Apocalypse May 2026

Maniac Closer Psh

In the Middle Ages, life was interesting. Every house had its goblin, each Church a God. People were young. Now every fourth person is old… A mathematical swarm. Slinging, slinger. Am I worth anything, or am I shit, like certain other people? I could have taken the other path, been enveloped into the great monster of corporate wealth — is that the only thing, and if you reject that, you’re left on the outside with nothing? Desires don’t come true immediately, you know. Orgies at the end of harvest festivals. Fearful visualisations of a worst-case event. Mounting dread. If you’re not actually changing anything, are you doing magic? Before Wasson, nobody took ‘the children’ simply to find God. They were always taken to cure the sick.

I saw you post on your story. Stops and starts, in fits and bursts. We are slowly turning into plastic. There’s plastic in a baby’s brain. There’s plastic in breast milk, in blood. Infertility. Soft creams onto skin, particles in water. You can sink quite a lot of work and financial investment and it still looks like some cables dragged through a desert. Even great things get quickly forgotten. The zoomies don’t realise that the accelerated rate of change is the bit that is completely new. Pre-internet verification meant myths survived for years, the playground functioned like an oral folklore network. Now we have nothing, for some minutes. Old films are slow, it’s because they’re like plays. The ways it’s shite are because we’re watching from the future. The ways it’s brilliant are intrinsic to it — the performances, the directorial vision, the mise-en-scène. The horrible nothingness that is actually behind the image of it. Or the horrifying amount of potentiality which then gets filtered through. What if we are trapped in constant repetitive motion without progress? Are you scaring me again? All my life I’ve been scared.

But it was those daydreams in the first place that helped them formulate that ‘if’. The basic inner pillar of consumerism is that the unit of happiness is the individual, or the family. But happiness is not an individual pursuit, or the pursuit of a couple. Happiness is something that happens within a community. Empathy. Common ground, in the street, across ideologies. Allowing stuff to go in the bin, scrapping stuff and being okay with that. Once that internal shift happened, the rest was a matter of logistics and luck. Since metropolises have started existing, this combination of access to an internationally active intellectual scene, and the possibility of living extremely cheaply, has been a catalyst for cultural flourishing. If you read the Paris as described by Balzac, was like that. Berlin as described by Isherwood was like that. Something similar can be said of New York in the fifties and sixties. To my knowledge, there isn’t really another such big western metropolis where this kind of lifestyle, that has been possible since the beginning of the nineteenth century, still is (1).

It’s simple — if you want to be in a better world, you should stop going on Instagram. Increasingly I am sure that the uncorrupted democratic-socialist place will have to be offline. It’s the ultimate mass dividing addict culture medium, this idea of experience not being worth a thing unless shared by each of us, individually on one of the big platforms, or Letterboxd, or Goodreads. The sum total of surfaces somehow implies the depth, and you can understand most of what there is to know about these people just by obsessively describing the surfaces of their life. Shrugging like, you’ve just got to. Conforming by consent because we can’t see out from around it. What? Mediate your life exactly like this? The alternative is unapologetically raw and unrehearsed, giving people permission to let loose and have fun and not take it too seriously. You’re being disco and punk at the same time, and they clash. And so it all just becomes absurd at that point, which is wonderful. Then nothing makes sense (2).

— — — — —

(1) Vincenzo Latronico

(2) Djrum