‘I’m tired of this back-slappin’ “isn’t humanity neat” bullshit. We’re a virus with shoes.’ ~ Bill Hicks

brief ode to the new forever times

It often feels like we’re in the winter of humanity: unconsciously consuming ourselves into nihility in the pursuit of something unimaginatively meaningless – like a bad dream.  Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills, in all their destruction of nature and human relationships, have simply been replaced by server farms and data centres.  The hegemonic views of tech-oligarchs in cahoots with government, intelligence and the Military Industrial Complex, not to mention the depressingly limited notion of consciousness expressed by leading scientists when conversing with AI, fills me with utter despair. I feel an intense melancholy towards the horror of it all to the point that I just don’t want to be in this world anymore.  Nuclear weapons were a game-changer for humanity: the pointless destruction of Earth now lies at the touch of a button, its widespread proliferation supposedly a means to check man’s darker impulses towards self-annihilation… though for how long? Similarly, Big Tech, in all its hyperreal nihilism and mind-numbing homogenisation, has ensured philistine nerds have become the main drivers of a uniformly beige and atomised culture. Where man destroys, art creates; man disconnects, art reconnects. And so, what of the arts amid all this? It appears to have retreated into an institutionalised bubble, hunkered down in an Americanised ‘politicisation of everything’, populated by the privately educated committed to vapid, omnicause activism. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of ‘art’. Is it possible to transcend this? Or have we gone too far down the rabbit hole into a linear society perpetually fragmented and controlled by soft totalitarianism? Have we become an era devoid of cycles and frontiers? Is there anywhere with a genuinely bohemian spirit?

2026

© Percival Alexander