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Modern life is a science fiction movie; point a camera on reality and you’ll capture a surprisingly strange, alien world. Moving through New York is like moving through an aquarium: everything is detached, watery, bright, encased in glass. Reality has the distinguishing character of unreality.
The texture of physical environments becomes more and more like the interior environment of the phone: videoscreens are tacked onto physical space; Spotify echoes in every coffeeshop, every restaurant. Silence is erased, like dirt — we sanitize the environment with waves of information; we ‘purify’ our brains with stimulation in the same way we ‘purify’ our hands with Purell.
