Sublime

The modern individual has grown up in a highly unstable environment in which almost everything is attainable and just about anything goes — the only rule being that you have to consume. The snag is that you must engineer your own success: if you fail, you must be either lazy or sick.

I see this girl, Vanden, for a while, who paints my futon frame black and who stopped seeing me because she said she saw “a spider the size of Norman Mailer” in my bathroom. I didn’t ask her who Norman Mailer was, and I didn’t ask her to come back.

The model of business success in the millennial era is that of dismantling social structures to suck up cash from whatever corners of life can still be exploited.

The Internet was

The aesthetic turn in the self-help literature of the late twentieth century, like the emergence of the belabored self, is in part a consequence of the changing nature of the labor market and the blurring of the boundaries between the commercial and intimate spheres.

In their race to grow exponentially forever, the markets had “gone meta” one time too many. No matter how many digital signifiers we employ to represent its value, the real world just doesn’t scale forever.

which presents words and books to us cut off from the living people who created them,

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that t