Dark Mode

If only it were as quick and easy as flipping a switch, like turning Dark Mode on in your smartphone or operating systems. For those who spend a lot of time looking at screens, this new option could alleviate eye strain and help save battery life. Before, the term Dark Mode would have recalled the mythic dark side of literature and/or cinema that represented a depressed humanity, overtaken by negativity, ill will, and a lack of empathy.

In this case, however, Dark Mode doesn’t refer to the abandonment of its opposite, that is, a light mode (the 20th century and the start of the 21st century can’t exactly be associated with light, despite having witnessed the total collapse of the “welfare state”). Rather, it’s as if a fog has turned our internal and external structures the color of tar. There was no coup, no strike, not even any announcement or press conference. There was no rupture or cataclysm, either, just a change in the background tone, as if reality now had less voltage.

This Dark Mode doesn’t transform what we do but it does alter the way we perceive it. Everything is the same except that everything is now dull, without hope, as if the present was powered only by inertia. Alive but having lost everything. This is the operating mode of our present, a culture that can no longer correct its flaws and must simply learn to live with them. What used to be repair is now collapse management. Each text in the series reflects some of the multiple layers of this metaphor, with war as one of the last common languages, perception as mirage and battlefield, the body as protocol, and technology as a parasitic religion. The result is a topography of collapse and sustained exhaustion.

In The militarization of the present, “war” ceases to be an exceptional event and becomes an organizational model, its logic (attack, defense, territorial control) replicated in social media, entertainment, the arts, memes and, of course, in cultural and political discourse. Confrontation guarantees attention and produces value. There are no truces because friction sustains visibility thus violence is no longer hidden. The text Say Hello to Pandemonium examines a complementary phase, that is, informational disorder. The overabundance of versions destroys any minimal agreement of what is real. In this context, each individual defends their small perceptual order as dogma while truth loses importance because it is unprofitable.

In the text BROzempic, we transfer this principle of control to the body. When an environment can no longer be stabilized, the subject stabilizes itself. The mass of flesh and life is treated as an operating system that requires constant patching. Ozempic, nicotine patches, longevity routines, and extreme productivity are all expressions of the same idea, that is, eliminating scarcity and maintaining efficiency.

Faced with this cognitive, perceptual, and corporeal decentralization, the text A Doommies’ Guide to the “New Antichrist” focuses on how technological capitalism behaves as a replacement religion. Thiel and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have created a faith in the market capable of absorbing the collective catastrophe and that of our infrastructures (internal and external, individual and collective), as well. Both desire and the tiny possibility of salvation are privatized.

Institutions, narratives, and individuals have learned to function with necrosis without having to reverse it. Management replaces politics, efficiency replaces imagination. Conflicts, beliefs, emotions, and desire are processed with the same logic that optimizes an application, that is, patches, updates, metrics, and usage time. Stability in the face of degradation becomes the only shared horizon.

We have learned to sustain our own collapse. The new order is not about rebuilding what breaks down but rather about ensuring that it keeps working.