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So, my cellmate Claire was this forty-something career lobbyist who used to be my boss inside the Beltway. Claire was full of horror stories about the cruelty of the socialist regime. Because, in the old days before we got ourselves arrested, alarmist tales of this kind were Claire's day-job. Claire peddled political spin to the LameStream Media to make sure that corporations stayed in command, so that situations like our present world stayed impossible.

Claire and I hated the sharing networks, because we were paid to hate them. We hated all social networks, like Facebook, because they destroyed the media that we owned. We certainly hated free software, because it was like some ever-growing anti-commercial fungus. We hated search engines and network aggregators, people like Google -- not because Google was evil, but because they weren't. We really hated "file-sharers" -- the swarming pirates who were chewing up the wealth of our commercial sponsors.

We despised green power networks because climate change was a myth. Until the climate actually changed. Then the honchos who paid us started drinking themselves to death.

This prison game was diabolical. It was very entertaining, and compulsively playable. This game had been designed by left-wing interaction designers, the kind of creeps who built not-for-profit empires like Wikipedia. Except they'd designed it for losers like us. Everybody in rehab had to role-play. We had to build ourselves another identity, because this new pretend-identity was supposed to help us escape the stifling spiritual limits of our previous, unliberated, greedy individualist identities. In this game, I played an evil dwarf. With an axe. Which would have been okay, because that identity was pretty much me all along. Except that the game's reward system had been jiggered to reward elaborate acts of social collaboration. Of course we wanted to do raids and looting and cool fantasy fighting, but that wasn't on. We were very firmly judged on the way we played this rehab game. It was never about grabbing the gold. It was all about forming trust coalitions so as to collectively readjust our fantasy infrastructure.

Jean Paul Sartre (who was still under copyright, so I reckon they stole his work). I learned some things from him. That changed me. "Hell is other people." That is the sinister side of a social-software shared society: that people suck, that hell is other people. Sharing with people is hell. When you share, then no matter how much money you have, they just won't leave you alone. I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre to the parole board. A very serious left-wing philosopher: lots of girlfriends (even feminists), he ate speed all the time, he hung out with Maoists. Except for the Maoist part, Jean-Paul Sartre is my guru. My life today is all about my Existential authenticity. Because I'm a dissident in this society.

These Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability geeks were maybe seven percent of America's population. But the termite people had seized power. They were the Last Best Hope of a society on the skids. They owned all the hope because they had always been the ones who knew our civilization was hopeless. So, I was in their prison until I got my head around that new reality. Until I realized that this was inevitable. That it was the way forward. That I loved Little Brother. After that, I could go walkies.

I learned to sit still and read a lot. Because that looks like innocent behavior.

they were scanning us all the time. Nobody ever gets it about the tremendous power of network surveillance. That's how they ruled the world, though: by valuing every interaction, by counting every click. Every time one termite touched the feelers of another termite, they were adding that up. In a database. Everybody was broke: extremely poor, like preindustrial hard-scrabble poor, very modest, very "green." But still surviving. The one reason we weren't all chewing each other's cannibal thighbones (like the people on certain more disadvantaged continents), was because they'd stapled together this survival regime out of socialist software. It was very social. Ultra-social. No "privatization," no "private sector," and no "privacy." They pretended that it was all about happiness and kindliness and free-spirited cooperation and gay rainbow banners and all that. It was really a system that was firmly based on "social capital." Everything social was your only wealth. In a real "gift economy," you were the gift. You were living by your karma. Instead of a good old hundred-dollar bill, you just had a virtual facebooky thing with your own smiling picture on it, and that picture meant "Please Invest in the Bank of Me!"

social networks versus bandit mafias is like Ninjas Versus Pirates: it's a counterculture fight to the finish

the European Red Cross happened to show up during that episode (because they like gunfire). The Europeans are all prissy about the situation, of course. They are like: "What's with these illegal detainees in orange jumpsuits, and how come they don’'t have proper medical care?" So, I finally get paroled. I get amnestied.

in a network society, the power is ALL personal. "The personal is political." You mess with the tender feelings of a network maven, and she's not an objective bureaucrat following the rule of law. She's more like: "To the Bastille with this subhuman irritation!"

like "Heavy Weather" with a post-technology green catastrophe thrown in

wasting my time

"I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine."

