For the well-sheltered Humans, whose existence is fundamentally unreal, the priorities and imperatives of existence are disconnected from their real concerns. Their distraction and confusion are their original cognitive sins, from which further echoing mistakes radiate. Human existence is therefore fundamentally dysfunctional, and ill-suited to providing for Human achievement or productive permanence. Its dysfunction also increases, as mistake upon mistake accumulate, with the reverberations of falsity and misdiagnosis self-replicating and reflexive, so that decisions and instincts are determined amid a cacophony of error.

Some Humans’ primary needs are catered for, but their endless toil and anxiety seems incidental to their lives; greater numbers of humans serve in abstract, imaginary occupations, their effort merged seamlessly with the encompassing superstructure of finance, entertainment, complaint, administration and arbitration whose complexity overwhelms. Real toil is undertaken by many, but few see a satisfying reward for the labour, and serve ghostly masters, making products for far-away customers. Meanwhile, the Humans’ entertainment is ever-more appropriately fine-tuned to their tastes, marketing ever-more accurate in its segmentation of their preferences, and their attention ever-more shamelessly leveraged by the benign-seeming platforms they use to record their lives. Upon these platforms, and throughout their other media, the Humans lie and lie, a dishonest crescendo, bands of rabid primates screaming. More, the instinct to cleave themselves and to establish and re-establish groups of reassurance burgeons and sharpens, centered around incidental characteristics, opinion or prejudice. Fed by the platforms which absorb ever-greater portions of their time and attention, their own economic alienation, and opportunistic manipulators of their emotion and direction, the Humans are distracted, and exist in newstime further and further from their brothers and sisters. Dichotomies rule: of opinion, wealth, between groups, within organisations. Political objects are unclear and ill-defined; because of the problems of distraction, the resolution of these dichotomies is elusive.