What have we really gained from the blitzkrieg advance of technology of the past three decades? Are we more enlightened, or less? Are we more or less hopeful of the future? More prosperous? More humane? Or are we collectively moving backward, and the platitudes preached in favor of technological advancement begin to ring increasingly hollow? What actual culture can we say exists now because of our hyperconnected world? Our paychecks buy less and less, and the world around us offers no real reprieve. Real culture of the past is being replaced with a cheap cut-out faux culture. Our architecture is a good weathervane for where we are, and it is pitiful. New buildings are boxes, no character, no soul. Intentionally ugly, it seems. Cars, clothes, music, all so hideous that it can’t be accidental. Everyone zombie-walking while staring at the plastic rectangle in their hands, ready to get home to the larger wall rectangles, the things that are increasingly becoming their entire world. We’re all distracted, and meant to be. Heroin-pure distraction is the new designer drug, further refined and distilled in Silicon Valley labs. An opium den that you carry with you, and never emerge from. We pay for it with our humanity, with our past, and with our future.
One of France's oldest companies, a 600 years old foundry, just went bankrupt because it "could no longer cope with the explosion in energy prices."
These guys survived the Middle-Ages, dozens of wars, plagues, Nazi occupation, but couldn't survive Europe's current suicide pact. https://t.co/6pAdSmEtsP
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) November 4, 2025
