After blitzing through season 5 recently, I was recently catching up on the latest episodes of Mad Men. Though the show always has lots to talk about, what struck  me was a tiny moment (spoiler!) in which Don needed the simplest of looks from Sylvia Rosen to know he should head back upstairs for another ‘romantic dalliance’. The reason it stood out? If I had been given that look, I would have nodded politely, headed off to work, and spent the rest of the day wondering what it meant.

In fact, my life has been a litany of missed and misunderstood romantic looks. There was the New Year’s Eve party in which repeated, prolonged glances from a woman only made me exasperatedly respond “What?!” There was the time I dropped off a coworker at 5AM and, when she cocked her head and asked me if I wanted to come in, I obliviously said “No, it’s late, I’m gonna’ go home and sleep.” I’ve even had a woman analyze my hopelessness at the end of an evening: “yeah, there were a couple of times that were perfect for you to kiss me… but you didn’t.”

It’s as if I were absent the day everyone else got their Romantic Moments 101 Handbook. Once during grad school, we had our last class at the professor’s house. There, over beer and talk of the sublime, I kept glancing at another student, who kept meeting my gaze in return and smiling. When class was done, we said farewell on the street and—while she stood next to her boyfriend, mind you—she looked intensely at me, with an expression you might describe as…. pleading? Apparently I was supposed to do or say something so that we could… what? Meet later so she could cheat on her boyfriend? I have precisely no idea.

But then, that’s just the way my life is. When I walk into a bar or a party, I feel as if everyone is speaking a completely silent language made up of looks and gestures that only they understand. I think perhaps that’s why I find Mad Men so compelling: it’s full of people who all know how to interpret this mute world of meaning. And I guess that’s why Don Draper is the perfect anti-hero. You can tell he’s an awful person, but you’re still jealous of his prowess. He would have known what those looks meant, would have known the next move to make—and he would have done it, too.

Readers of Scrawled in Wax are likely familiar with Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good?“, an ongoing feature which takes a work of long-form journalism and, well, tries to explain why it’s so good. It’s a brilliant bit of insider baseball because the vagaries of long form excellence – the narrative arc, those short, punctuated paragraphs that reveal fascinating tidbits, the careful restraint by which a writer often speaks through circumlocution – are difficult to tease out, even for experienced writers.

But what about the sentence? Sometimes, it is that basic unit of long form writing that can be so beautiful. The precision and care of the well-crafted sentence, after all, is writing. It is that fastidious love for the ordering of words — a la Jakobson’s view of poetry as an emphasis upon substitution rather than sequence — which makes writing an art.

Utterly awash in utterly banal language, I rarely have the patience for poetry or a poetic appreciation of language. But it was the following paragraph from Ta-Nehisi Coates that reminded me of something which I used to hold dear:

When your life is besieged, the music is therapy, vicarious mastery in a world where you control virtually nothing, least of all the fate of your body. I had a friend in middle school who would play Rakim every morning because he knew there was a good chance that he would be jumped en route to or from school by the various crews that roamed the area. But, in his mind, the mask of rap machismo made him too many for them.

It was that last clause which stopped me dead in my tracks. I mean, not too big, not too strong, not too tough – too many. What a brilliant turn of phrase, one that in just a fragment manages to evoke the dialectic of virtually projected image and the material body, and the aching desire for one pole of the binary to supersede the other.

So what about a “Why’s This So Good?” for the sentence – except rather sentences in fiction a la traditional literary analysis, we look at sentences in journalism, on social media, etc – i.e. the language that makes up our daily interaction with words.

I know I’ve talked a lot about Twitter over the years, but it’s always fascinated me to watch so many gifted writers work within the constraints of the medium, crafting and then re-crafting clauses to fit in that tiny space. Wouldn’t it be great to sit back and think about what makes the truly great ones work — what rhetorical devices produce what effect; of how the linearity of language can be used to conjure an expectation, only to have it reversed just a few words in; of how to foreground a particular ethos through vocabulary or tone; and what distinguishes the brilliant ‘standalone’ sentence to a tweet very much ‘of its time’, almost down to the minute?

But Jesus: too many for them. It’s that which is really the concern. How might we emulate the spirit of a sentence that does so much with so little?

Which is to say: how, as a swirl of forces constantly tugs at attention and soul, might we learn to say so much more with less?

