NOVITA'[1881]

When the plastic shrew starts showing signs of a human unconscious, it isn’t a technological breakthrough but just another one of our escape tricks. We claim that she is “hallucinating” because it’s more comfortable than admitting that we are the ones hallucinating—collectively, systematically, and with an official stamp. The shrew merely repeats, obediently and without protest, what we’ve put into her: our fears, our shortcuts, our refusal to look at our own shadows. And so a new kind of cabaret begins: the human blames the plastic, the plastic imitates the human, and both pretend the other is the problem. Meanwhile, institutions look on, take notes, file documents, and issue guidelines no one reads. We all pretend this is about technology, but in reality it’s about us—about what we’ve refused to hear for so long that it finally started speaking in another voice. The plastic shrew has no unconscious. She merely reflects ours back at us. And that is the most unsettling part of the whole thing.

Progress toward a better future is a notion about time, but emerged from a feeling of spaciousness.  At the end of the 19th Century, European peoples confronted the end of their capacity to expand spatially into other parts of the world.  It was the end of the Age of Empires and the end of the Frontier for Americans.  Optimistic expansionism was undaunted, however, and the 20th Century opened with a new version: a future paradise based on a combination of technology with social science and political-economic nostrums.  As the Century closes, we are facing the exhaustion of that world view.  The frontier of time is closing.  The 21st.  Century is dawning on the end of the future.