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  Perhaps the line "The 20th C. was a mistake" is a bit inflammatory as there were some very good things to come out of the century (progress for civil rights, a change in attitudes towards colonization, medical breakthroughs, etc.). The ways in which our societies in the West function though seem to have taken a poor turn. I think that a lot of the progress of the 20th C. falls prey to the idea that all progress must be a positive, when in fact some progress could be seen as a side step or a backwards step.   In this idea of Hauntology and that media consumed in our youth helps plant the seeds for how we continue to think about ideas, there was one summer in my youth that I picked up a book from the library. I never finished the book, but I think that some of the ideas that it helped inspire me to think about have continued in my mind. The book was The Great War: Walk in Hell by Harry Turtledove. (If an earworm is a song that we can't get out of our head because we didn...

  Ghosts of My Life by Mark Fisher begins with a passage about a British sci-fi television programme called Sapphire and Steel that was shown on ITV from 1979 to 1982. The premise of the series is that there are two characters, Sapphire and Steel, who are sent to fix problems with time breaking down. They are not quite human with special abilities like telekinesis, reading the history of objects, and the two of them being able to communicate mentally. As Fisher puts it, “Anachronism, the slippage of discrete time periods into one another, was throughout the series the major symptom of time breaking down.  In one of the earlier assignments, Steel complains that these temporal anomalies are triggered by human beings’ predilection for the mixing of artefacts from different eras.” (pg5) The first story was about how the saying of nursery rhymes worked as an incantation across time. This was because they have been said over and over again throughout time that these words become t...