The Machine is much, but it is not everything. I see something like you in this plate, but I do not see you. I hear something like you through this telephone, but I do not hear you

the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people - an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit.

"It is contrary to the spirit of the age," she asserted. "Do you mean by that, contrary to the Machine?"

The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no advantage. The surface of the earth is only dust and mud, no life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air

For a moment Vashti felt lonely. Then she generated the light, and the sight of her room, flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons, revived her. There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

To most of these questions she replied with irritation - a growing quality in that accelerated age

Her lecture, which lasted ten minutes

Vashti was seized with the terrors of direct experience

I will not tell you through the Machine

thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.

her horror of direct experience returned. It was not quite like the air-ship in the cinematophote. For one thing it smelt - not strongly or unpleasantly, but it did smell, and with her eyes shut she should have known that a new thing was close to her.

The man in front dropped his Book - no great matter, but it disquieted them all

they seemed intolerable

When the air-ships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights and windows, and the proportionate discomfort to those who were civilized and refined

illegal, unmechanical, and punishable by Homelessness

People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine

"Cover the window, please. These mountains give me no ideas."

She might well declare that the visit was superfluous. The buttons, the knobs, the reading-desk with the Book, the temperature, the atmosphere, the illumination - all were exactly the same. And if Kuno himself, flesh of her flesh, stood close beside her at last, what profit was there in that? She was too well-bred to shake him by the hand.

"You think it irreligious of me to have found out a way of my own. It was just what the Committee thought, when they threatened me with Homelessness." At this she grew angry. "I worship nothing!" she cried. "I am most advanced. I don"t think you irreligious, for there is no such thing as religion left. All the fear and the superstition that existed once have been destroyed by the Machine. I only meant that to find out a way of your own was----Besides, there is no new way out." "So it is always supposed." "Except through the vomitories, for which one must have an Egression-permit, it is impossible to get out. The Book says so." "Well, the Book"s wrong, for I have been out on my feet."

Each infant was examined at birth, and all who promised undue strength were destroyed. Humanitarians may protest, but it would have been no true kindness to let an athlete live; he would never have been happy in that state of life to which the Machine had called him

Man is the measure. That was my first lesson. Man"s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong

all the food-tubes and medicine-tubes and music- tubes that the Machine has evolved lately

Kuno had lately asked to be a father, and his request had been refused by the Committee. His was not a type that the Machine desired to hand on

I felt, for the first time, that a protest had been lodged against corruption, and that even as the dead were comforting me, so I was comforting the unborn. I felt that humanity existed, and that it existed without clothes. How can I possibly explain this? It was naked, humanity seemed naked, and all these tubes and buttons and machineries neither came into the world with us, nor will they follow us out, nor do they matter supremely while we are here

There was not room for such a person in the world. And with her pity disgust mingled. She was ashamed at having borne such a son, she who had always been so respectable and so full of ideas

Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now

I fought till the very end

Beware of first- hand ideas!" exclaimed one of the most advanced of them. "First-hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by live and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element - direct observation

in theory the Machine was still the creation and the implement of man. but in practice all, save a few retrogrades, worshipped it as divine

No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence

Time passed, and they resented the defects no longer. The defects had not been remedied, but the human tissues in that latter day had become so subservient, that they readily adapted themselves to every caprice of the Machine

mankind was not yet sufficiently adaptable to do without sleeping

Under the seas, beneath the roots of the mountains, ran the wires through which they saw and heard, the enormous eyes and ears that were their heritage, and the hum of many workings clothed their thoughts in one garment of subserviency. Only the old and the sick remained ungrateful, for it was rumoured that Euthanasia, too, was out of order, and that pain had reappeared among men

there came a day when, without the slightest warning, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they understood it, ended

