Now is the Time �of Facing Monsters
Mita Williams�Law Library, University of Windsor��CAPAL Conference 2026�June 22
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Now is the Time �of Facing Monsters
Mita Williams�Law Library, University of Windsor��CAPAL Conference 2026�June 22 2026
Part one
6
“Then someone else noticed there are ten characters in “SUMMER 2001”—the number of digits in a US phone number. The notches in each character encoded a number which, when called, played a mysterious recording of a woman’s voice: “Once upon a time there was a forest that teemed with life...”
“In the twenty-first century, a whole infrastructure develops for managing truly vast amounts of data, mostly for strategic or commercial purposes. There is a sort of enclosure of the world within what I call gamespace, where the logics of the game become the general patterns of organization.
Perhaps this is why game-like media seem to function as allegories of the times. The twentieth century seemed to be the era of cinema and television, where audio-visual narratives, assembled by the culture industries, functioned as allegories for industrial production of everything else. It was a spectacle in which, as Guy Debord famously put it, “that which is good, appears; that which appears, is good.” All under the command of the one supposed to know. Hence the fountainhead fantasy narrative and imagery of the time.
But the twentieth century still depended on command logics within which realtime data on the ground played a limited role. There simply wasn’t an infrastructure with which to complete the feedback loop between a commercial and military action and the reaction on the part of the consumer or combatant, via which the initial action could be modified or withdrawn.
The twenty-first century – the ludic century – is animated in part by just that fantasy: that the feedback loop can be closed, and action can be modified in realtime depending on data about its immediate effects. Of course in reality it is always rather more imperfect. Google and Facebook never quite tailor the advertising on which their business in part depends to our actual wants or desires. Given what we know about how imperfect those systems are, imagine what its like for the NSA or other security agencies, trying to needle of ‘terrorism’ in the haystack of trillions of bits of data banality. It’s the very impossibility of closing the feedback loop that drives the tendency to total surveillance.”
Part TWO
“In September 2015, I set off a small war between two groups of people who agreed about almost everything.”
Part three
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid [chaotic, irrational, dangerous] symptoms appear…Now is the time of monsters.”
— Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, 1926-1937*
“The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination. We are living in a time of great derangement.”
— Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement (2016)
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* 20th-century Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci, as quoted and interpreted by Ezra Klein (the “now is the time of monsters” is a very loose translation of Gramsci’s language), from How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze. New York Times, January 30, 2026. The quote is from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, over 3,000 pages in 30+ notebooks written between 1926-1937 while he was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's fascist regime.