Utopian Rapport

"Like the notoriously short cycles of financial markets and digital media, the contemporary public sphere spasmodically convulses without ever crystallizing into durable infrastructure. Hyperpolitics would be unthinkable without a particular set of social preconditions. Sociologically, it is rooted in a society in which exit options abound and citizens find it easy to move from one institution to another. Just as employment has become more precarious in the postindustrial era, abandoning a family, a relationship, a party, or a circle of friends is a much less demanding process than it was in Weber's time. Temporally, such ease of exit produces a society in which all dimensions of life are subject to short-term logics; friendships, marriages, jobs and political commitments are compressed into ever-shorter time frames. The life-worlds of the online are the primary environment for this sort of de-institutionalized, impermanent engagement, offering repertoires of social expression that require little to no long-term obligation." —Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics

"All these jobs and all this shopping: a society of total but invisible control, this impersonal grid that reaches deep down into the wet stuff of your brain and tugs you around by the desires. It’s not just the size of the place, although that is, obviously, terrifying: ten trillion neat bungalows slotted into ten trillion rectangular lots, stretching into Orange County and over the curvature of the Earth. What’s really unsettling about Los Angeles is how, from the air, it doesn’t really look like a city at all. That endless regular grid, with all those human bodies filed away; the bright specks shuttling along the avenues and onto the freeways: the sense of an enormous contraption, a massively complicated abacus with ordinary lives as its moving parts, flows of money and traffic and consumer goods and fame, zapping through logic gates, calculating—well, what? Once you’ve seen the city like that, it’s hard to be fully comfortable in whatever little bit of it you find yourself inhabiting. Here’s your nice house, here are your nice flowers, but you’re like Kelvin at the end of Solaris, living pleasantly on the surface of an alien star." —Sam Kriss, Infinite America