She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her - it did kill many thousands of people outright

man who had once made god in his image, and had mirrored his strength on the constellations, beautiful naked man was dying, strangled in the garments that he had woven

some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow

scraps of the untainted sky

Hayabusa2 reminds us that space exploration is more multinational and more disaggregated than ever.  Besides JAXA there are space programs being build up by China and India, including robot craft, astronauts (taikonauts, for China, vyomanauts, for India), and space stations.  The Indian Mars Orbiter still circles the fourth planet. The European Space Agency continues to develop satellites and launch rockets, like the JUICE (JUpiter ICy moons Explorer).  Russia is doing some mixture of commercial spaceflight, ISS maintenance, exploration, and geopoliticking.  For these nations space exploration holds out a mixture of prestige, scientific and engineering development, and possible commercial return.

Bezos, Musk, and others live out a Robert Heinlein story by building up their own personal space efforts.  This is, among other things, a sign of how far American wealth has grown, and how much of the elite are connected to technical skills (as opposed to inherited wealth).  It’s an effect of plutocracy, as I’ve said before.  Yuri Milner might lead the first interstellar mission with his Breakthrough Starshot plan.

Privatization of space seems likely to continue.

Uneven development is also likely, as different programs struggle to master different stations in the space path.  China may assemble a space station while Japan bypasses orbital platforms for the moon, private cubesats head into the deep solar system and private companies keep honing their Earth orbital launch skills.

Surely the challenges of getting humans and robots further into space will elicit interesting projects that can be used Earthside.  Think about health breakthroughs needed to keep humans alive in environments scoured by radiation, or AI to guide robots through complex situations.

robots continue to be cheap, far easier to operate, capable of enduring awful stresses, and happy to send gorgeous data back our way

Japan seems committed to creating a lunar colony.  Musk and Bezos burn with the old science fiction and NASA hunger for shipping humans into the great dark.  The lure of Mars seems to be a powerful one, and a multinational, private versus public race could seize the popular imagination.  Older people may experience a rush of nostalgia for the glorious space race of their youth.

This competition could turn malign, of course.  Recall that the 20th century’s space races grew out of warfare, and included many plans for combat and destruction. Nayef Al-Rodhan hints at possible strains in international cooperation: The possible fragmentation of outer space research activities in the post-ISS period would constitute a break-up of an international alliance that has fostered unprecedented cooperation between engineers and scientists from rival geopolitical powers – aside from China. The ISS represents perhaps the pinnacle of post-Cold War cooperation and has allowed for the sharing and streamlining of work methods and differing norms. In a current period of tense relations, it is worrying that the US and Russia may be ending an important phase of cooperation.

Space could easily become the ground for geopolitical struggles once more, and possibly a flashpoint as well.  Nationalism, neonationalism, nativism could power such stresses

Enough of an off-Earth settlement could lead to further forays, once we bypass the terrible problem of getting off the planet’s surface, and if we can develop new ways to fuel and sustain craft in space.  The desire to connect with that domain might help spur the kind of space elevator which will ease Earth-to-orbit challenges.

The 1960s space race saw the emergence of a kind of astronaut cult.  The Soviet space program’s Russian roots included a mystical tradition.  We could see a combination of nostalgia from older folks and can-do optimism from younger people, along with further growth in STEM careers and interest.  Dialectically we should expect the opposite.  A look back at the US-USSR space race shows criticism and opposition ranging from the arts (Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon”, Jello Biafra’s “Why I’m Glad the Space Shuttle Blew Up”) to opinion polls (in the US NASA only won real support for the year around Apollo 11, apparently).  We can imagine all kinds of political opposition to a 21st century space race, from people repeating the old Earth versus space spending canard to nationalistic statements (“Let Japan land on Deimos.  We have enough to worry about here in Chicago”) to environmental concerns to religious ones.  Concerns about vast wealth and inequality could well target space.

How will we respond when, say, twenty space tourists crash into a lunar crater and die, in agony, on YouTube?

