Transcendental System

Mark Fisher offers another image for contemplation, this time updated for the early twentieth-first century: an image intensified by its sequential, mutating multiplicities without a future and without any sense of shared experience. After all, a shared experience of togetherness is rather discouraged by the increasingly privatized and personalized algorithmic cultures of the present: ceaseless motion without progression, recursively reiterating communications technologies without human connection, algorithmically optimized behavior standardization, and hourly upgrades without innovation. So, rather than the speed train, airliner, or automobile, "the twenty-first century," Fisher writes, "is perhaps best captured in the 'bad' infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a timetrap."