You can’t stop playing the game, but its rules keep changing without warning. It’s worth noting that Francis Fukuyama wrote his notorious book about “the end of history”—arguing that we had reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government”—in 1992, just as the internet age was kicking into high gear: everything is moving so fast . . . but history has ended. In this way, Rosa contends, we find ourselves in a state of “frenetic standstill,” constantly in motion but going nowhere.
