Knowing all this, I listened to Mr. Vine go on about how the ST was a better place for women than anyone realized, how his wife (my wife) had simply mistaken the simplicity of her life as a form of oppression. This is one of the darker, less contested realities of authoritarian governments—that the human animal is a meek thing, easily manipulated. No one wants to admit that they, too, might live quite happily in a simulation, in a simulacrum of life. No one wants to believe that they are, at heart, more interested in comfort than in truth.

X then went on to name names, to make an example of thirty-nine of her peers and their most celebrated works, which she deemed “full of unredeemable pettiness, violent anti-intellectualism, and fatuous notions of insight.” Her primary thesis was that “art is an expression of the society from which it emerges, not the artist in themselves,” and her primary complaint was that the relative comfort and political apathy of the Northern Territory had produced at least three generations of “money-driven fluff machines … that insult the very notion of art as a matter of existential survival.”