The flattening of specificity to make way for a verticalized generic.

A compressed and pure present.

‘Then all the screens around me started throwing footballs in unison, and it started to make sense. The future screen, the future TV, is not about cinema but about simulating presence, a carnal ultrafidelity that’s good for sports, and reality TV, and porn. I must have had low blood sugar or something—box stores do this to me—but a vague apocalyptic dread descended upon me, as I imagined these home theaters invading millions of homes and literally sucking the life out of them, like phantasmic vampires, or digitally remastered portraits of Dorian Grey. Screens that grow more lifelike in exact proportion to the ontological exhaustion of the world outside, a world flattened and set groaning under the weight of us, our distractions, our hunger for figments. A verse from the book of Ezekiel welled up from the depths: “Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, the Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.”‘

Each is a strategy for propagating information forward through time—meaning, Flack adds, “individuality is about temporal uncertainty reduction.” Replication here emerges as just one of many strategies for individuals to order information in their future. To Flack, this “leaves us free to ask what role replication plays in temporal uncertainty reduction through the creation of individuals,” a question close to asking why we find life in the first place.

The eulogists of work. Behind the glorification of ‘work’ and the tireless talk of the ‘blessings of work’ I find the same thought as behind the praise of impersonal activity for the public benefit: the fear of everything individual. At bottom, one now feels when confronted with work – and what is invariably meant is relentless industry from early till late – that such work is the best police, that it keeps everybody in harness and powerfully obstructs the development of reason, of covetousness, of the desire for independence. For it uses up a tremendous amount of nervous energy and takes it away from reflection, brooding, dreaming, worry, love, and hatred; it always sets a small goal before one’s eyes and permits easy and regular satisfactions. In that way a society in which the members continually work hard will have more security: and security is now adored as the supreme goddess…”

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Dawn, p. 173

The great seasonal festivals, as done in traditional primitive cultures, also balance out the male and female in each person. This is very important for preventing the difficult anima and animus battles between the unconscious of men and women. As described by C.G. Jung, the animus is the male aspect inside a woman and the anima is the female aspect inside a man. In our culture these other aspects are seldom given a chance to develop fully so that when the person reaches middle age there is a real crisis. “When a man is possessed by the anima he is drawn into a dark mood, and tends to become sulky, overly sensitive, and withdrawn.” In a woman, the animus (her male aspect) “typically expresses himself in judgments, generalizations, critical statements.” [24]