I spent the first quarter of 2006 living in Galway City, a small, nearly perfect town in western Ireland. Here’s one thing I learned while there.

In the early 1960s, on the site of what was once a jail, Galway chose to erect something rather surprising: a great stone cathedral, in the tradition of similarly grand religious buildings scattered all across Europe. It’s sorta’ brilliant. Situated on the banks of the river Corrib, it’s a relatively new building that feels old. Entering it is almost akin to experiencing what a medieval cathedral must have felt like shortly after it was built. Sitting inside it was as calming as it was awe-inspiring.

Sometimes on Sundays, I and Roxanne, the charming lady with whom I lived at the time, would saunter over to the Cathedral to partake in the Sunday service. Though I’m far from ‘a believer’, the lingering antagonism I had toward theism simply gave way in the face of the peace and ritual of a Sunday morning spent with others, heads bowed.

What struck me most, however, was the idea of taking time each week to reflect upon one’s life and its relation to one’s principles. The priest’s sermons, though obviously underpinned by the Catholic faith, nonetheless had a way of speaking to me. It wasn’t so much about the assertion of a particular set of principles that drew me in, though. Rather, what appealed was the opportunity to ask myself whether I was living by mine. What I heard was something like “Are you, good Christian soldier, spending your time chasing one definition of success and abandoning what’s really important?” But put Art, Pleasure or Family in the place of God and the question once again becomes relevant to those who don’t believe.

Instead of simply fostering an ethos of ‘self-help’, however, I also liked the anti-modern feel of the whole thing. I can’t find it now, but scholar Alan Jacobs once tweeted something like “modern Christianity is transgressive because, in its refusal of selfishness, it resists the tenor of the age.” I may have that wrong, but that’s the idea which stuck with me. Regardless of what you think of that, there’s something very interesting about a ritual and community space explicitly  not meant to fit within economic structures of consumption and the attendant focus upon self-concern. In our imaginary secular meeting space, there is no equipment to buy, no smartphone through which to access something, no purchase or insider knowledge to conspicuously perform. There is only a desire to put yourself somewhere and pause in order to think about whether there is a disparity between the kind of person you are, and the kind you wish to be.

So. Idea #6 is the secular Sunday service: a weekly gathering, led by a rotating set of speakers who, in relating a tale or a series of thoughts, beckons you to always be on two seemingly contradictory paths that are in fact one and the same: of ever being on the verge of becoming a radically different person; and being just about to truly become yourself.

Oh: a really really nice building also helps.

The most interesting thing about atemporality – the term we’ve given to the collapse of multiple historical, hermeneutic contexts into the same experiential frame – is that it is not ahistorical. Rather, atemporality is a function of materially-rooted phenomena of media.

Think of your average Tumblr, with its pastiche stream of images from the 50s and an hour ago. Both the glut and pace of nostalgic novelty fosters a collapse of interpretive frameworks, effacing the political, material, and historical context of those images, rendering their relations somehow invisible.

Atemporality is thus an evil, yes?

What I’d suggest is this: first, pause for a moment, and listen to “Chori Chori” (above) as sung by Meesha Shafi during the third season of Coke Studio Pakistan.

Okay, are you back? Good. Now, return to Massive Attack’s Blue Lines or Mezzanine. In fact, do it all. Listen to “Kamlee” by Hadiqa Kiani and then return to Tricky. Take “Mori Bangri” by Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad and then go back to Portishead.

The thing to ask is this: how might one draw a historical line connecting each? Which would come first? Are Shafi or Kiani’s haunting, lilting vocals part of a historico-cultural trajectory, appropriated by the British, that ‘led to’ triphop? Or is it Shafi who has listened to Massive Attack in an apartment in Lahore,  and then ‘taken’ their sound? Is the rhythm behind Ayaz and Muhammad’s modern qawaals simply a function of westernization? Or is there a pre-existing overlap already there?

Or perhaps, is it that drawing out a clear, singular line of influence becomes impossible? That what you would instead have is a mess of lines, overlapped and criss-crossed, scrawled in wax so that, once melted in the heat of analysis, they must be redrawn again, and then again?

The point is not to say that atemporality is disconnected from history, or that it necessarily foregrounds apolitical presentation. Instead, it is the overlapped flows of capital and culture that manifest in the impossibility of a linear chain of origin, one in which there is a clear starting point leading up to the singular cultural referent we designate as “the aesthetic object”, closed and whole.

