I am trying to recall these books in chronological order, and I'm already failing. I think this is the second book that changed me. Anyways.

I remember reading this book around 2011. I had just discovered drugs, alcohol, and I was working my first job. The book is already good, but in the same way psychedelics are. It makes the mundane profound, or reframes the mundane in a profound way, and it also lies to you. Or maybe my experience of this book is bound to my experience of life at that time.

My memories of this book are tied up in a haze of vivid psychedelia, and I could see its image of society everywhere. As I write about this book I almost feel disturbed. Maybe this book profoundly changed me by giving me a small dose of schizoidal affect that I never recovered from. But from then on I felt like everything was so clear: the way human beings and their societies are intimately bound up with the technologies that enable them, the way our society has been impacted by the creation of mass media, and the way technology and mediated experiences have colonized our social lives.

For a while I walked around feeling like I had been gifted a special vision. I don't really feel that way anymore, but if you press me I haven't rescinded these beliefs. If anything the evolution of society since then has only confirmed the worst from this book. The pervasive hostility of the internet, the obsession with increasingly granular forms of representation, the stupid moralism surrounding art and artists, I still think it all boils down to perceiving oneself as a commodity among commodities instead of a person among persons.

Anyways, this isn't the last book that gave me this feeling. I became increasingly obsessed with the impact of technology on humanity, and of human beings as a technological species. If you look at the list again that will be clear. I guess I will write another of these posts soon.