In May 2026 we held the first Collective Scroll session in Berlin. Collective Scroll is a Mudmap format dedicated to exploring specific corners of the internet together. Each session starts from a phenomenon, a subculture or a particular visual ecosystem and works its way into it through live browsing. The route is not fully decided in advance: there is a starting point and a frame, but the images, accounts and connections that come up during the scroll determine where the session goes next.
For the first edition we chose Tartaria, an unusually expansive conspiracy theory. Working from old maps, photographs, buildings, world’s fairs and other historical fragments, its followers reconstruct the existence of an advanced civilization that was supposedly erased from history. Depending on the version, you find lost technologies, covered-up catastrophes, giants, and architecture whose real origin has been hidden.
During the scroll we moved between Instagram and TikTok. On Instagram we found more polished accounts with archival ambitions; on TikTok what dominated were videos of people walking through cities like New York, Chicago, Lima or Berlin and pointing at buildings as supposed historical anomalies. @bigtmims718, one of the creators who came up during the session, ends his videos with a recurring line: «Make it make sense.» The architecture is presented as something that can no longer be explained by the history we know.
As we went through this material, someone remarked on the sheer amount of imagination behind all of it. Not only imagination, but also time and a capacity for making connections: a photograph led to a map, the map to a building, the building to another theory. The conversation started drifting away from Tartaria.
At some point a familiar line came up: «It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.»
Someone said Mark Fisher. Someone else remembered that the line was older than that. The conversation took a short detour through Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek. We did not settle much at the time. That was not the point either. The line had introduced another question into the room: what was happening with all that imagination we had just found?
A weakness in our imaginations
The phrase has become almost a cliché of contemporary cultural criticism, but the problem it tries to describe is still relevant.
In The Seeds of Time, published in 1994, Fredric Jameson observed that it seemed easier to imagine the complete deterioration of the Earth than the collapse of late capitalism. Perhaps, he wrote, this was due to «some weakness in our imaginations.»
Years later, Jameson returned to a similar difficulty when writing about our growing inability to imagine a different future. For him, the function of utopia does not necessarily lie in handing us a precise design for a future society. It can also lie in simply opening up the possibility of a rupture: allowing us to think that things could be organized otherwise.
Mark Fisher took up this problem at the beginning of Capitalist Realism. For Fisher, capitalism had come to occupy the horizon of the possible so thoroughly that it was difficult even to imagine a coherent alternative. The point was not whether capitalism seemed good or bad, but something deeper: a widespread sense that there was nothing else.
Fisher connected this closure to a broader cultural and political exhaustion. The present could produce novelty constantly and yet it remained strangely difficult to imagine anything genuinely different. But there was something odd about thinking in terms of exhaustion after what we had just been looking at. If anything was abundant in Tartaria, it was imagination.
An enormous imagination directed at the past
Historical Tartary did exist, though not as the advanced, erased civilization the contemporary conspiracy describes. For centuries, European sources used names like Tartary or Tartaria to loosely designate vast territories of Asia they knew little about. The conspiracy takes that historical name and builds something else around it.
In that account, many buildings we know were not built by the societies they are normally attributed to. The world’s fairs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are especially fertile ground for this imaginary. Their monumental buildings are reinterpreted as the remains of an earlier civilization. The same happens with other technically ambitious constructions. Architecture becomes evidence: something this extraordinary could not have been built by the people we think built it.
Many of these buildings belong precisely to an era obsessed with progress. World’s fairs were large stages where industrial societies displayed new technologies, architectures and ways of living. Whatever was problematic about those ideas of progress, and there was plenty, those spaces were explicitly oriented toward a demonstration of possibility: look at what we can build, look at what we will be able to do.
Tartaria looks at some of those same images and makes the opposite move, concluding that there is no way we could have built this. When this relationship surfaced during Collective Scroll, Tartaria started to look like a kind of mirror.
An inverted utopia
The fit is not exact, but the inversion is fairly symmetrical. Utopian imagination projects into the future something that does not yet exist. It can be a city, a technology, a form of social organization or a different way of living together. It does not matter here whether those projects turn out to be feasible, desirable or even terrible from where we stand. What matters is the movement: imagining a different reality collectively and placing it ahead of us.
Tartaria also imagines a radically different reality. It imagines another civilization, other technologies, another architecture and another history. But it places it behind us, so that the future becomes the past.
And there is a second inversion. Utopia can work as an affirmation of collective capacity: we could build this. Tartaria takes some of the most spectacular historical monuments to that capacity and arrives at the opposite conclusion, so that collective capacity becomes collective incapacity. Much of this material never gets around to explaining who actually built those buildings. Sometimes giants appear, an earlier race, distinct from ours. Other times it is enough to repeat that the technology of the period could not have managed it. A full explanation is not required. What the account needs is to empty the people who were there of any agency.
There is a third similarity, less obvious, and it has to do with form. Tartaria’s imagination is nobody’s work in particular. One account finds a photograph, another connects it to an old map, another films a building in Lima or Chicago and folds it into the same account. Each contribution stays available for the next one. The result is an imaginary that none of its participants designed in full and that all of them recognize. World’s fairs worked in a comparable way: thousands of people building, funding, visiting and arguing over an imaginary of the future that no one held whole in their head. What shows up in Tartaria is not just a comparable quantity of imagination. It is also the same way of producing it, spread across many people and accumulating over time.
This is why it can be useful to think of Tartaria as an inverted utopia. Not because the people taking part in Tartaria are trying to formulate a utopian project, and not because a conspiracy is simply a utopia pointed the wrong way. The relationship is simpler than that: both mobilize an enormous collective capacity to imagine a different world, but they organize it in opposite directions. One projects possibility forward. The other finds that possibility in a lost past.
Exhaustion or direction?
So let us return to Jameson’s problem. If there is a weakness in our capacity to imagine a different future, Tartaria introduces a curious complication. The imagination required to build alternative worlds does not appear to have disappeared. It can produce entire civilizations, technologies that never existed, giants, catastrophes, secret genealogies and connections between objects separated by centuries and continents. What shows up is an excess of imagination, and what stands out is its direction.
None of this necessarily contradicts Fisher’s diagnosis either. If the present makes it increasingly difficult to imagine a future alternative, it is possible that part of that imaginative energy finds other places to operate. We do not need to assume it disappears simply because it fails to project itself forward. It can turn toward the past. And from there it can build an alternative world as complex as any imagined future.
The fuel has not run out
During that first Collective Scroll session we did not reach this idea through an orderly discussion. It came out of a fairly chaotic conversation: someone looking at an image, someone else making an association, someone recalling a line, someone else correcting its authorship, and the conversation gradually shifting from conspiracy theories toward imagination and utopia.
Collective Scroll started as a very simple experiment: taking an activity that is normally individual, scrolling a feed, and turning it temporarily into a collective one. Several people receive the same images, but each one makes different connections. One observation immediately becomes material for the next.
The idea of Tartaria as an inverted utopia appeared that way, between the images rather than in any one of them, and it was not the argument the session started with. Perhaps the most interesting conclusion from that conversation is also the simplest one. If we can still pour enormous amounts of imagination into building lost worlds, perhaps the utopian fuel has not run dry after all. The challenge is where to direct it.