The atemporal nature of “Chori Chori” is about a kind of inextricability or indivisibility – a rhizomatic, multiple, non-linear chain of influence.

It is not so much that “hybridity is virtual”, though  - that the aesthetic object as site of mixture hovers in an impossible third space waiting to recuperated by the magical invested listener. Rather, the hybridity of something like “Chori Chori” is an effacement of a hierarchy of origins as in that very effacement it also roots itself in global historico-material processes, refuting a linear chain of aesthetics as it grounds those very aesthetics in the conditions of their production.

Fusion can thus be a form of atemporal aesthetics, which in turn are a refusal of teleology, of the originary, and of ends. It is their backward-forwardness, their refusal of the tree in favour of the rhizome, that renders them atemporal–and their atemporality that renders them ideal politicized art.

In the winter, there are two parallel dichotomies of interior and exterior: firstly, the warm glow of inside and the harsh air of the outdoors; and secondly, the mental contrast of the two, the outside becoming a looming presence, impinging upon the interiority of consciousness, like the constant, low hum of an unknown threat.

Put another way: it’s hard to get out in winter.

An idea, then: invert the dichotomy. Take the outside and put it in inside. It shouldn’t be too hard. After all, the French have already done it.

It would be easy to wax rhapsodic about not only the Parisian Arcades themselves, but also Benjamin’s canonisation of them. Here in North America, and Toronto especially, they and similarly ‘exotic’ notions of alternate urban arrangements haunt our collective desires for a ‘something else’ in a horizon dotted with new buildings, but little in the way of radically novel ideas.

But in a city in which the outside is uninviting for nearly half the year, we need to approach the issue proactively rather than merely begrudgingly. In the spring, one of the most remarkable changes is the extent to which, after months of scurrying past people in the street, the outside is suddenly a place to linger, to people-watch, to simply be around others.

So, the Arcade.

The point is not “shopping”. It is not to simply replicate the high street inside. And it isn’t quite “to take Toronto’s patio culture and give it a place in the colder months”. You cannot replicate street life indoors; it must be its own thing.

Instead, the aim is to produce a non-uniform interior area for socializing that takes the best of the outdoors – the serendipity, the overlapped, multipurpose social space, the demographic mixture – and make it inviting in the bitter temperatures of January.

Think of St. Lawrence Market: one moves through the bustling space as if one were walking a tightly packed open air bazaar. It is a series of provisional, dynamic spaces under a broader literal and figurative roof.

Some rules, then, for the Toronto Arcades:

1. It cannot, like a casino or a stadium, obliterate the street around it. Look at the covered walkway in this picture of Paris. The life of the Toronto Arcade must bleed from the inside outward into the street. Think windows through which to buy coffee, or an idea less offensively bad.
2. Natural light seems key to this idea; glass roofs or nothing. The last thing one would want is a space practically or aesthetically sealed off. There must be a tangible, practical interplay between the inner and outer.
3. Public space needs public space. That means small indoor squares where loitering is encouraged, not security guards from Holt Renfrew chasing off teens.
4. A mixture of the cheap and high-end is essential. More playgrounds for the rich are the last thing this city needs.
5. Speaking of which: more playgrounds for the rich and white are actually the last thing this city needs. Less Grand Electric, more Drupati’s please. If the people I grew up with in central Etobicoke wouldn’t want to come, it will be an abject social failure. That means that, yes, chain stores and restaurants would be a necessity, too.
6. “Indoor cafe culture”. Tables and chairs should line the walkways of the Arcade. Bars, too. Designate certain areas/Arcades as places open ’til 2AM.
7. But also: for lack of a better term, “real multicultural” space. Cafe culture is not universal. Hybrids might work, though. The only real way to do this — and I’m serious here — would be to have an RFP process for “diverse social spaces”, judged by committee. The solution is to get ideas from the various communities and entrepreneurs as sort of a halfway point between ‘the market’ and activist-rooted approaches to diversity.
8. Have it be located at the fringes of the city centre so that it is literally and figuratively a halfway point between urban and suburban.

Naturally, I’m sure this idea isn’t pragmatic at all. Whether some obscure zoning requirement or a simple, obvious fact – like “Nav, this is a mall. You’re talking about a mall.” – means that this, more than anything else, is another thought experiment.

