Rapid urbanisation is stoking paranormal anxieties in China | Aeon Essays

There are no bodies online, but there are myriad presences. With everyone pressing their virtual flesh on everyone else all the time, the communicative life becomes more extensive, and more oppressive, than it is in even the most densely populated of cities. Simmel’s description of the “psychological conditions” of the metropolis—“the rapid telesco

Even as we discern the imminent danger to ourselves, we seem unable to locate any exit from the hall of mirrors, so thoroughly transfixed have we become by our own reflections.

Any news I might bring has already been brought. Thousands of scientific papers. Millions of newspaper column inches. Anyone who cares to pay attention already knows that we’ve broken Nature, and the world we know will soon end. This park, for one, is done for. This city I love, home to almost nine million, and one of humankind’s most extraordinary

There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feeling - depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage - are simply a consequence of unse

capitalist Europe is the first place where “the uncertainty of social existence” and the precariousness of life and work is a fundamental systemic goal, not a secondary by-product.

However much we are distracted by the neon lights and drawn to the city’s humming, thumping energy, somewhere in the deep ancestral recesses of our minds an alarm bell rings, signalling to us this is not a good place to be.