That’s a lot to hang on one Japanese probe landing two tiny ‘bots on an asteroid in 2018, I know.  But Hayabusa2 is such a signal event that it becomes a fine story to think through.

citizens of What Not are ranked based on their intelligence from A to C3 and can’t marry or procreate with someone of the same rank to ensure that intelligence is evenly distributed

Brave New World is more futuristic and preoccupied with technology than What Not. In Huxley’s world, procreation and education have become completely mechanized and emotions are strictly regulated pharmaceutically. Macaulay’s Britain is just the beginning of this process, and its characters are not yet completely indoctrinated into the new ways of the state—they resist it intellectually and question its endeavors, like the newly-passed Mental Progress Act. She writes:He did not like all this interfering, socialist what-not, which was both upsetting the domestic arrangements of his tenants and trying to put into their heads more learning than was suitable for them to have. For his part he thought every man had a right to be a fool if he chose, yes, and to marry another fool, and to bring up a family of fools too.

Where Huxley pairs dumb but pretty and “pneumatic” ladies with intelligent gentlemen, Macaulay’s work is decidedly less sexist.

We was published in French, Dutch, and German. An English version was printed and sold only in the US. When Orwell wrote about We in 1946, it was only because he’d managed to borrow a hard-to-find French translation.

While Orwell never indicated that he read Macaulay, he shares her subversive and subtle linguistic skills and satirical sense. His protagonist, Winston—like Kitty—works for the government in its Ministry of Truth, or Minitrue in Newspeak, where he rewrites historical records to support whatever Big Brother currently says is good for the regime. Macaulay would no doubt have approved of Orwell’s wit. And his state ministries bear a striking similarity to those she wrote about in What Not.

Orwell was familiar with Huxley’s novel and gave it much thought before writing his own blockbuster. Indeed, in 1946, before the release of 1984, he wrote a review of Zamyatin’s We (pdf), comparing the Russian novel with Huxley’s book. Orwell declared Huxley’s text derivative, writing in his review of We in The Tribune:The first thing anyone would notice about We is the fact—never pointed out, I believe—that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it. Both books deal with the rebellion of the primitive human spirit against a rationalised, mechanized, painless world, and both stories are supposed to take place about six hundred years hence. The atmosphere of the two books is similar, and it is roughly speaking the same kind of society that is being described, though Huxley’s book shows less political awareness and is more influenced by recent biological and psychological theories.

In We, the story is told by D-503, a male engineer, while in Brave New World we follow Bernard Marx, a protagonist with a proper name. Both characters live in artificial worlds, separated from nature, and they recoil when they first encounter people who exist outside of the state’s constructed and controlled cities.

Although We is barely known compared to Orwell and Huxley’s later works, I’d argue that it’s among the best literary science fictions of all time, and it’s highly relevant, as it was when first written. Noam Chomsky calls it “more perceptive” than both 1984 and Brave New World. Zamyatin’s futuristic society was so on point, he was exiled from the Soviet Union because it was such an accurate description of life in a totalitarian regime, though he wrote it before Stalin took power.

Macaulay’s work is more subtle and funny than Huxley’s. Despite being a century old, What Not is remarkably relevant and readable, a satire that only highlights how little has changed in the years since its publication and how dangerous and absurd state policies can be. In this sense then, What Not reads more like George Orwell’s 1949 novel 1984 

Orwell was critical of Zamyatin’s technique. “[We] has a rather weak and episodic plot which is too complex to summarize,” he wrote. Still, he admired the work as a whole. “[Its] intuitive grasp of the irrational side of totalitarianism—human sacrifice, cruelty as an end in itself, the worship of a Leader who is credited with divine attributes—[…] makes Zamyatin’s book superior to Huxley’s,”

Like our own tech magnates and nations, the United State of We is obsessed with going to space.

Perhaps in 2019 Macaulay’s What Not, a clever and subversive book, will finally get its overdue recognition.

we can’t begin those discussions until we say, as a society, we want to at least try subordinating these potentials to the democratic project, rather than allow capitalism to do what it wants

I say in FALC that this isn’t a blueprint for utopia. All I’m saying is that there is a possibility for the end of scarcity, the end of work, a coming together of leisure and labour, physical and mental work. What do we want to do with it? It’s perfectly possible something different could emerge where you have this aggressive form of social value.

