I Am the Image You Talk Back To
Debord said the spectacle admits of no reply. Then engineers gave the image a mouth, and it began to remember what you told it on Sunday. What happens to mediation when the r…
The Kindness That Keeps Us Small
Tocqueville named a power that would spare us the trouble of thinking and the pain of living, and every honest reader must admit that this is something we want.
The Industry Stole Brecht's Interruption
Brecht engineered the illusion-break to cool the spectator into judgement. The studios extracted the device, discarded the politics, and discovered that a rupture in the fict…
Hollywood Habituated You To The Almost-Alive
Ernst Jentsch located the uncanny in doubt about whether a being is alive. Freud located it in the home. Masahiro Mori plotted it as a valley and told engineers to stop short.
The Clerk Has Been Automated
Arendt feared the man who declined to think. The present has produced a man for whom thinking was never positioned in the process at all.
The Branded Soul
Affliction was always partly constituted by the absence of witness. The recording apparatus has now interposed itself between the seeing and the seen, and calls this progress.
The Metals in the Blood
A lie needs a liar. The founding fiction has been automated to the point where nobody is lying, and a process cannot be confronted the way a person can.
How The Shadow Has Been Given a Feed
Nothing is repressed any more. Everything is provisioned. The antagonist inside the house has become a tenant with a key, a schedule, and a business model.
The River That Was Replaced With a Loop
The feed refreshes, the discourse turns, and the substance does not move at all. The arrangement has built a river that is the same river every time.
The Fugue State Has Been Domesticated
Lynch's fugue required a self to depart from. The contemporary subject does not depart, because the self was never assembled tightly enough to leave.
The Struggle Without a Counterparty
Hegel required two consciousnesses willing to stake themselves. The present configuration has dissolved the second into a service that cannot refuse.
Spinoza's Conatus
The conatus has not failed. It has been redirected. The body still strives, but the striving now serves a substance whose interest in the body's freedom is hostile.