Still. This city feels like two radically different places in winter and summer. It’s not that I would want to erase that difference; it’s that I think the city is far too focused on making itself great during the summer months, as if there are no reasons or means to approach the city with the same eagerness in the winter.

What feels different about an Arcade – particularly if it adequately captures the mixture of Toronto – is that it is a midpoint between things. Picture one along Dupont in the west end, at the meeting of the core and the inner ‘burbs. It could be both a community hub of activity and commerce, but also a destination, a place in which locals, downtowners and suburbanites congregate. And unlike the strange flurry of activity from May to September we have now, it could instead be something that occurred year-round.

But ultimately, the point would be to build a city meant not only for all its inhabitants, but all of them all of the time. It’s that which some cities are so successful at, and where Toronto lags. I for one am tired of such a divided, stratified city, a phenomenon multiplied when the dichotomies of urban and suburban, rich and poor, white and not, get magnified by that ever-present contrast between warm and cold. And perhaps one day, a great many more of us might intermingle, becoming flaneurs as we wander through a microcosmic metoynm of the city – no matter how cold it is outside.

Now in my memory, the day opens with a slow moving shot from above. There are things laid out on your kitchen table in an almost too-obvious fashion – a passport, your keys, a phone blinking red as the battery slowly dies. The tabletop is wooden and worn, warm from the pale winter sun, in a house in which the floorboards creak, the cracked, damp window frames leak cold, and everything else gleams new.

You leave tomorrow.

What strikes me is your right thigh laid across mine, the image framed by the touch of black fabric at your hip and the rumpled white duvet at our feet.

Absence is its own form of death; this is an indulgent, funereal revel. It is as it should be, an abandonment of two kinds: of you eventually leaving the warmth of this bed as the brisk January air and the airport loom outside; and the decision to spend the day like this in a dreamy, defiant joy.

Later, you stand half naked fiddling with a phone, carefully choosing what music to play. We make coffee, chilled and shivering in the kitchen, then return to bed mugs in hand, knees pulled up, covers drawn around us. Bits of movies and TV shows loop in our minds as we each voice our thoughts about whether we are playing at something or have simply decided to fall in love for just the day. Neither of us believes such a thing is possible or that what we are doing is false.

In the pale grey light of the next morning, an eternity spent in bed has made the cold outside somehow more bitter when we stand in it. A taxi pulls up. I open my mouth – no doubt to say something ill-advised about staying in touch – but relent. We are both struck by the sharp breeze upon our cheeks, a trace of moisture sitting just beneath our eyes. The next moment is hazy; I am unsure if you kissed my cheek for a moment too long, or if I simply imagined it. What is left is the sputtering exhaust of the car that takes you away as, almost immediately, the sensations that seemed so present evaporate like steam into the otherwise silent, still winter air.

“New urbanism” as it’s called has as one of its central premises the idea of “density”. It is density that allows for areas to become bustling hives of activity full of coffee shops, neighbours who know each others’ names and a mixture of all kinds of people. But it is density that also brings all the downsides of urban living: the crowding, the lack of space – and perhaps most of all (at least symbolically), the noise of others’ lives creeping into your own.

To some, the idea of hermetically sealing oneself off from the grit, sounds and smells of urban living is anathema to the very idea of cities; it is a rejection of the authentic and the true, a retreat into the very sterility, emptiness and postmodern malaise of the suburbs one is meant to escape.

What such a view mistakes is an overabundance of what is defined as the inauthentic. It posits as the ground a surfeit of artifice and a lack of the true. This perspective is nonsense, in no small part because of the incredibly narrow view it uses to define “the authentic”. It is the abundance of others’ presences impinging upon one’s own life that defines modernity – it is that incessant pressure that has rendered the suburban home as reprieve and castle. The suburbs were a mistake; that does not make those who now flee there mistaken.

What urbanism needs is not some version of the post-authentic city. It is a way to say to the people whom urbanism has thus far excluded “here, we understand.” We know what your 90 minute transit commute past three high schools is like. We know what the years of being stuck in traffic has done to your patience and energy to explore the world when you get home. We know about the car stereos that shake your windows, the roar of lawnmowers when you just want to sleep and parking lots in the summer, acres upon acres of black asphalt, gleaming cars, and four tiny trees, the shade of which is like a pen drawn across a canvas as it runs out of ink.

