The title is Wallace Stevens’. In his poem, the respectable townspeople sleep in white nightgowns and dream of nothing; only an old sailor, drunk and asleep in his boots, dreams of catching tigers in red weather. It is a fair description of the century now underway. The dreaming is done elsewhere, by people we did not elect, in systems we cannot see — and the rest of us sleep in white.
This first edition assembles nine writers on the machinery being built in our name. Automated media and the industrialisation of judgment. The delegation of lethal decisions to instruments no citizen can inspect. War conducted through the devices in civilian pockets. The political economy of scientific research and who is permitted to fund a question. Trust, and what happens to a state that has stopped asking for it.
Fear here is not an atmosphere. It is an architecture — a mode of government in which people are made to act against their own understanding because they cannot see who is deciding, or on what grounds. This edition is an attempt to describe that architecture accurately. It does not offer a way out of it.
Featuring Shane Alexander Caldwell, Lesely Seebeck, Michael Richardsen, Matthew Ford, Sian Troath, Mark Andrejevic, Kobi Leins, Philip Mirowski, The Stroud and Zac Rogers.
