The fundamental crisis faced by members of the professional-managerial class (a.k.a. “proclassers”) is not, as they believe, difficulty managing the profuse data they abstract from reality, but, rather, keeping those abstractions in contact with any directly intuited relationship with reality.

They are alienated from reality and inhabit a world of secondhand abstractions rooted in yet more abstractions. In normal dealings with real people, they have been taught to mistrust their perceptions, intuitions and emotions and to replace whatever they experience and intuit directly with less biased, more objective conceptualizations based on categorizations and calculations of power relations, by which they can determine the correct mode of interaction.

But intuition alone gives reality its heft, solidity and depth. And it is only intuitive participation in social life that can give us any felt identity.

Life in an information simulation can offer us only social categories, deductions, calculations and executable actions. This is also a participation of a kind, but one that gives us only one identity — a right-thinking, right-acting pro-classer, who is essentially a job-holding professional with pro-social progressivist beliefs — even if that one identity encourages us to adopt secondary identities based on its schema of social categories. It is all done for the sake of the one, essential, unnamed identity, erased to preserve the illusion of objectivity.

It is all so boring, insubstantial, tedious… unreal. Such is advanced alienation. Meanwhile the meaty, dirty, visceral, hands-on world beyond the abstractions is summoning itself to catastrophe. How can a time be so simultaneously stultifying and momentous?

Once upon a time, news was an uninteresting chore, and our personal lives were fascinating.