ıuǝɯɐʞ

“Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge. We take notice [nehmen Kenntnis] of everything without gaining any insight [Erkenntnis]. We travel [fahren] across the world without having an experience [Erfahrung]. We communicate incessantly without participating in a community. We collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections. We accumulate ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ without meeting an Other. In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.”

coming face to face with the absurd and these are some of the only consolations I have found

“If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure, that, for me, there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving. But as it is said of the merchants that ninety-seven in a hundred fail, so the life of men generally, tried by this standard, is a failure, and bankruptcy may be surely prophesied.”

“I mean, that's what we're trying to attain, aren't we, through media? - That awful max-imisation of time and efficient transmission of 'information'. Some of this is economic - time equals money - and some is simply done because it can be done, and has become an unquestioned convention.”

Capital demands that we always look busy, even if there's no work to do. If neoliberalism's magical voluntarism is to be believed, there are always opportunities to be chased or created; any time not spent hustling and hassling is time wasted. The whole city is forced into a gigantic simulation of activity, a fantacism of productivism in which nothing much is actually produced, an economy made out of hot air and bland delirium.

“Everything is possible, and yet nothing is. All is permitted, and yet again, nothing. No matter which way we go, it is no better than any other.... There is an explanation for everything, and yet there is none. Everything is both real and unreal, normal and absurd, splendid and insipid. There is nothing worth more than something else, nor any idea better than another... All gain is a loss, and all loss is a gain. Why always expect a definite stance, clear ideas, meaningful words? I feel as if I should spout fire in response to all the questions which were ever put, or not put, to me.”

Once we begin to want, we fall under the jurisdiction of the Devil.