In Third Reich Germany, Charlotte Beradt began to notice how her own dreams expressed what, in a totalitarian state, she was unable to say. She asked others about their dreams, and wrote them down. What we can't say, can emerge in dreams.
I'm riveted. This is my territory. How does one become a totalitarian subject? What—aside from the threat of violence—are the necessary conditions?, Zadie Smith asks in a review of a new English edition of this book of dreams. Now, in our times, do people mistake control for comfort? Are they nesting in algorithms? Are social media sucking out the marrow of our attention? There is much talk from E. Musk about freedom of speech. What has happened to freedom of thought? The OED's word for this year (they add a word every year) is brainrot (from too much mindless screen time). What kind of dreams does brainrot give you?
Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books ends her essay on The Third Reich of Dreams: the nightmares of a nation with an update: a talk she gave to 400 14 year-olds in Barcelona, ostensibly about fiction, but really they wanted to talk about social media. It was hard to get rid of slavery— it took riots, murder, changes in the law — the Third Reich needed world war two to bring it to an end. All you have to do to get rid of social media, she said to her young audience, is to look the other way.
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