Attempting to escape the tyranny of the instantaneous culture that predominates, the subject effects a strategy wherein the personal and cultural past that they carry with them is dissolved into the deep-time of archaic, pre-human history and present. Personal identity, with its weight of memory and regret are among the social functions that in today's extreme situations are tested and found wanting. In contrast with older individuals for today's young the dissolution of personal memory and identity that have occurred is experienced not as a disaster but as liberation.

The "society of the instant" believes in nothing. All ideology has gone; there is just a scramble for attention. There is a vacuum. What people have most longed for, which is the consumer society, has come to pass. Like all dreams that are fulfilled, there results a nagging sense of emptiness. Entertainment has become to dominate industry, consumption the core of the economy and boredom the principle evil. Technology has become eroticised, war and politics reinvented as branches of the media, and the paparazzi of tabloid papers/magazines have emerged as proxies for a public of voyeuristic stalkers.

In a society in which scarcity has been overcome, what is most threatening is a loss of desire. Contemporary economies are founded on the insatiability of the public want. Because these are so quickly sated, the economy now comes to depend on the manufacturing of transgressive desires/actions. The functioning of the 21st Century economies have reached a situation that requires mass psychopathology. We have a vision of individual fulfilment in a time form of nihilism.

That no persons have identities is one of the main tenets of the Marquis de Sade's counter-ethics. Only a few individuals – the future Nietzscheans – are authentic anti-persons. Since they are not individuated, they are uniquely identified by the evil narratives they pursue. All other people are mere objects – junk to be marked or discarded mechanisms which produce blood, sweat, and tears. In this manner, the ethical ideal of shared human dignity is a basic falsehood. Sade's logic is anti-humanistic. Sade's counter-ethics describes the principles of living according to a wicked design, or baroque style of life. The basic rules require one to choose goals which are cruel and transgressive.

In the contemporary condition the anti-social activities – crimes of violence/theft/delinquincy – have been the focus of our darkest fears and imaginings about social disintegration and disorder. (Bored youth enjoying the "fruits" of urban civilization - shooting-up/hanging-out/ enacting vandalism and engaging in under-age sex). Somehow the results are darkly glamorous. There exists something exceptionally dangerous about the human condition. If the opportunity is there, the impulse to sink can be every bit as powerful as the need to rise.

"I'II follow you into Hell sooner than leave my hatred at the gate."
~ ~ Jean Genet