out of time



This image enables us an opportunity to observe how capitalist culture dragged us here dislocated from time and space. The passing motorway traffic leave trails of red and white light, luminescent markers of atomised transient human will projected somewhere in a perpetual never-never land of now. The photograph captures a motorway network connecting individuals to consumer choices, black holes of tarmac act as wormholes between home and the nowhere places of retail parks.


Grab yourself a coffee, and a hot sandwich “made your way”, from a multinational chain of local restaurants. In these faux-organic wood veneered places, money is sucked out of our world and into tax havens where corporate kleptocrats upgrade their lives, hidden far away from the toilet cleaning rota of the zero hours restaurant worker. The young people who work here fit the corporate image, ghosts exorcized by capitalist realism from 1960s west coast American, essence of hippy, extracted from time and space into the motorway service stations of Dagenham, Leeds, and Luton.

A sense of youthful rebellion is inferred by your choice of café, a collage of countercultural moments set the scene for your moment of relaxation, we are all West-coasters now. Images of young people, on the walls, flowers in their hair, smiling extracts from when history offered a future, now incorporated by transnational branding, to infer a sense of subcultural cool on the weary consumer. As you gulp down your last mouthful of latte froth from the cardboard cup with your name scribbled on it by a precarious worker, café culture corporate kaisers sup champaign moored off the Amalfi coast, top deck views from their Costa latte yachts.

Time is a relic of pre-history, from when human life was limited by physiology and facts. As we imagine ourselves via our purchases into the living embodiment of designer brand aspiration and consumer product technological advance, we shed another layer of skin from our shapeshifting reptilian past. In the forever present patterns of work and consumption flatten time and space into whatever you or the big other wants.

Transnational tech demands we outsource human consciousness into a digitally augmented world of noughts-and-ones-real, where potential for deeper thinking is kept at arm's length on the amyloid display of our telecommunication devises. Through these handheld extensions of our physical bodies, we project our ambitions, hopes and fears onto the Internet, where in the vacuum of cyberspace anything goes. Algorithms connect our thoughts to create holographic mirrors through which we render ourselves as pure ego set loose in the hyperreal of social media. Our growing detachment from our collective struggle for better conditions and happiness, individualised as a mental problem, to be resolved by smart phone applications.

As the physical three-dimensional significance of shopping centres lose their attraction, and virtual world fills these roads with warehouse delivery vans, the image maintains its metaphorical function. This space cuts through the landscape like knife through flesh and blood. Gouged out from nature, this tarmac wormhole cuts through the grey horizon of contemporary life, acting as a portal between points ‘a’ and ‘b’. Point ‘a’ is Nietzsche’s Superman, individuals free from the tyranny of good and evil. Point ‘b’ is the destination of our thoughts, shaped by whatever we choose to believe will make us happy, sad, thin or fat.

Leaving behind our temporality and a history plagued by the buzzkill of moral tales, we are cybernetic discombobulation, kind-of-existing in virtual communities, amongst friends, trolls and keyboard warriors, we express ourselves in moments captured forever by the web, as if we never change. In this ever-present, we doom scroll our way past news of the permanent war, disaster capitalism, climatic collapse, and the politics of greed, towards fluffy kittens, cake decorating, and product reviews of things we do not need. Following the late-night hit of adrenalin administered as reward for beating the countdown clock to next day delivery, online shopping as sexual stimulation, a one-night stand imagining how tomorrow we will be satisfied by the objects of our desire.

This neoliberal nightmare lives inside all of us, manifest in our unwillingness to face up to the ‘nothingness’ of existence, without the fragile compassion of each other. We all know in our hearts that consumerism is meaningless if only we were not living so fast. Our failure to face up to the impending ecological disaster is written on the body politic of youth, who are almost terminally sick with the self-fulfilling prophecy of maddening powerlessness.

In place of reality everything is digitalised into binary code, from spreadsheets that predict outcomes, to video game death distraction, nothing is meaningful unless it exists somewhere else in a hyperreality, where big business externalises social dysfunction as consumer choice. The spectacular potential of youth to rupture capital's oppressive tenancies, is medicated away as individualised dysphoria. British youth are resigned to their fate, not because of apathy or cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. Or as Fisher puts it, ‘They know things are bad, but more than that, they know that they can’t do anything about it.’

