Hell

Keywords for hell: ennui, gambling, pauperism
A canon of this dialectic: fashion
The golden age as catastrophe

—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

[…] the deadly repetitiveness of time that is part of the archaic, mythic imagery of Hell describes what is truly modern and novel about commodity society.

—Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (1989)

There is a tower in Chihuahua being built called the Torre Centinela—Sentinel Tower. When complete, it will be the nucleus of an AI-powered state surveillance system: nearly ten thousand cameras, two thousand license plate readers, facial-recognition technology cross-referenced against a biometrics database. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Director of Investigations Dave Maass called it “the eye of Sauron hanging over your city” (D’Annunzio 2025). It is 370 feet tall and was built without community consultation. It is the New Tower of Babel in its most literal contemporary form: a technological structure that claims to see everything, to predict everything, to manage uncertainty by eliminating it—built not to protect but to control, and understood by those who live beneath it as an emanation of a power that is inscrutable, unaccountable, and absolute.

As we age, the names of new years tick off at an accelerating rate, mile markers on a steep mountain road climbing into ever more sparse and airless territory. The numbers become absurd, with no chart to compare them with other than the hyperbolic future settings of science fiction.

The absurdity of these numbers comes in part from their failure to measure anything but wasted resources, rotting surplus, and lives lost. Social progress has been swapped for ideas of technological progress, in which smartphones become thinner, while the production chain that assembles them still somehow involves the enslaved labor of children, hand-digging tunnels into toxic earth in some bronze-age version of hell. What feels like a life-long climb is stationary thrashing within the tangle of a net, while a moving panorama gives the illusion of ascent to the top of a great and fragile tower.

That society has failed to progress meaningfully within my life—that it builds momentum only to lurch forward before being dragged deeper into quagmire—is denied by a whole host of popular phantasmagoria and ticking numbers. I might normally be compelled to find statistics to defend my position, but statistics are, in part, what this writing was meant to address.

Suffice to say that in 2026 an American citizen cannot vote on whether bombs should be dropped on other countries in their name and with their tax dollars, but they are encouraged to gamble on when the bombs will land, using sophisticated and massively funded data analytics platforms.

As the new year 2026 rang in with embarrassment, the information bursts of social media conjured ghosts of futures-past—2026, they said, was the year in which Fritz Lang and Thea Von Harbou’s Metropolis (1927) took place.¹

I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow. (Duhigg 2018)

This from Waymo co-founder Anthony Levandowski, who attempted to install himself as “Dean” of a new religion, worshipping an eminent “AI Godhead” (Harris 2017). The “memorylessness” of predictive models becomes the process by which capitalism annihilates tradition in the search for something new, but instead creates a phony, petrified facade of newness that binds us in ways tradition could never hope to.

Benjamin’s hell—and ours—is the hell of the frozen work-clock, while the persuasive signifiers of progress start to peel away—fashion, compounding interest, processor speeds—corroding that grimacing plastic baby-mask of novelty. Hell is a time where nothing is ever finished and the years have no number, but the cemeteries crowd until they are inevitably bulldozed for real estate.

In Memory of Scot Casey 1962-2026 poet, hermit, and former manager of the FringeWare Bookstore