There’s six guys who live in this flat and all they do all day is play WoW and watch movies. Waking up at 2pm every day and there’s always just someone asleep on the bed near all the multimonitor computer setups. There’s always music playing and it feels like a recovery day every day, padding around blearily in pyjamas or underwear. Old hoodies from defunct school teams. They’ve got this system where they’re selling their excess computing power to companies and hosting all this warez, and they’re stealing the internet from the business next door anyway and getting welfare on top of all that. They’re self sufficient and never go outdoors except to buy more fast food, and even then only in the dark. But then one of them wakes up dead some heavy afternoon. He’s just dead and they don’t know why but maybe the floor covered in fast food wrappings is a clue. They don’t want to tell the cops because of the purgatory den they live in and the illegality that supports it, and as far as they know he never had any actual parents. So it’s trouble. It’s taking a long trip out to the forest and thinking about how stars are so far away for the first time in a long time. It’s sweating in the cold air and digging a hole all night with your brand new shovels to leave him alone in. And it’s a long few days cracking all his passwords to keep his identity and associated payments persisting. Until the rhythm of waking up every day at 2pm to play WoW for nine hours and half watch a movie on your other monitor takes over again. It’s the same as it ever was except now there’s a room no one ever goes in. -@grimelords_

Humans have always produced and lived within systems, cyberneticists would say, but with the advent of [Norbert] Wiener’s distinctly American philosophy, every person on Earth does or eventually will consider themselves to be ego machines negotiating systems of modulated inputs and outputs. The body is a machine; thought is energy; and both are variously connected to the machinery of power. This terror, once actively resisted by a modern ego under siege, is now openly embraced. A few vestigial pockets of humanism may no longer promote cybernetics as the key to All Known Truth, but it remains the defacto religion of science, communications, information studies, and all other positivist endeavors that believe the qualitative dynamics of subjectivity and meaning can be mastered through the quantitative administration of objective data. -Jeffrey Sconce, The Technical Delusion