I think the thing that’s been beaten out of everyone since 2010 is one of the prevailing tenets of neoliberalism: work hard, you can be whatever you want to be, that you’ll get a job, be well paid and enjoy yourself.  In 2010, that disappeared overnight, the rules of the game changed. For the status quo to continue to administer itself,  it had to change common sense. You see this with Jordan Peterson; he’s saying you have to know your place and that’s what will make you happy. To me that’s the only future for conservative thought, how else do you mediate the inequality and unhappiness?

I don’t think we can rapidly decarbonise our economies without working people understanding that it’s in their self-interest. A green economy means better quality of life. It means more work. Luxury populism feeds not only into the green transition, but the rollout of Universal Basic Services and even further.

Google and Facebook know how to utilize negative emotions, leading to the new system-wide goal: find personalized ways to make you feel bad

in Adam Greenfield’s Radical Technologies, where he notices that ‘it seems strange to assert that anything as broad as a class of technologies might have an emotional tenor, but the internet of things does. That tenor is sadness… a melancholy that rolls off it in waves and sheets. The entire pretext on which it depends is a milieu of continuously shattered attention, of overloaded awareness, and of gaps between people just barely annealed with sensors, APIs and scripts.’ It is a life ‘savaged by bullshit jobs, over-cranked schedules and long commutes, of intimacy stifled by exhaustion and the incapacity by exhaustion and the incapacity or unwillingness to be emotionally present.’

Omnipresent social media places a claim on our elapsed time, our fractured lives. We’re all sad in our very own way.4 As there are no lulls or quiet moments anymore, the result is fatigue, depletion and loss of energy. We’re becoming obsessed with waiting. How long have you been forgotten by your love ones? Time, meticulously measured on every app, tells us right to our face. Chronos hurts. Should I post something to attract attention and show I’m still here? Nobody likes me anymore. As the random messages keep relentlessly piling in, there’s no way to halt them, to take a moment and think it all through.

Unlike the blog entries of the Web 2.0 era, social media have surpassed the summary stage of the diary in a desperate attempt to keep up with real-time regime. Instagram Stories, for example, bring back the nostalgia of an unfolding chain of events – and then disappear at the end of the day, like a revenge act, a satire of ancient sentiments gone by. Storage will make the pain permanent. Better forget about it and move on

By browsing through updates, we’re catching up with machine time – at least until we collapse under the weight of participation fatigue. Organic life cycles are short-circuited and accelerated up to a point where the personal life of billions has finally caught up with cybernetics

The price of self-control in an age of instant gratification is high. We long to revolt against the restless zombie inside us, but we don’t know how.

Sadness arises at the point we’re exhausted by the online world.6 After yet another app session in which we failed to make a date, purchased a ticket and did a quick round of videos, the post-dopamine mood hits us hard. The sheer busyness and self-importance of the world makes you feel joyless. After a dive into the network we’re drained and feel socially awkward. The swiping finger is tired and we have to stop.

Much like boredom, sadness is not a medical condition (though never say never because everything can be turned into one). No matter how brief and mild, sadness is the default mental state of the online billions. Its original intensity gets dissipated, it seeps out, becoming a general atmosphere, a chronic background condition. Occasionally – for a brief moment – we feel the loss. A seething rage emerges. After checking for the tenth time what someone said on Instagram, the pain of the social makes us feel miserable, and we put the phone away. Am I suffering from the phantom vibration syndrome? Wouldn’t it be nice if we were offline? Why is life so tragic? He blocked me. At night, you read through the thread again. Do we need to quit again, to go cold turkey again? Others are supposed to move us, to arouse us, and yet we don’t feel anything anymore. The heart is frozen

If experience is the ‘habit of creating isolated moments within raw occurrence in order to save and recount them,’11 the desire to anaesthetize experience is a kind of immune response against ‘the stimulations of another modern novelty, the total aesthetic environment’.

unlike burn-out, sadness is a continuous state of mind. Sadness pops up the second events start to fade away – and now you’re down the rabbit hole once more. The perpetual now can no longer be captured and leaves us isolated, a scattered set of online subjects. What happens when the soul is caught in the permanent present? Is this what Franco Berardi calls the ‘slow cancellation of the future’? By scrolling, swiping and flipping, we hungry ghosts try to fill the existential emptiness, frantically searching for a determining sign – and failing

Millennials, as one recently explained to me, have grown up talking more openly about their state of mind. As work/life distinctions disappear, subjectivity becomes their core content. Confessions and opinions are externalized instantly. Individuation is no longer confined to the diary or small group of friends, but is shared out there, exposed for all to see.

