The capitalist state, he wrote, “is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behavior; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently.”

Music, in spite of its global commodification, remains one of the few ways they can contrive “a bare minimum of singularity.”

“belittlement” is the inevitable lot of human beings in a social world,

“capitalism as an engine of infinite expansion and accumulation cannot, by definition, continue in a finite world.

one can remain geographically stationary and yet become torn away from a shared connection to the past or mutually nurtured expectations for the future.

the internet complex, with all its tools for individual advancement and branding, is the new, self-serving delusion of the “meshes of power”

The gun symbolically, and too often in actuality, redeems the hollowness of a material culture that produces powerlessness and disappointment.

“annihilating nihilism,” in which the disintegration of long-standing forms of social solidarity are inseparable from epidemics of depression, addiction, and suicide.

Arthur C. Clarke, by the late 1950s, was an early incarnation of the public “futurologist,”