is incredibly efficient, but there is a sense we have lost some of the magic and mystery that we used to attach to things distant and rare. Historic romantic obsessions, such as Orientalism or Futurism, were powerful to people largely because the objects of desire were distant and near-unobtainable. That gap between the desire and the acquisition created a space for the imagination to fly and bloom.

That’s not to say we want to go back to such romantic fantasies, because, as we now clearly know: they were fantasies. Orientalism could be positive when it enchanted people to want to learn more about very real cultures to their East. But it was destructive when it was shared as accurate representation. At its worst, portrayed people from the Middle-East and Asia as “other” enough that Western civilians would not empathize when Western governments invaded, pillaged, enslaved, and forced opium through those same Eastern nations.

Let us never return to that world.

Futurism was different, but still tricky. Through Humanist and adjacent movements, it inspired many many people to contribute to the sciences, to engineering, and to the arts. We had taken the reigns of history from unpredictable gods, and assure ourselves that we were on track to a better future. There was indeed widespread flourishing as a result of this movement, but there were also those who became too obsessed and blinded by the fantasy of that future, that they willingly sacrificed their present world for it.

Within a few decades of the birth of the Internet – that Futurist invention which connected people across Earth – the leading technology companies ignored consent and unleashed armies of “scraper” bots to ingest all of the information and creations of the world’s population to train their new Generative Artificial Intelligence models. These companies built vast data centers to power these models, sucking up enormous percentages of global energy, water, and computation hardware in the process.

Even at the time, many people were asking who would commit to such destructive, trust-breaking, and unsustainable development. These were not idiots – far from it. It was because the Futurist fantasy they held core included building god-like super-AI panaceas which would cure all of the world’s issues. When you are bringing about God, any sacrifice is worth it. And yet again these Romantics of the Distant committed their lives to false utopian fantasies, and sacrificed the consent and rights of many real humans along the way.

So now that we can print anything, whenever we desire, does Romanticism still have a place in our world? Should it? I suppose those among you old enough might remember a time when many Nanofactory design schemas were hard to find online. That time brought a kind of romanticism. I remember spending three days searching for the schema for a Honeyball Orange tree, as I had heard they were the tastiest of oranges. For three days I looked, and convinced myself in the process that these was going to be life-changingly tasty. No other orange tree could match. I didn’t find it at the time, but years later, during the Open-Schema boom, I finally came across it. I printed it, picked, and sliced open my first Honeball Orange. And finally I tasted it. It was delicious. It really was. But I don’t know whether I can say it was life-changing in the way I had charged myself to believe. I probably wouldn’t recommend anyone else spending three days for this orange.

This is where I’m particularly intrigued by the recent “Hinted Design” movement emerging from the Avant-Garde side of the Printed Arts. One of their core philosophies centres around creating print schemas for objects which do not tell the whole story, but are designed to spark the imagination to fill out the empty space and the blanks. They often utilize moving lines, glassfreeze, and photon catchers to give a shimmering sense of a full object that could be.

I suspect that this kind of Romanticism we should continue to pursue – where we go in knowing that it is invigorating imagination at work, but also knowing that these distant fantasies are made to inspire, not to convey reality itself.