Best Films of the 2010s: A Retrospective

What was the 10s’ as a decade? My pat answer: a seismic shift in American culture. What used to be nerd culture went mainstream, or more accurately, became gentrified. The Internet Lost Its Joy. Smartphones and social media fed off each other, stuck in one gigantic circle-jerking feedback loop. We are all online all the time. No such thing as AFK.

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A History of Nothing

Chapter 1: In the Beginning… There was Nothing.

Chapter 2: Ex Nihilo

Chapter 3: We Know Nothing

Chapter 4: Null and Void

Chapter 5: Nihil Perpetuum Est

Lucretius

Seneca

Chapter 6: Apropos of Nothing

Chapter 7: A Crack of Light between Two Nothings

Chapter 8: Nihil Sub Sole Novum

Machiavelli

Montaigne

Shakespeare

Chapter 9: Nothing Exceeds like Excess

Pascal

Chapter 10: Nothing but Sophistry and Illusion

Jonathan Swift

Voltaire

de Sade

Chapter 11: Sweet Nothings

Schopenhauer

Carlyle

Max Stirner

Kierkegaard

Baudelaire

Chapter 12: …and Nothing Besides!

Flaubert

Mark Twain

Nietzsche

Chapter 13: Nothing Old Fashioned

Kafka

Hemingway

Camus

Chapter 14: Nothing Original

Beckett

Baudrillard

David Foster Wallace

Banksy

Whence Then MAGA?

Today, thanks to late-stage capitalism, alienation and atomization has exacerbated everything, threatening the apocalypse by pushing the survival of the human species to the brink. A bullying, bureaucratized anonymity on our phones hectors us from the minute we wake until we finally close our eyes at nighttime, and it seems nothing really matters, and nobody ever really gets their comeuppance.

Mr. Robot
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American Malaise

Every nation has an origin story, be it born out of blood or drawn on a map. America was born with two ideals in its genesis story, security and liberty.

by Kaliq Elliott

The forbidden entrance into liberty, that is to say, the entrance into modernity, did not come without consequences: the acquisition of money, the anticipation of buying new things, the banality of consumerism, and the spectacle of the media, among others that plague the country.

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Baudrillard

Jean Baudrillard, smoking a cigarette

The so-called “high priest of postmodernism,” Jean Baudrillard evolved from a Marxist-inflected critical commentator of the affluent society to an ambiguous position that can be described either as a bleakly lucid perception that is resigned to the omnipresence of the society of spectacle, or as a horrified fascination with the shallowness of a postmodern society where the sign has become a simulacrum that signifies nothing.

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Beckett

Samuel Beckett

In Waiting for Godot, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, kill time on an open, empty road waiting for Godot, who never comes, and who they suspect may not exist. They quarrel, make up, contemplate suicide, try to sleep, eat a carrot, and gnaw on some chicken bone. An oppressive air of desperation and panic lingers over all of their activities because nothing actually happens. The play ends where it began – it goes nowhere.

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