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“The world has become a planetary Nozick Experience Machine, mediated by the ubiquitous smartphone. Everyone is plugged in, desperate for their pleasure fix, for their likes, their approvals. They have become addicted to hyperreality, yet hyperreality is soulless. It can’t satisfy exactly because it lacks, well, reality. You have been told you can have it all, you can have the perfect life. You can’t. However, you can be presented with images and experiences as if you had achieved it all. But you haven’t. You have to buy into the fantasy, but deep down there’s something missing. What is missing is you. You yourself have become hyperreal, which means you have lost the real you, and nothing can make up for the loss of yourself. You have become fixed to your persona, your mask, and now there is nothing beneath the mask. When you take the mask off at the end of an exhausting day of faking it, there’s no real face underneath, just a faked face, or a blank space. We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.” — Mark Romel