By Dr. Elena Marchetti, Cultural Historian
In the lexicon of classical music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, often at the same pitch. It is relentless, hypnotic, and sometimes maddening. The word destino —destiny—implies a predetermined end, a final chord toward which all narratives inexorably move.
The 1990s gave us Groundhog Day (1993)—a film about living the same day forever. By the 2020s, we got Don't Look Up (2021), a film about watching the asteroid hit while scrolling past it. The protagonist of modern life is not a hero; it is a user scrolling through a feed of infinite tragedies, pausing only to like a recipe for sourdough.
In the 1980s, apocalypse was a movie ( The Day After , Threads ). It had a beginning, a middle, and a radioactive end. In the era of Ostinato Destino, apocalypse is a screensaver.
But meditations require stillness. And there is nothing still about 2024.
The 1992- era is a failure of the cadenza. We have had thirty years of warnings. The Rio Summit was thirty years ago. The Kyoto Protocol (1997) was supposed to be the fix. The Paris Agreement (2015) was supposed to be the fix. Each time, the orchestra plays the same rhythm: deny, delay, deflect, repeat .
But here is the terror of the Ostinato: the only reliable way to break a musical loop is to stop playing. Silence. In historical terms, silence is extinction-level collapse or totalitarian enforced peace.
Consider the summer of 2024: Floods in the Sahara. Fires in the Arctic. A sitting U.S. president drops out of a race. Assassination attempts livestreamed. Wars expanding in the Middle East and Eastern Europe simultaneously. And yet, the S&P 500 is up. Taylor Swift is on tour. The algorithm serves you a reel of a dancing dog between a missile strike and a heat death graph.