Now that the Ever Clear ship is cleared, we can view the Suez Canal blockage with irony, as a metaphor of our times, that culture is stuck.
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Category: History of Ideas
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.
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.
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.
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.
Continue reading Best Films of the 2010s: A RetrospectiveBanksy
The most famous artist of this age, Banksy is a conceptual street artist whose work has ranged from walls to satirical amusement parks.
Continue reading BanksyDavid Foster Wallace
At 46 years of age, David Foster Wallace hung himself in his basement.
Continue reading David Foster WallaceBaudrillard
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.
Continue reading BaudrillardBeckett
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.
Continue reading BeckettNothing Original
In 1979, the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard explained postmodernism as an “incredulity towards metanarratives,” those predominant illusions by which we make sense of the world, the myths of progress, liberty, and rationality.
Continue reading Nothing OriginalCamus
What is man, other than an individual, an isolated being thrown into an alien universe totally devoid of any inherent meaning where contingency and failure seem to be the only organizing principles?
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