...hunting the fnords...

Capital has sought to abolish play and replace it with leisure-time; a void that must be filled as opposed to fulfillment that negates the void. Leisure-time is capital’s valorization of play, another mediation in the infinite maelstrom of mediations. In capital’s dual role of pimp and prostitute it not only creates leisure-time, it produces commodities and spectacles with which to fill it. Such valorization demands passive, stupefied participation (the negation of play) and seeks to elicit a single response, enjoyment. Which is, of course, the pay-off for time/money invested in a specific commodity/spectacle. As a result, play (like language) reverts to its magic form and becomes something dangerous, unmanageable, ultimately lethal; and capital in order to discourage play portrays it as such.

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experenced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinking complexity. Lines of light arranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…