this may seem like an excercise in absolution, but on a planet of apes, only the natives are ever bored. The edge of history is always a negation, but there is no such thing as a negation-into-boredom. Not that in our case the ennui is the main character, but jelousy and its cousin, hate.
first the cat came out of the bag, but it wasn’t the first time it had done so, but perhaps never this globally but ever? that would be an exaggeration, rather it was, per usual, a spilling of colors in as much as it seemed a shedding of the snakes’ skin, yet evergreen as it was routine.
what was new was ecstatic and the old so stale, and they were in love to the point that even money got peeled inside fibre optic cables. the prison itself was shaking before our very eyes as if the walls had begun conspiring to colapse on us. but even as the twenty-first century grew dimmer, perhaps ultimately to be commemorated as an imploding supernovae, not everyone could appreciate the beauty in decay.
the problem with being at the bleeding edge of history (regardless of how i got to this perch) is that there is no science, not in the sense of not being able to use a computer, but more viscerally, despite it. libertarians sniff such zones out and like storm chasers, and are often found here. sometimes this draws a croud, creating tiny explosions in capitalism to keep the game interesting. but aside from the odd joke, conditions are grim.
in such a total absence of any rudder, the entire spectrum from patriarchy to pronouns takes on the appearance of an absurdist theater, and thus becomes true art for it carries on for nothing except its own sake.
yet another test of true art is perhaps its instructive capacity, so we learnt that the negative drive of history, which had only so far delvered us at the mercy of the difference engine, a god greater than the mighty electron, was no chancy scheme.
and we slept, waving dante goodbye as he ferried himself across the charon, seeing that in hell, even science has its limits as bones jut into bones.
should have chartered a boeing. but as the expression goes, “woulda, shoulda, coulda”.
but the weighted blankets of ignorance were proving to be too thin as their patterns changed on the will of multi-layered perceptrons, even as old walls collapsed new ones rushed in to replace them.
“it is not the sun rising, but our sins”, a video game proclaimed and one had to begrudignly acknowledge this bitter fact and where else was it still clearest if not on wall-street where perhaps god himself had appeared to bid adieu?
that it was an end of hedgemony was by now an unquestionable fact, we were only waiting for the ball to go into the hole, applause, and go home back to our curtains, weights, walls, and weighted blankets.
it did not seem too misopportune inside such a civilizational collapse and worldwide “teachable moment”, to perhaps recall some highlights as we wonder where things went wrong, not only to course-correct, but also as some kind of divine entertainment, or otherwise put, peak narcissism.
post-history had both meta and hyper layers to unpack, a “subaltern stack” so to speak, though one is no historian by training. but before addressing the subtext, we could dive into the surface level interpretation and on the surface the decline was remarkably steady - both through the lens of ‘nation-state’ and in the terms of a republic - it was by all accounts a standard fare, what was rather surprising was the timing and even as uncle sam stepped off stage with the embarassed saunter of a heckled comedienne, one could help but see through the facades that got her here. not only was it a sorry sight to behold, it was also rendered boring and not without some violence, as if expectations would be respected this time, or by doing it this way.
though a rare death is ever graceful or glorious, from my vantage point i could see that there was about as much grace or glory in the fall of rome 2.0 as there is in decomposing, non-biodegradable trash, not that the “revolution will not be televised”, but that dead eye of the television was the final revolution, and it carried on as if bradcasting what comes after “end of history”, which, precisely, is more end of history.
but where things get really, immeasurably ineresting, is the parallax between collapse and the turning of the tide itself. here we have not just a state or market failure, but a total collapse of will itself and not just political or collective will but at a deeply individual level, and that’s were we find parallels hitherto forgotten.
forgotten simple truths have their shadow visibly confirmed during such times a hyperobviousness is the first apparent symptom, such as it was no pilgrimage that founded this nation, but rather its opposite, no hallelulahs were heard as it solidified but rahter the opposite. why the USA ends in the twenty-first century is because of this opposite from the full-circle, equally strong force of nature by whichever name called.
not all nations are based on the idea of vice, and slim contitutions are proof not only of the atheletic proclivities of the founding fathers, but also their distance from treating verbal testimony as a source of truth but rather a strong belief in “fuck around, find out” and not in an intellectually sound or nuanced way.
no doubt this jock bent of mind this has roots in european persuasions, the new world was never really “new” - what was created in the imagination of land-hungry and trigger-happy started as little more than an amusement park for the aristocracy busy plundering the eastern hemisphere. and that’s where it ends, in Netflix, in Trump, in the vegas sphere which, like a panhandler in a gucci belt, is there just excusing itself, please, mind the exodus.