Extracted as economic value from self, the unsustainable illusions of consumer culture leave us vulnerable to the virus of magical thinking, where our immunity to the bullshit of adverts is left compromised by years of advertising propaganda. Manipulated like Pavlovian dogs, we live as infantilised puppy dogs, extracted from civilization by tech giants who train us how to live in digitally rendered virtualities from which economic value can be tapped, where post God relativity turns morality into clickbait, and barefaced lies into alternative facts.

The remnants of our pre-digital age skin, flesh, and bones, have become ‘dysmorphic,’ online battles between culture war traditionalists, trolls, and existentialists, fight over the significance of genetic code in the identity politics of individual choice. Social dysfunction has been privatized as problems of chemical imbalance, overlooking our extraction from social connections and historical agency as the root cause of much sickness.

Much social, cultural, economic and environmental dysfunction is caused by capitalist externalities The unintended but price worth paying consequences of wider damage caused in the pursuit of profit. Cigarette cancer, alcoholic kidneys, fast food fatty liver, social media mental breakdown, consumer culture ecological destruction. Big business passes on the bill for someone else to pay later, you, me, other people, your children.

Inner city crime as an externality; consumer culture adverts encourage young people to self-identity with the latest things. Realists Leah and Young explain how inner-city gang crime and deviance are a social illness, symptomatic of a bulimic society, young people who gorge themselves sick on the latest disposable items, quick fix fades like a sugar rush, chucking up the old, to steal for the new.

For philosopher Jean Baudrillard, capitalism has created a new version of the world, he calls hyperreality. Like the vehicles disappearing in the photograph above, neoliberalism has blended the real, thing, with the symbol that represents it. In this ghost world sociologists Archer et al, explore how economically and culturally poor children learn to express their,emergent sense of self, via the ‘swoosh’ logo of the Nike and the idea it represents ‘just do it’, spunk! We live in a replica world, an illusion created by the matrix metaverse, now manipulated by multimillion dollar vested interests and the interconnectedness of prosumer product, self-worth. In this glitch in time, we are both the consumer and producer of the goods and services we choose based on the consumer reviews we have written and produced online, for free.

As the rich get ever richer, our systemic illness becomes narcissistic, feeding those who have benefitted most from the system with the idea that they must be the best. The most suited to becoming one with a systemic failure to do anything that is in our collective self-interest.

In an added twist to this photographic examination of ourselves, capitalism seeks to mitigate the damage done by our reliance on oil, and Planet Earth’s catatonic reaction to it, the climate crisis. Its solution is the electrification of cars with lithium ion-based fuel cells. However, just like lithium’s other use, as a mood stabilisation medication, prescribed to treat depression and rage, neither application do anything to treat the overriding cause of our dis-ease, the dislocation of humanity from time and space.

Fisher suggests that Kurt Cobain’s suicide back in 1994 reflected the death of any possibility that capitalism might be defeated. An ‘X’ marked the spot where his body was found and our body politic fell to the floor, end of his story. Cobain’s search for authenticity in the world of undead, hollow resistance. Irvine Welsh’s book 1993 Trainspotting, drudgery, drugs, 27-years old and dead. Capitalist realism gauged out the aesthetic of the 1960s and 1970s subculture from its authentic yearning for a better social reality casting them out onto the hard shoulder of now. Advertising agency culture vultures set about marketing youth culture ideals, flesh and blood sex sells better than meaning. The social capital of subcultures, smashed into fragments of cool and sold off as brand logos. Freedom tamed and translated into semiology; mass produced products represent spaces where people once thought.

In contemporary society our bodies are no longer needed as most production of the real is outsourced to sweatshops overseas. Here, our minds are metaphorically extracted, then buried deep inside the matrix of audit culture, where everything we do is closely monitored in terms of time spent on task and how well we meet the targets set to control us and restrict opportunities where time spent on yourself might facilitate your emancipation. We are held here in this digitalised version of the world to make money and buy artefacts that we are convinced to use as an expression of our imagined selves as units of symbolic consumption.

From this perspective nowhere is the pathology of capitalist realism more manifest than in the mental distress of young people, now as then. For him, British youth are resigned to this fate, not because of apathy or cynicism, but of reflexive impotence. They know things are bad and that they can’t do anything about it, they are trapped in a self-fulfilling prophecy, unable to do anything except pursue individualised pleasure.

