Philosopher John Zerzan on the Imperialism of Everyday Life:

We live in a culture of increasing emptiness; there is a vacuum at the heart of our empire. Epidemics of illegal drugs succeed one another, while tens of millions, including children as young as two, need antidepressants to get through the day. A great hunger exists for anesthesia in the face of emotional devastation and loss. Everyone knows that something is missing, that meaning and value are steadily being leached out of daily life, along with its very texture.

The empire is global. There is nowhere to go to escape its corrosive barrenness. A global unity of alienness, of disorientation and disconnection, destined to resemble a mall or an airport. People now dress alike in every major city in the world. They drink Coca-Cola, and watch many of the same TV shows.

The empire's landscape of unreality and routinization grows steadily more pathological. Damage to nature and violence to the psyche compete in a postmodern culture of denial, punctuated by eruptions of the homicidal at work, at home, at school. We can expect to hear more and more alarm bells that will wake us altogether. Peaceful slumber is unthinkable.

And our response is to make ourselves generic clones of each other. Or to walk into a crowded area and just point and shoot. We live in the age of instant coffee, instant noodles, instant gratification. We try to assure ourselves that we are unique, we are rebels, and then we take a walk inside our shoe-box malls and meet other rebels like us, garbed in the same assembly-line manufactured clothing. We pause, and console ourselves that we are still unique. We know better. But we cannot confirm the denial.

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