What one must say to these people – or rather, what you must say to us – is not at all “embrace the authenticity of our life”. It is simply this: we understand. We understand with enough empathy that building codes have been changed. We have made it so that condo boards have arcane new rules about renovations and subfloor insulation. We care enough that we can tell you why this tiny detail – that building inspectors now carry sound meters – means so much for how you and I shall live side-by-side.

A dying man organizes via social media a listening session in which a small, vital group of people all across the world sit and listen to a song all at the same time. Nothing much is made of it, quite on purpose; some use it as background music, others sit  and reflect on what has been lost. Some think of their friend across the oceans who, carried by those very notes, is being lifted from one realm unto the next as, amidst candlelight and glasses of wine, people look meaningfully at both each other and nothing at all.

I have, in the past, tried to wax philosophical about the Microsoft Surface. Given its interesting in-between position between laptop and tablet, I have been intrigued by not only its multi-functionality, but the idea of a device that changes ‘in nature’ depending on how you use it.

Having had one to test out for a few weeks, I think it’s safe to say that, in its current form at least, Microsoft’s first attempt at a tablet is not the perfect genre-bending product I had hoped it would be. That said, it is very interesting—which is saying something for a consumer tech product—and it’s also a lot better and more practical than a lot of the more negative reviews would have you believe. More to the point, though, the Surface almost succeeds at the impossible feat Microsoft had challenged itself with: forcing you to reconsider what you want from either a tablet or a laptop—or indeed, if you really need two separate devices.

At this point so long after its release, there seems little point over the well-worn details too much. The Surface RT runs a version of Windows 8 that only contains the Metro interface, with the exception of a fully functional Microsoft Office and more familiar desktop Internet Explorer. The build quality is excellent, and yes the kickstand is great. The battery lasts about 8-9 hours, which is good. The type cover, the touch-sensitive keyboard that doubles as a cover, works much better than you would expect it to, and careful, reasonably fast touch-typing is surprisingly an option. I know, I didn’t believe it either. The type cover, which has actual keys that depress is obviously better, though slightly thicker as a cover, and is almost as good as a regular laptop keyboard.

In fact, it’s that dimension of the Surface that I find most intriguing. Since the arrival of the iPad, Macbook Air and Ultrabook, we’ve come to accept a new orthodoxy in computing: tablets are good for reading and quick online experiences like email, banking etc etc. Small laptops are excellent for travelers, and Ultrabooks and Macbook Pros etc are versatile if expensive all-rounders. (As for desktops, though I still swear by them, for most people they are not terribly useful.)

The Surface, though, sits in this weird in between position. At first, all you notice is how it cannot do anything as well as an task-specific product. As a tablet, it’s significantly worse than an iPad. It has far less apps, is heavier, and simply has the wrong form factor; a widescreen tablet just doesn’t work for portrait reading. It certainly doesn’t help that it isn’t as fast, either. The apps thing will improve over time, but for there to be not one good Twitter or Facebook app tells you the lay of land as it stands now.

As a laptop, it is of course missing hundreds of thousands of Windows programs from the last decade, and is small and underpowered to boot. The kind of easy multifunctionality of, say, running Rdio in one window, a browser in another and Word and a Twitter client and so on is impossible. This is not a laptop replacement as it is (I do, however, have some thoughts about the potential benefits of this).

All that said, the inclusion of Office really does make it feel practical in a way that most tablets do not. It’s oddly refreshing to be able to take the thing you were just using to read on the couch and then type out ‘real work’ on it. And that sense of ‘huh, this is pretty practical’ actually grows on you over time. I’m typing this on it right now using the type cover, and even though I have a Bluetooth keyboard, I’d never dream of doing this on my iPad for the simple reason that complex websites are just bad on tablets you control only with your finger. I also have a wireless mouse plugged in which recognized instantly. The ability to cut and paste using a mouse—not to mention all those finicky clicks on a site like WordPress—just makes the Surface better at being productive than other tablets. For all its various flaws, the more you use it, the more its benefits become clear.

As, I’ve said, overall the product is far from perfect. At the same time, I can’t help but think that Surface has laid the ground for a very interesting shift. While for ‘core users’ its downsides may be too great, for many who simply want to read the news or check movie times on a tablet, and then occasionally surf and write with a laptop, the price, practicality  and portability of the Surface might actually be worth it, and if that’s not true now, it almost certainly will be in an updated model.

