Related: "hauntology"
Mark Fisher didn't create this word, but he wrote a lot in the 2000s about our inability to imagine a new future after the failure of our previous visions.
Using electronic music - a "future-looking" genre - as an example, he wrote (second paragraph explains it more generally):
"...Twenty-first-century electronic music had failed to progress beyond what had been recorded in the twentieth century: practically anything produced in the 2000s could have been recorded in the
1990s. Electronic music had succumbed to its own inertia and retrospection. It was also clear that this was more than a moment in a familiar pattern, in which, as one genre wanes, another emerges to take its place at the leading edge of innovation. There was no leading edge of innovation any more. In music, as elsewhere in culture, we were living, in Franco Berardi’s suggestive phrase, after the future.
...
What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the twentieth century taught us to anticipate. The futures that have been lost were more than a matter of musical style. More broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of a situation in which culture would continue without really changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration of an already established (capitalist) system. In other words, we were in the "end of history" described by Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama’s thesis was the other side of Fredric Jameson’s claim that postmodernism — characterized by its inability to find forms adequate to the present, still less to anticipate wholly new futures — was the "cultural logic of late capitalism.""
I don't know if I completely buy it or if it was Mark's (and other's) inability to cope with their ideals for the future not panning out. But it is interesting to think about, and I do see glimpses of it in most art forms. I don't know enough history to know how common this repetition of, and nostalgia for, the past is though. Perhaps a flurry of imaginings of a "new future" was the anomaly.