Our mind makes predictions about what it thinks we will see, and shows us hallucinated projections of the near future. When a baseball batter sees a ball traveling towards them, they’re not seeing the actual ball, but a hallucinated projection of where the mind thinks the ball will travel. The batter swings at the hallucination. If all goes well, the hallucinated ball is temporally synched to where the actual ball should be. When we zoom out from the mechanics of motor function and temporal synchronization, the story of visual perception becomes even more unstable.

We can think of magic as a type of media. One that operates in the world of preconscious perception, playing with associations, expectations, symbols, and other forms of media to alter perception, to influence behavior, to affect the physical world, and to produce any number of other effects. To study magic is to study the quirks, foibles, and everyday hallucinations that characterize human perception, and to use those gaps between reality-as-it-is and reality-as-it-is-perceived as a vehicle for making supernatural-seeming interventions into perceived reality.

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.

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?