If the postwar media landscape was characterized by spectacle, and the late twentieth and early twenty-first century by an age of surveillance, then we are entering a new phase. One marked by affective computing, machine learning–enabled optimization, neuroscience, and cognitive psychology. A mediascape that has little use for distinctions between real and fake, signifier and signified. That assumes no distinction between perception and reality even as it attempts to intervene as directly as possible into the brains and emotional makeups of its experiencers.

In the twenty-first century, we can easily sense that this process of destruction and recreation is only accelerating rather than slowing down. The longing for Heimat will only be intensified instead of being diminished; the dilemma of homecoming can only become more pathological. In fact, two opposed movements are taking place at the same time: planetarization and homecoming. Capital and techno-science, with their assumed universality, have a tendency toward escalation and self-propagation, while the specificity of territory and customs have a tendency to resist what is foreign.

Textiles express ancestral knowledge of geometry and mathematics connected to the Mayan worldview, incorporating elements of politics, nature, history, and memory. Each community has different colors, embroideries, and figures that have been passed down from generation to generation. As the slogan of the National Movement of Women Weavers says: “The weavings are the books that colonialism could not burn.”

Though Hasenbosch was a victim of heteropatriarchy, he was also undoubtedly an agent of Empire. He showed no signs of resistance against the murderous unworlding campaigns of the Dutch East India Company. His only divergence from the terms of order was his sexual desire for men, which had no place in the white Christian doctrine central to the Dutch empire’s command structure. As such, Hasenbosch was exiled from the very world he had helped to propagate.

The challenge for sabotage will be to erode the gap between unavoidable delay and avoidable delay, to make avoidable delays appear unavoidable, both as a threat to employers who pay poor wages and to enable the kind of unprovability that sabotage hinges on and weaponizes. (Did the power just happen to go out, causing everything to go quiet? Or did someone knock it out?) The tactic will try, again and again, to pass resistance and fatigue out from an individual body expected to work faster, more repetitively, or for less money, back into the system of production and circulation itself.

It can be difficult to see what is lost when loss is experienced. Freud described melancholia as a condition in which what is lost, beyond any particular object, is ultimately the subject’s relation to the world, which he then describes as a topographical withdrawal back into the self and narcissism, a state he called melancholia. In the process, the relation to the external world is severely compromised. But, Anders asked, could it be possible to start from the opposite premise—that the relationship to the world is never guaranteed a priori?

When the US Constitution was drafted, the definition of the word “art” didn’t exactly coincide with today’s Art Basel version. On the positive side, Clause 8 recognized intellectual work as a form of actual labor. The founding fathers would have supported my demand for a dollar. On the negative side, Clause 8 set down guidelines that, by promoting applied knowledge in a world defined by the hope for certainty, have today culminated in the push for STEM curricula.