Skip to content
Pathfinding
Blog

In the Desert of the Real - by Paul Kingsnorth

In the Desert of the Real - by Paul Kingsnorth

Section titled “In the Desert of the Real - by Paul Kingsnorth”

In the Desert of the Real

Metadata

Section titled “Metadata”

Highlights

Section titled “Highlights”
  • I looked around me in that moment, and the sheen of dull normality that my mind had constructed around the supermarket experience briefly fell away. You probably know what this feels like: sometimes, just for a minute, the stories that support your life may dissolve, and something raw will be revealed. What was revealed to me was how fake the whole thing was. I saw then what was lurking below the cellophane and the slogans and the special offers. I saw the sheer unnaturalness of this way of obtaining food, and the unnaturalness, too, of our wandering these straight-lined, strip-lit, plastic aisles inside this giant metal box instead of gathering mushrooms from a forest floor. I saw identical produce in identical boxes on identical shelves. I saw lumps of meat sheared from the carcasses of living creatures bred in slavery in factory farms, hung and stunned in abattoirs, sealed in plastic and shelved beneath a picture of a field in the sun. I saw the planes flying in bulk boxes of aubergines and peppers from other continents, and the sweatshops where the cheap trainers and trousers and brittle plastic toys were made for us by the silent poor, and the marketing meetings where people sat around designing slogans for the door stickers and the sustainability leaflets. I saw the canning factories and the shipping containers and the mines and the fertiliser plants and the site clearance operations and the annual shareholder meetings. I saw the machinery of this great operation, in which I was just one tiny, nameless tube in the global delivery mechanism between production and consumption. It was all brutal, cynical and fake, and I was fake too, part of the great game of it, wandering through, playing along; paying the price, but never the full price. Not yet.
  • I’ve noticed for a few years that the grimier the consuming experience gets, the more florid becomes the language in which it is wrapped. The deepest human emotions are engaged to flog us cornflakes, shampoo and dog food; we are drowning in strategically commercialised passion. My daughter recently told me that the last time she bought some shoes, the box was emblazoned with the slogan We’re all about love. The Irish grocery chain Centra, a low-budget high street supermarket, is currently beating all competition for this approach to advertising with this TV slot, which consists of 2.5 minutes of lifestyle hectoring, and no information at all about what they actually sell.
  • As a result it increasingly feels like nothing is true and nothing is real - and yet we can’t quite see what is actually wrong. Where are the joins? How are they glued together? What is this feeling of discomfort, of unreality, that comes from simply existing amongst all this? Whatever it is, it is this feeling, more than any event or argument, which seems to define our times. Everything is fake now, and we all know it - but how else can we feed ourselves?
    • Note: cf. Adam Curtis on the sense of unreality
  • The boundaries between real and fake were already blurring, and soon we would no longer even be able to see them. Soon after that we would forget there had ever been boundaries at all. Then things would really get freaky. Information would devour content and then replace it. The sign would no longer point to the signified - it would point to nothing at all. Hyperreality would not simply be confused with reality. It would replace it entirely, and we would all be living in it.
  • Everyone lives in the desert of the real: the Matrix is designed to promote an illusion of freedom and choice to people who have neither. Those who manage to escape it are brutally outnumbered and faced with horrors they have never been prepared for. Some of them react by trying to get back in again: even though they know the Matrix is an illusion, they prefer the illusion to what reality has become.