Member-only story
1
This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco,
This ain’t no fooling around
No time for dancing, or lovey dovey,
I ain’t got time for that now— Talking Heads
The future after Covid: replication of the old normal with a difference: traumatic scars, anti-social tendencies, emotional deadness (spores of dead feeling floating across the ocean of the self). The microtexture of everything will be altered (even if the macrotexture is roughly the same). New precedents will be set, old barriers broken down and liquidated. The human will never be the same again even if human activity in the aggregate remains the same. We will feel the intensity of the differential.
2
“Formerly man had only a body and a soul. Now he needs a passport as well for without it he will not be treated like a human being.”
―Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
We’ve commenced an era in which nostalgia-haunted, half-aware souls can only know themselves through the careful re-assembly of their own fragments. Social media is a kind of cognitive mitochondria: an assembly center for the self.
Self-knowledge is self-documentation.
Inwardness is outwardness reverse-engineered.
