“When interfacing with the machine zone via key depressions and strokes across a frictionless plane, “time, space, and social identity are suspended in the mechanical rhythm of a repeating process,” which is just the kind of technological experience that allows one to manage “the kinds of contingencies and anxieties that riddle contemporary American life.” “Those contemporary anxieties are embodied in computers, in the consensus hallucination of signifiers and theoretical systems we presume as facts beyond our control, the perceptual scar tissue of untouchable politics and impossible moralities made material as civic infrastructure and identity consumerism.”
“The branching specificity of care in these processes is erased by computers. They leave their users instead with a newly liberated chasm of time in which anxiety accumulates and disperses in cycles pegged to the identification of desires rather than their fulfillment.”