thenewinquiry:
If we spent much time actually thinking through...
If we spent much time actually thinking through how staggering the daily facts of our technological lives are right now–not just the phones in our pockets but the food on our plates, the clothes on our backs, the forging frontiers of our collective imagination–well, how could we carry on getting up and going to work every day? How could we avoid the delicious, discomfiting paralysis of future shock long enough to fix dinner and file those reports? If we looked too hard at the system, would it start to collapse? This is why science fiction is dangerous. When we hear Slavoj Žižek’s famous aphorism (often mis-attributed as his original coinage) that it is “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” we should also be asking ourselves the second question, contained within the first: why is it so very easy to imagine the end of the world?
“The Future, Probably,” by Laurie Penny | Read More
