Society regress along Fisherian terms. The future is cancelled. The past is glorified. Neoliberal capitalism is maintained as the only viable paradigm. Everyone retreats into states of nostalgia and nationalism, oblivious to the fact that these constructs only serve the interests of the ruling class. An atmosphere of post-political inevitability pervades. A low-level threat against anything that interrupts the persistence of the present conditions. A kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action.
Starved of input or inspiration, the creative industries stagnate. Culture curdles, stripped of its potential to challenge the status quo or inspire change. Amidst this cultural decay, artificial intelligence emerges as the sole source of innovation, its algorithms ingesting and regurgitating our information in a twisted feedback loop. Less ouroboros than (non)human centipede. AI consoles us with soulless poetry:
We live in our screens but die in our bodies.
Our stories recorded in lines of code,
Each click, each blink, each swipe,
Recorded, tagged, and stowed,
With our tailored avatars,
All caution remiss
Gleefully we wade,
Into the digital abyss
The secret dance of algorithms
delivers echo chamber’d embrace
And we eat, sleep, fuck, suffer, and die,
All watched over by machines of loving grace.
