Sublime

In the end, Abbott Coburn had simply not been made for this world. He was one of those extra screws you find in the box after assembling a piece of furniture.

The carefully engineered systems of factories were replaced with the “personal productivity” of offices, in which individuals deploy their own ad hoc and often ill-defined collection of tools and hacks to make sense of their jobs, with no one really knowing how anyone else is managing their work.

Das ungelebte Leben gewann umso mehr Potenz, als es von dem leisen ökonomischen Motor der Enttäuschung angetrieben wurde. Es verwandelte sich in einen phänomenalen psychischen Motor für einen ganzen Wirtschaftszweig, der eine Verbesserung des Selbst verhieß.

The Internet—what Dodge used to call the Miasma—had just gone completely wrong. Down to the molecular level it was still a hippie grad student project. Like a geodesic dome that a bunch of flower children had assembled from scrap lumber on ground infested with termites and carpenter ants.

In recent years, an underlying sense has emerged that algorithmic culture is shallow, cheap, and degraded in the washed-out manner of a photocopy copied many times over.