... like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a

hinge, or secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have

been given names? Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply

refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite.”*

On the occasion of the opening of the first-ever direct flight from the Polish city of Wroclaw

to the South Korean capital, Seoul, the head of the local branch of the multinational

corporation, LG Group, proclaimed that the flight would serve to “[close] the psychological

distance between the two countries.” They likely invested in the connection because more

than half of the Korean community in Poland lives in Lower Silesia where Wroclaw is the

regional capital. Many of them work in South Korean companies, including the world’s

biggest lithium-ion battery production facility, owned and run by LG.

This stuck with me. But, of course, it wasn’t a surprise to read about a higher-up manager

in a large conglomerate speaking positively about an attempt to safeguard their workers

from the sense of painful isolation that may arise in someone when they find themselves

working far away from home. This flight is meant as a remedy, I thought. A high-speed link

that short-circuits any such homesickness.

However, this statement pertains to a more general condition which is hardly resolved

through this manner of well-intentioned Taylorism. It is the psychological condition of

homelessness resulting from living with a lack of familiar language, customs, foods, media

– friends and family, and so forth**. And this way of life is a consequence of a state of things

which, by now, have been given many names: planetarity, or omnipresent technological

acceleration, accidental computational megastructure, singularity, or even just machine

time.*** Named here, are various theoretical attempts at mapping the technological rupture

in the psycho-social landscape in which contemporary life plays out. The planetary aspect

of this is that the same computational logics appear across all global classes all at once.

The child of the software engineer, who’s not allowed a smartphone before they turn

fifteen, and the poor teenage farmer, who turned their remote existence into a live-stream

operation, are both reacting to the same system of instantaneous digital transmissions.

I remember once asking a friend if they thought they were punk enough for planetarity. I

asked because I believe – as I did then – that planetarity has a far more depressive affect

than one might immediately think. It is not exactly cosmopolitanism... it’s not Boarding

Gate-style sexy globalism.**** It’s rather a sense of immense scale and a deflation of

subjective meaningfulness. It is an oppressive feeling. It is inescapable. It is a feeling of an

off-set home, a home that is only ever just of out of reach. It’s disorientation.

It hurts to accept that you are not going to wake up one morning and feel at home

anywhere and that the only real antidote is the moment of clarity you find when staring out

the airplane window while last night’s designer drugs are still rippling through your veins.

The actual tranquillity is a moment fully enclosed in transit. The publicly prescribed solution

manifests as the sense of uncanny familiarity that you might experience at bar, at a club,

or a clothing store – for that matter – where it is obvious that its entire interior has been

downloaded from a curated database.

This is to say that the creeping feeling engendered by this current state of the world comes

from the simultaneous evaporation of things you think you know and their substitution by

the incredibly generic. I guess you can try to guard yourself from this, similarly to what LG

tries to do for their workers, but clinging to tradition in alien loops sounds like a cope to

me.

It all reminds me of a famous note about the creature of the snail and the genesis of

stupidity: “The emblem of intelligence is the feeler of the snail [...] Meeting an obstacle, the

feeler is immediately withdrawn into the protection of the body, it becomes one with the

whole until it timidly ventures forth again as an autonomous agent. If the danger is still

present, it disappears once more, and the intervals between the attempts grow longer.”*****

The snail senses nothing with it’s feelers retracted, but it is home. The condition of

homelessness gives you no choice but to naively send out your probes, while knowing too

well that they may only come back bruised. The homeless know that there is no shelter

from the new and nor should there be.