Prologue

The prologue situates this book within the epoch of post-truth, when society and humanity have grown apart, and ‘reality’ and ‘feeling’ have become one. The broader context is the Anthropocene, marked by a series of lifeways systematically exploiting the sources of production. In communication and technology, one-directional signals or ‘simplexes’ block off the contradicting input in parallel that could humanize. The result is, among others, polarization, populism, dehumanization, racism, conspiracy hypes, memetic escalation, a-historicism, dogmatic positivism, emo-cracy and identity politics, but also technologies of automation, massification, human resources formatism, algorithmic preprocessing, surveillance and remote-controlled warfare. Simplex phenomena dissociate feeling from meaning whereafter emotions can be manipulated. The diagnosis of Part I (Simplex Frames) comes with a remedy in Part II (Tensors of the Undertow). We have reason for optimism. In a knowledge society, whose currency is language instead of capital, altered vocabulary can end discrimination and injustice. The media-savvy generations are destined to drag us out of post-truth. They know about ‘tensors’ that stretch the simplex back to life. They cultivate intuition, the missing link between spirituality and knowledge.