Sublime

Now, in a totalitarian move I suspect the Chinese leadership would admire, as a result of dissent in other areas, I am being installed to run it, against my will. A test of loyalty to the regime.

The problem has not gone away, it’s gotten worse. We still are working to answer why the loss of faith in the old order has registered as intensified anti-egalitarianism rather than a renewed egalitarianism, why perceptions of public corruption and criminality have led to the open embrace of corruption and criminality rather than its rejection, and

Capitalists build cities designed for bourgeois identity performance and commerce only to invest in them so heavily that all that can afford to exist are carefully managed environments: postmodern corporate mishmashes of symbols and architectural referents that have no discernible connection to a past, only a technologically mediated amalgam of

While Klein, Kingsnorth, Berardi and their co-thinkers believe themselves to be critiquing capitalism, their modest proposals and catastrophist thinking—and in the case of the latter two, their strategy of retreat from struggle—actually fit within and contribute to a broader mood of abandonment of the possibility of any type of post-capitalist

Such resemblances to cities of the third world are in no way casual, or based on the “color” of a polyglot population: these are all cities arranged primarily not to improve the lives of their citizens but to be labor-intensive, to accommodate, ideally at the subsistence level, since it is at the subsistence level that the work force is most apt to

The city becomes a backdrop to the omniscient screen, falling into the space of flows. Geographical differences give way to digital similarities, which can sometimes be very inconvenient when too many people are following the same algorithmic pathways.