The Committee to Nuke Elysium

[This is the reason why “science fiction” has today come to be pretty much the equivalent of social realism. In one sense, the most intense aspect of our lives today is our sense of futurity, of continual innovation and continual product turnover; and yet this futurity has no other content than “more of the same” (or of what Ernst Bloch called “sheer aimless infinity and incessant changeability… a merely endless, contentless zigzag”). Thus, we are always being urged to upgrade our computers, which fall quickly into obsolescence through the force of Moore’s Law; we are always looking for the next fad, the next cool thing, to such an extent that all fads and fashions seem to exist simultaneously. This urgency without change, or novelty without difference, is an expression of the commercial product cycle that dominates all aspects of our lives; it is the equivalent, on the level of content, of genre-conformity, as an expression of the claim that “There Is No Alternative”, on the level of form. As with every other aspect of its production, the strategy of Gamer in this regard is not to offer a critique, but to embody the situation so enthusiastically, and absolutely, as to push it to the point of absurdity.]