In a post-digital world, the Named garment achieves something our social networks cannot. We may never meet the three-dimensional version of our complete online cohort. But Minnie has a name. Order her. She’ll arrive at your door. Touch her. Smell her. She’s real. She’s yours.
In the opening scene of Julia Leigh’s debut film Sleeping Beauty, Lucy (Emily Browning), our beautiful college-student protagonist, serves as a medical test subject. She leans her head back as the doctor slowly threads a tube down her throat, then fills a balloon in her chest with air while she holds the tube in place.
The appeal of Rush, however, is that being a Rush fan seems to exempt one from such constraints and anxieties, from feeling required to validate tastes by advertising them. No matter how counterintuitive or ironic things become, throwing on a Grace Under Pressure tour shirt or air-drumming to “YYZ” isn’t likely to impress anyone. How
We might consider making things that can’t sink. One good way to do this is to not build boats. But there are landslides, and many houses are placed along the sea. Once you open the door to non-sinkability, it’s hard to know where you reasonably stop. Or perhaps a boat made of water, but that
Grindr is an app men can put on their phones to find other men to have sex with. But it automates the work that once made a subversive and politically potent world.