Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.

The first move for any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things—objects, situations, systems—into uselessness.

If I had, he’d say, to sum up, in a word, what we (the Company, that is) essentially do, I’d choose not consultancy or design or urban planning, but fiction.

Thus passed the week.