Some background: If you’re plugged into the discourse in Silicon Valley, you’ll know that it’s currently in the grip of an obsession with words like “taste” and “beauty”. The fintech billionaire Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen recently ran an open call offering grants of up to $250,000 for people working on “new aesthetics for the 21st century.” Meanwhile the Peter Thiel-backed Praxis, which calls itself “the world’s first digital nation”, is attempting to build a physical city in Uruguay that its founder describes as a “fusion of Gothic elements and space-age futurism.” Last summer, within the space of a month, the Trump Administration unveiled its AI Action Plan, titled “Winning the Race”, and issued an executive order stating that all new federal architecture should be built in classical and traditional styles. I have been interested in the entanglement of progress and nostalgia, novelty and tradition, for a long time, and these developments have fascinated me. I couldn’t work out how to give that interest a tangible form, but I decided that I wanted to start by making something for the tech community that shows how their concerns are part of a much longer history of Western modernity. That desire became this film, which chronicles how these tensions have played out in architecture and design, from the mid-nineteenth century up to the present day. I made it very quickly, in four days, with Opus and dozens of rounds of edits, but I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.