the series turned into a fancy puzzle without any external referents

the internet's constantly churning charnel house of pointless provocation

Jean Baudrillard termed hyperreality—a network of surface appearance so densely configured and mediated through the manipulation of images as to displace our sense of what’s real. What we think of as the financial system is something that resides only on the surface

We can continue to think of the story of the last forty years as the rising global reach of neoliberalism, and this hermeneutic explains a lot—nearly everything, in fact.