Debbie Foster

Unique among animals, we humans cultivate altered states of consciousness in our efforts to contact the beyond.

I love the thwarted circularity of how we can use our brain to think about how our brain thinks without really understanding how it thinks.

Dostoyevsky understood this psychological state better than anyone. In so many of his novels we meet seemingly wicked characters who are really only in despair, their original goodness having been robbed by someone or by circumstances beyond their control. And to cope with the trauma, they convince themselves that there is no such thing as

As with most modes of binary thinking, this creates superficial and destructive patterns: pretending that the conflict over pop culture is a simple battle between the right versus the woke corporatists allows the right to dictate the shape of reality, recasting diversity as a sincere corporate concern.

My research had reminded me of the custom of ta'arof, or never saying exactly what you mean, and three-part refusals. But I'd barely guessed, when reading of Iran, how hard it might be in life to tell where custom ends and conviction begins.

The more the nineteenth century progressed in science, industry, and even politics, the more nostalgic it became in spirit. Such are the hydraulics of historical consciousness.

Our blind trust in algorithms helps us believe in the categories assigned to us. Even though personalized recommendations are probabilistic —trying to predict what we like—we often treat them as deterministic , as if they already know what we like. Through that attitude, we become "calcified in our digital identities," each of which can be uniquely

Your decisions are now curated for you under the guise of personalization, while in reality they're engineered to make platforms as much money as possible. Your aesthetic preferences, your language, your very identity --all handed down to you by the positive feedback loop of social media algorithms.

The relevance of the death instinct isn't restricted to behaviour that is manifestly self-destructive. The death instinct is also expressed across a spectrum of mental states characterised by passivity and inertia. These states can be construed as small resistances and oppositions to vitality, and they seem particularly prevalent in the modern