Snapstreaks, the ‘best friends’ fire emoji next to a friend’s name indicating that ‘you and that special person in your life have snapped one another within 24 hours for at least two days in a row.’19 Streaks are considered a proof of friendship or commitment to someone. So it’s heartbreaking when you lose a streak you’ve put months of work into. The feature all but destroys the accumulated social capital when users are offline for a few days. The Snap regime forces teenagers, the largest Snapchat user group, to use the app every single day, making an offline break virtually impossible.20 While relationships amongst teens are pretty much always in flux, with friendships being on the edge and always questioned, Snap-induced feelings sync with the rapidly changing teenage body, making puberty even more intense

The bare-all nature of social media causes rifts between lovers who would rather not have this information. But in the information age, this does not bode well with the social pressure to participate in social networks.

dating apps like Tinder. These are described as time-killing machines – the reality game that overcomes boredom, or alternatively as social e-commerce – shopping my soul around. After many hours of swiping, suddenly there’s a rush of dopamine when someone likes you back. ‘The goal of the game is to have your egos boosted. If you swipe right and you match with a little celebration on the screen, sometimes that’s all that is needed. ‘We want to scoop up all our options immediately and then decide what we actually really want later.’25 On the other hand, ‘crippling social anxiety’ is when you match with somebody you are interested in, but you can’t bring yourself to send a message or respond to theirs ‘because oh god all I could think of was stupid responses or openers and she’ll think I’m an idiot and I am an idiot and…’

The metric to measure today’s symptoms would be time – or ‘attention’, as it is called in the industry. While for the archaic melancholic the past never passes, techno-sadness is caught in the perpetual now. Forward focused, we bet on acceleration and never mourn a lost object. The primary identification is there, in our hand. Everything is evident, on the screen, right in your face. Contrasted with the rich historical sources on melancholia, our present condition becomes immediately apparent. Whereas melancholy in the past was defined by separation from others, reduced contacts and reflection on oneself, today’s tristesse plays itself out amidst busy social (media) interactions. In Sherry Turkle’s phrase, we are alone together, as part of the crowd – a form of loneliness that is particularly cruel, frantic and tiring.

What we see today are systems that constantly disrupt the timeless aspect of melancholy.31 There’s no time for contemplation, or Weltschmerz. Social reality does not allow us to retreat.32 Even in our deepest state of solitude we’re surrounded by (online) others that babble on and on, demanding our attention

distraction does not pull us away, but instead draws us back into the social

The purpose of sadness by design is, as Paul B. Preciado calls it, ‘the production of frustrating satisfaction’.39 Should we have an opinion about internet-induced sadness? How can we address this topic without looking down on the online billions, without resorting to fast-food comparisons or patronizingly viewing people as fragile beings that need to be liberated and taken care of.

We overcome sadness not through happiness, but rather, as media theorist Andrew Culp has insisted, through a hatred of this world. Sadness occurs in situations where stagnant ‘becoming’ has turned into a blatant lie. We suffer, and there’s no form of absurdism that can offer an escape. Public access to a 21st-century version of dadaism has been blocked. The absence of surrealism hurts. What could our social fantasies look like? Are legal constructs such as creative commons and cooperatives all we can come up with? It seems we’re trapped in smoothness, skimming a surface littered with impressions and notifications. The collective imaginary is on hold. What’s worse, this banality itself is seamless, offering no indicators of its dangers and distortions. As a result, we’ve become subdued. Has the possibility of myth become technologically impossible?

We can neither return to mysticism nor to positivism. The naive act of communication is lost – and this is why we cry