The condition of the United States in the post-postmodern, or post-post-irony period. It's what the country will become when there is nothing left but mediated images of its substance.

The condition of the United States positively announces the lack of substance, of unifying principle from the start: that consensus is a lie, and that the absence of consensus is a necessary condition for, not the dissolution of the political entity, and its reconstruction according to both viral and virtual principles, which, are, in practice, user-generated.

The condition of the United States in the post-postmodern, or post-post-irony period. It's what the country will become when there is nothing left but mediated images of its substance.

All media is moving, at light speed, toward development through viral channels.

I moved straight from kindergarten ,at age 4, to graduate school to my position at Lake Forest ,at age 26. No break. No bumming around Europe. No peace corps. No corporate cubicle job. No stint as a Starbucks barrista.

I certainly want people to read what I've written. Yet, and here's that question of economic position, because I have a secure job, I don't need a wide readership to survive. I'm a participant in the indirect economy, what sociological critic Pierre Bourdieu would call the "economic world reversed." I get "paid" by writing whatever I choose. That's a pretty good position to be in, but I don't pretend for a moment that it is not a privileged one.

I'm a bit skeptical about the possibilities for resistant fiction, and even more despondent over the potential for politically engaged writing to do much of anything outside the dominant means of production and distribution.