In times like these, when waves of multiple social, economic, and political crises vie for attention, our prior experiences make sense of things. As is the way of socialisation, these memories are shaped by cultural moments, happenings and works of art that cut through the fog of now, casting light from our collective memory. Watched now, the Wachowskis' 1999 Matrix movie is a cinematographic quantum leap back in time before the forever present.

The film reaffirmed our growing suspicion that everything was not as it appeared, before the Twin Towers collapsed on top of the possibility of social progress. The war hawk wet dreams of the American New Century came, true and the potential for progressive social change was set back decades by the War on Terror. The world was recast as a real-life Hollywood action thriller, the men in black declared are ‘you with us or against us? At this moment the axis of evil enabled the powerful to label social progressive as enemies of the people.

Just before Neo goes under in a kind of cyber-medical procedure, reality gatekeeper Morpheus asks Neo how he feels about finding out the truth.

Morpheus: I imagine that right now; you're feeling a bit like Alice. Hmm? Tumbling down the rabbit hole?

Neo: You could say that

Morpheus: I see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that's not far from the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo?

Neo: No

Morpheus: Why not?

Neo: Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life

Morpheus: I know *exactly* what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Neo: The Matrix

Morpheus: Do you want to know what it is?

Neo: Yes

Morpheus: The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage, into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind

Neo awakens to the reality that society is, but a simulation, created by artificial intelligence machines to distract humanity whilst they use human heat and electrical energy to sustain their mechanical existence. Neo, along with a band of neo-tribe of cyber punks, hack into the mainframe of this illusion to fight for freedom

The film is neo-Marxist critique of capitalism, where the proletariat masses are enslaved by a ruling elite who dominate the world by extracting physical and mental energy from their subordinates through employment. Value is taken from workers, who are paid less than their energy is worth, and is syphoned upwards and accumulated by those with the power to shape reality in their own image. Like the machine masters of the Matrix, this ruling elite are often unburdened by empathy and human compassion, as an exclusive upbringing keeps them a country estate and a green belt away from the problems that their control of urban reality creates for increasing millions of poor.

The dysfunctionality of an exploited workforce hanging onto the daily monotony of falling living conditions, decreasing job security and the temptations of drink, are not even thought about for a blink. From a young age, the main imperative of the ruling class is cultural self-replication through the maintenance of ideological dominance via the control of socialisation. In elite educational institutions perception is compressed into an ethnocentric account of humanity, white cultural superiority and the simple message, survival of the fittest.

Over the years the truth has become even more elusive as it falls further down the cyber warren of alternative theories and different facts. Undercover deep web investigations, pizza-gate-ping-pong, Podesta’s emails read out under chem-trails, Alex Jones drinking bourbon at Sandy Hook, Q-anon’s fancy dress revolution. Well-founded suspicions set the million keyboard warriors loose online searching for the myth of objective reality. Online chatrooms, Bit Torrent backrooms, postmodern opulence, Dark Web ideas breed like rabbits, cultural myxomatosis.

Now, click bate algorithms guide truth seekers down a multitude of rabbit holes, each one filled with the toxic gases of metanarrative decay. The Matrix of capitalist consumption augments reality by hiding its oil stained hand in shaping a world, where too much and too little define everything. The film points towards a hidden force that alienates us from the possibility of an organic human connection with the World is confounded by a capitalist ideology that grows ever stronger as it extracts every amp of energy from our souls.

In contemporary society our bodies are no longer needed because most production in the real economy is outsourced to sweatshops overseas. Here, our minds are metaphorically extracted, then buried deep inside the matrix of audit culture, where everything we do is closely monitored in terms of time spent on task and how well we meet the targets set to control us and restrict opportunities where time spent on yourself might facilitate your emancipation. We are held here in this digitalised version of the world to make money and buy artefacts that we are convinced to use as an expression of our imagined selves as units of symbolic consumption.

The Matrix is a critique of consumerism and the illusion that our lives must be bought through work in a fixed version of reality constructed by the faceless machinery of capitalism, our energy mined for cash extraction. The film reflects a growing awareness that everything is not as it appears, and our free will, a faltering illusion. For the last generation to come of age before algorithms narrated online identity as human traffic, we perceived the growing threat of the corporate machinery. Just before the last iteration of punk was incorporated by online identity shopping.