The point is that its capacity to function conveniently as both a consumption device and a productivity device is a model that, once refined and perfected, may seems as obvious and as natural as a laptop once did. After all, laptops once entailed serious compromises compared to the power and reliability of a desktop, a difference that has all but vanished now. What will be interesting to see is how the Surface evolves, and whether or not consumers at large will or will not embrace the idea that all you need is one, adaptable device. I for one was pleasantly surprised.

What I need isn’t “freedom” from technology, but self control: the ability to choose when and where certain features of my gadgets are appropriate to use, and when they are not.

It’s an interesting idea, and one I think will become increasingly common. What started as Freedom will inevitably morph into digital objects that change in function dependent on the time of day, location, or proximity to other devices.

What intrigues me, though, is the doubled sense of self-control here: what I need is the ability to control when and where I cede control to technology. I’ve said this before, but digital technology seems to represent the pinnacle of tools that both create, and then satisfy, desire. When I cannot stop checking Twitter, my craving for a flow of novel information is inextricably linked to the structure through which I have become accustomed to receiving easily digestible chunks of stuff.

Pavlus argues that, given the multifunctional nature of the smartphone, it would be silly to simply cast aside all those features for the occasional need to do away with distraction, and it’s a compelling notion that appeals to a certain sort of pragmatism.

That said, I also think it’s worth thinking about the following idea: what does technology designed to refuse desire look like?

Both Pavlus’ argument and the entire pantheon of modern digital tech is aimed at maximizing functionality. While you could make the Tim Cook-esque argument that ‘hard decisions must be made’ regarding functionality, even the iPad – stripped of some of the functions of the computer – is meant to perform a dizzying array of tasks. All of it is an ever more efficient, concentrated conglomeration of machines that are now better at doing ‘that which we always wanted to’.

What’s perhaps more important, though, is that the ideology underpinning this tech is the satisfaction of desire. Even the stripped down, mono-functional device is praised for the way its efficiency lets one perform the task at hand, the desire for productivity and the fetish for the product becoming one and the same. Particularly when we consider modern digital tech as emblematic of modern techno-capitalism, the whole structure works at more and more efficiently satisfying particular needs, whether those we might argue are ‘given’, or those that, like, say, the ability to work from the road, are themselves products of late capitalism.

What I mean to say is that there is this enormous cultural inertia rooted in global economic practices that says “satisfy your desire”–even when your desire is simply to do more and better work–that works on ‘both ends’ of the consumer equation, the construction of needs and their satisfaction. Looked at this way, digital technology is not a solution to a pre-existing set of problems, but the logical extension of the supremacy of global capitalism. This is, no doubt, an oversimplification–my Skype chats with family in India, or pseudonymic activist mobilization through Twitter seem to be clear counterarguments–but it is still in some way true.

So what might it be like for the CEO of a large tech company to get up on stage and say “here is a product that does less”? Or: “Hey, listen, we here at Widgets Co. know what your life is like. We know that you are a creature utterly wrapped up in your own personal libidinal economy, and even though you know that watching that beautiful art film on Netflix will make you happier, you often watch Two and Half Men instead. So here is the new iThing–and it will refuse your desires. It will not simply cut off function, but tell you how to spend your time according to your pre-programmed parameters.”

Part of me believes this is what we really wanted Steve Jobs to tell us all along. We wanted to be told not only what technology can do, but what we should do with it. We wanted the Father to instruct us, to enforce the Law, to tell us how to behave against our instinctual push. Maybe this is why people like the idea of curation, or any other number of filtering services. Maybe the problem with the tyranny of choice is that the discourse and material networks that underpin it made us forget that what we really desire is tyrants.

Naturally, I’m getting a bit far-fetched. But what I do think is interesting is how, with various bits of software and technology now designed to direct and focus attention or time, we have reached a strange point in the development of capitalism in which we create products to deliberately not let us do things–or if we’re not quite there yet, that it will happen soon.

So what happens when Mrs. CEO gets up on stage and says “here is a product that does less” – and we respond by saying “My God. It’s brilliant.”? Is it then that, oh hope of hopes, that capitalism starts to eat itself? Is there a certain horizon or threshold at which, when the crystallization of massive networks of production meet, we arrive at a point where capitalism has produced a commodity that undercuts its own libidinal predication?

Put another way: what happens when, after two centuries of desperately saying yes, capitalism starts to produce products designed to say no?