> The five-minutes-into-the-future world being conveyed is thus utterly banal and falling apart at the seams. It reflects an understanding of an indefinitely near-term future seeping into the acrylic-concrete present; a postsingularitarian future of omnipresent intelligence that already exists in the already-banal network of sensors and vector embeddings scattered across folded-over and multiplexed EM energy carriers and leaks less and less surplus-jouissance as it develops. Whereas previous generations announced the end of the past as an end of history that pointed to a hopeful avenir, the indefinite concreteness of the future in Crystal Castles tells us we’ve reached peak history — almost all of it is concentrated in the next ten seconds, more people and more EM energy in more intricate a-centered structures of meaning and value, more than in the sum total of the previous 10,000 years.
> Indeed a case can be made that everything changed in the years between 2000 and 2009, and nothing in the decade that followed. Wi-fi, Facebook, dystechnic China, the Euro, smoking bans… This case would imply that like Alice with her bubbly dissociative energy, we have been enjoying our symptom — the symbolic deadlock that tells us she will never leave the abusive relationship, fraying European nations never give up on the single currency, Catalonia’s protests of independence will never be signified as cries of liberation used to be, Brexit will never happen and we will never give power to meaningfully right-wing political parties (for example in the upcoming European elections). These are, of course, all inevitability discourses — the thing of the world does carry on; Alice broke up with the band, after all.
> The five-minutes-into-the-future world being conveyed is thus utterly banal and falling apart at the seams. It reflects an understanding of an indefinitely near-term future seeping into the acrylic-concrete present; a postsingularitarian future of omnipresent intelligence that already exists in the already-banal network of sensors and vector embeddings scattered across folded-over and multiplexed EM energy carriers and leaks less and less surplus-jouissance as it develops. Whereas previous generations announced the end of the past as an end of history that pointed to a hopeful avenir, the indefinite concreteness of the future in Crystal Castles tells us we’ve reached peak history — almost all of it is concentrated in the next ten seconds, more people and more EM energy in more intricate a-centered structures of meaning and value, more than in the sum total of the previous 10,000 years.
> Indeed a case can be made that everything changed in the years between 2000 and 2009, and nothing in the decade that followed. Wi-fi, Facebook, dystechnic China, the Euro, smoking bans… This case would imply that like Alice with her bubbly dissociative energy, we have been enjoying our symptom — the symbolic deadlock that tells us she will never leave the abusive relationship, fraying European nations never give up on the single currency, Catalonia’s protests of independence will never be signified as cries of liberation used to be, Brexit will never happen and we will never give power to meaningfully right-wing political parties (for example in the upcoming European elections). These are, of course, all inevitability discourses — the thing of the world does carry on; Alice broke up with the band, after all.
(ob self-sourcing: https://asemichorizon.wordpress.com/2019/05/24/physique-du-r...)