By James D Ellis

All Rights Reserved.

This time her tongue was out, bowing out of her mouth like a courteous slug and her lips were pursed tighter than her vanity. To the right of her, about 5ft away, a man of about 20 years old raises his selfie stick at arm’s length above him, spinning under a narcissistic hypnosis; both their sets of eyes addressing a non-existent audience, a screen of reflection only. The streets emblazoned with infectious hotspots, oversized trinkets of pop-culture ready to be visually gorged upon. The infection spreading like wild-fire, through cables and sounds waves, signals and currents, deceptively entering the minds of those it infects acting as interest and culture, replacing your taste and perception with ignorance and apathy. An auto-immune disease for our zeitgeist suffocating you internally, until you are no more.

The crowds become writhe with hedonism, what must be known must be known now! Solipsism is its philosophy, and it’s caused blindness, a cultural hierarchy of malice, for those without likes are those who are not liked. It consumes the original, spewing it out as a repeated image, out of context and instantly out of favour, seconds matter and uniformed spontaneity is king. The true tyranny is not that we’ve accommodated the virus, it’s that we’ve learned to love it, love through fear of social abandonment and rejection. And as the cities quieten, and the sky turns a static black, the virus follows all, into their homes and beds, into their thoughts and dreams. It sits, waits, and as they sleep it evolves, as they awake it is a new, an unknown, nothing of worry or recognition. You are infected, and will obey, for you need to be entertained, at all times, limiting thought and creativity, destroying trust and compassion, a self-perpetuating social dictator. You are the infection.

James D Ellis is a writer and artist living in Norwich, UK. His work takes inspiration from Absurdism and Dada. ‘Flogging a dead horse’ is an idiom that propels his nihilistic practice.