This book, an innovative collaboration between Shumon Basar, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Douglas Coupland, is somewhat disorientingly like reading through a 250-page printout of a complex and idiosyncratic video essay - and is all the more arresting for its style. It taps into the subjectivity of the self-aware citizen of the contemporary era; the alarming rate at which new forms of media and technology are changing the way we think and act and relate, the consumerist-celebrity-enthused cultural shambles of political spectacle and public apathy and bemusement, the dizzying horrors of the Anthropocene's onset and development. Through a combination of well-chosen and well-modified images and bluntly thought-provoking short strings of text, it's like a kind of multimedia collage, as poetic and profound as it is relatable to everyday experience.
I don't really want to add any of my own reflections about it as I feel this book (one which before flipping through it I had no idea really what to expect and ended up reading in one sitting) has enough depth of critical insight packed into its extraordinarily well-assembled pages to render pointless anything that I would add. It is an artistic experiment in exaggerative truth-telling, one that I think succeeds in mapping out some of the less-explored but highly-relevant and important contours of our extreme (and in large part unobserved in much critical detachment by those living inside it) present age. This book is a cohesive, wide-ranging, incisive and ultimately pretty bleak - the global zeitgeist in 2017 is one in which we all find ourselves weirdly sort of trying to catch up with who we are and what's going on, only to find that as soon as we get near practical understandings, things have already started changing in surprising ways. Technology, politics, social order, individual behaviours, and more, are becoming inextricably interconnected in strange and unpredictable ways - while this book is by no means a robust informational guide to these happenings, in looser terms it cuts to the heart of what is going on by presenting and subverting the absurdities that play out daily all around us.
Would I recommend this book? Eh, maybe - people growing up in the world it describes may well share my reaction of both feeling like their own world was being aptly described and their [re-?]developing a deep sense of uneasy angst. Or, give a copy to a non-millennial if you want to make them feel thoroughly uncomfortable.
I don't really want to add any of my own reflections about it as I feel this book (one which before flipping through it I had no idea really what to expect and ended up reading in one sitting) has enough depth of critical insight packed into its extraordinarily well-assembled pages to render pointless anything that I would add. It is an artistic experiment in exaggerative truth-telling, one that I think succeeds in mapping out some of the less-explored but highly-relevant and important contours of our extreme (and in large part unobserved in much critical detachment by those living inside it) present age. This book is a cohesive, wide-ranging, incisive and ultimately pretty bleak - the global zeitgeist in 2017 is one in which we all find ourselves weirdly sort of trying to catch up with who we are and what's going on, only to find that as soon as we get near practical understandings, things have already started changing in surprising ways. Technology, politics, social order, individual behaviours, and more, are becoming inextricably interconnected in strange and unpredictable ways - while this book is by no means a robust informational guide to these happenings, in looser terms it cuts to the heart of what is going on by presenting and subverting the absurdities that play out daily all around us.
Would I recommend this book? Eh, maybe - people growing up in the world it describes may well share my reaction of both feeling like their own world was being aptly described and their [re-?]developing a deep sense of uneasy angst. Or, give a copy to a non-millennial if you want to make them feel thoroughly uncomfortable.
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