Para paliar el aburrimiento hace falta dinero; mucho dinero, si se quiere alejar el fantasma del aburrimiento de una vez para siempre y alcanzar el «estado de felicidad». Desear es gratis; pero, para desear de forma realista y, de este modo, sentir el deseo como un estado placentero, hay que tener recursos. El seguro de salud no da remedios contra el aburrimiento. El dinero es el billete de ingreso para acceder a los lugares donde esos remedios se entregan (los grandes centros comerciales, parques de diversiones o gimnasios);

These days I tend to think of dystopias as being fashionable, perhaps lazy, maybe even complacent, because one pleasure of reading them is cozying into the feeling that however bad our present moment is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the ones these poor characters are suffering through. Vicarious thrill of comfort as we witness/imagine/experience the heroic struggles of our afflicted protagonists—rinse and repeat. Is this catharsis? Possibly more like indulgence, and creation of a sense of comparative safety. A kind of late-capitalist, advanced-nation schadenfreude about those unfortunate fictional citizens whose lives have been trashed by our own political inaction. If this is right, dystopia is part of our all-encompassing hopelessness. On the other hand, there is a real feeling being expressed in them, a real sense of fear. Some speak of a “crisis of representation” in the world today, having to do with governments—that no one anywhere feels properly represented by their government, no matter which style of government it is. Dystopia is surely one expression of that feeling of detachment and helplessness. Since nothing seems to work now, why not blow things up and start over? This would imply that dystopia is some kind of call for revolutionary change. There may be something to that. At the least dystopia is saying, even if repetitiously and unimaginatively, and perhaps salaciously, Something’s wrong. Things are bad.

I can’t go on

EvgenyMorozov’sTheNetDelusion(2011),Turkle’sownAloneTogether(2011),orJamieBartlett’sTheDarkNet(2014)strikemuchmoresombre,ifnotworried,moods.WhileMorozovdrawsattentiontotheconsequencesofgivingupdatainreturnforso-calledfreeservices,Turkledrawsattentiontohowpeoplearegettinglostintheirdevices.BartlettdrawsattentiontowhatishappeningincertainareasoftheInternetwhenpushedunderground(removedfromaccessviasearchengines)andthusgivingrisetonewformsofvigilantismandextremism.PerhapsthespyingandsnoopingbycorporationsandstatesintowhatpeoplesayanddothroughtheInternethasbecomeawatershedevent.

if stopped in their development and reified too early, are potential sources of hacks in the derogatory sense. The latter is, according to their stories, exactly what happened when, 40 years ago, the prototypes left the labs too soon, and entered the world of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, producing the accumulation of bad decisions that led to a world where people stare at smartphones.

That future is not given, but depends on the medium the group is imagining. It thus depends on the properties of the medium that the group is exploring, selecting, and practicing. On the one hand, technology enables a new medium, which is imagined as shaping the future, on the other hand the future is imagined as shaping the new medium, which then should drive technology.

película Metrópolis

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