We were all against Yaldabaoth, the snake-demon with the head of a lion, the blind god who fashioned this false reality out of his own darkness. And in culture, a kind of secular Gnosticism that briefly conquered the world. No real ideological program, just a firm belief that more things ought to be on fire. In politics, the fetishism of revolt: black blocs, culture jamming, an angry but incoherent anti-authoritarianism. If the only thing left to do is buy some cool stuff, then refusing to buy cool stuff becomes the only form of resistance left. What filled the gap was not thought, exactly, but a vague transcendental mood. Philosophy was happy to just skim across the brightly colored surface of capitalist society. Hermeneutics were out, we no longer needed a distinction between essence and appearance, and Marx and Freud were creatures of the nineteenth century, helpless before the future. Any kind of depth metaphor had become deeply untrendy. Shouldn’t there be something else? Usually, the job of articulating a something else goes to the intellectuals, but the intellectuals were no longer interested. The whole of history, cave paintings, stark pyramids in the desert, the bloody struggle for freedom on every continent-it had all just been one big conveyor belt, built solely to deposit us in front of the United Colors of Benetton.
“The peak of your civilization.” All the great battles had been won and all the big questions were now settled. History was over the world had settled into its final form: society as one giant mall, a consumer utopia built on limitless credit. The dying years of the twentieth century were the best time there’s ever been to see through the bullshit of society. The red pill/blue pill metaphor has survived the last two decades, which should be strange: the choice it describes no longer exists.
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