All Rights Reserved.<\/strong><\/p>\n This time her tongue was out, bowing out of her mouth like a\u00a0courteous slug and her lips were pursed tighter than her\u00a0vanity. To the right of her, about 5ft away, a man of about 20\u00a0years old raises his selfie stick at arm\u2019s length above him,\u00a0spinning under a narcissistic hypnosis; both their sets of\u00a0eyes addressing a non-existent audience, a screen of\u00a0reflection only. The streets emblazoned with infectious\u00a0hotspots, oversized trinkets of pop-culture ready to be\u00a0visually gorged upon. The infection spreading like wild-fire,\u00a0through cables and sounds waves, signals and currents,\u00a0deceptively entering the minds of those it infects acting as\u00a0interest and culture, replacing your taste and perception with\u00a0ignorance and apathy. An auto-immune disease for our zeitgeist\u00a0suffocating you internally, until you are no more.<\/p>\n The crowds become writhe with hedonism, what must be known\u00a0must be known now! Solipsism is its philosophy, and it\u2019s\u00a0caused blindness, a cultural hierarchy of malice, for those\u00a0without likes are those who are not liked. It consumes the\u00a0original, spewing it out as a repeated image, out of context\u00a0and instantly out of favour, seconds matter and uniformed\u00a0spontaneity is king. The true tyranny is not that we\u2019ve\u00a0accommodated the virus, it\u2019s that we\u2019ve learned to love it,\u00a0love through fear of social abandonment and rejection.\u00a0And as the cities quieten, and the sky turns a static black,\u00a0the virus follows all, into their homes and beds, into their\u00a0thoughts and dreams. It sits, waits, and as they sleep it\u00a0evolves, as they awake it is a new, an unknown, nothing of\u00a0worry or recognition. You are infected, and will obey, for you\u00a0need to be entertained, at all times, limiting thought and\u00a0creativity, destroying trust and compassion, a self-perpetuating social dictator. You are the infection.<\/p>\n By\u00a0James D Ellis All Rights Reserved. This time her tongue was out, bowing out of her mouth like a\u00a0courteous slug and her lips were pursed tighter than her\u00a0vanity. To the right of her, about 5ft away, a man of about 20\u00a0years old raises his selfie stick at arm\u2019s length above him,\u00a0spinning under a narcissistic hypnosis; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":947,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1022","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1022"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1025,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1022\/revisions\/1025"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fictioninternational.sdsu.edu\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}James D Ellis is a writer and artist living in Norwich, UK. His work takes inspiration from Absurdism and Dada. \u2018Flogging a dead horse\u2019 is an idiom that propels his nihilistic practice.<\/em><\/h4>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"