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

Hannah Arendt’s warning that “clichés, stock phrases, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against a claim on our thinking.”

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

the system will hit its physical limits. Whatever we end up with at that point, it will not be a system of infinite expansion.

The unspoken truth is that as internet access and use expands, economic inequality is heightened, not diminished.

The priority is to derail the possibility of a potentially rebellious youth, and, in order to conceal their jobless, worldless future, there is the dismal fiction of a generation aspiring to become “influencers,” founders of start-ups, or otherwise aligned with spiritless entrepreneurial values.

“Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.”

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

the future is presented as the maintenance of existing power relations—projections from which egalitarian forms of post-capitalism or eco-socialism are excluded.