Letter From the Suburbs of 2024 to JG Ballard
Dear Jim,
You were right. Everyone said it would be the city that defines the 21st century, but you always maintained it would be the suburbs.
And you were right.
The edgelands are the temporal mecca of my crumbling civilisation. Gaseous stratocumulus clouds clad the pre-emptive sky. Unwitting participants satisfy the death-drive of the corporate divine.
I say this as I observe them frequenting the fast food restaurants and discount electronics stores, never without a device attached to their one-dimensional limbs — the sheen of the interface gleaming like an inveterate compass, as the world burns around them.
I say this as the smell of fire and smoke tarnish my air. Your prescience undeniable regarding the earth’s eroding atmosphere too. The sky is blanketed by a miasma of vapor. Soaked masses wander aimlessly, corrupted by the ebbs of deep time. They glance up infrequently from the interzone to see what the planet has become. Hazy orange light leaks phosphorus minerals into the firmament. I watch as the violated wanderers return to the screens, unfazed as they rejoin the void. Addicted. Catatonic.
Billions of years of transformation having swallowed the last itinerant observers.
Suburban symbiosis overhauling order.
Expressway as icon.
An evolution in domesticated banality.
I say this because I am the luminous peripheral third eye of the populace. The consumption of content in my sphere is vast, singular, massive. Mindless streaming clicking swiping liking sharing touching pressing saving the next distraction in their incomprehensible lives. The presentation of the artificial represented as real. The horseshit food, the visions of grandeur, the trivial errands are, all, too, real.
I say this as an overweight elderly couple walk their mutant designer dog next to a dry fountain. Their flabby flesh hanging from their malnutritioned torsos like dessicated rotors.
I say this as children play amongst the supermarket trollies while their parents scroll aimlessly through a proliferation of labyrinthine information that is of no importance.
I say this because you already know all of it. I say this / and more /and more because I say this. I say this because you were right.