in the deep autumn, still raining. a sick planet, a missing book

A book vanishes and it cannot be found, nobody has any idea where its disappeared to, a slim volume of elegant prose hidden somewhere in the stacks. One moment there, hours or days later when looked for again it has gone. They have this idea. that the mass-media, social media and mass-consumption are some sense an ideal. version that is necessary for their lives to be fulfilled. After an hour of looking through the shelves its become clear that the book is not where you thought it should be. It is scarcely imaginable that anyone can think like that. It is understandable how to live with, to share an environment, with them but to think they are necessary in these forms, not at all. They believe that the spectacle is a utopia (false, true of Castells etc) even as the ocean fills with plastic, becomes increasingly acidic, the sky fills with carbon and methane, local space with the chips of paint satellites and launches. What makes the specialist in waste despair ? Vast amounts of waste that cannot be cleared up because […] the costs are too great for the spectacle to bear if its to produce the glittering objects that constitute the ideal. The ideal pollutes their imaginaries as much as it does the air they breathe.