Hypermodernity And the End of the World w/ John David Ebert & Michael Kamins

 On this edition of the Parallax Views, comparative mythologist and media theorist John David Ebert returns to discuss his book, co-authored with Brian Francis Culkin, Hypermodernity and the End of the World. Along with John, poet Michael Kamins, who provides the preface for the book, also joins us to turn this episode into a roundtable discussion on the current zeitgeist and the apocalyptic anxieties that accompany it. Given the jam-packed nature of this over two-hour juggernaut of an auditory adventure for mind, it may be best to list some of the topics covered in bullet points:

- What is hypermodernity?
- The strange synchronicities of Ingersoll Lockwood's Baron Trump novels and The Last President
- The history of media from stone tablets to the Gutenberg press and finally the digital age
- An analysis of David Cronenberg's Videodrome and it's relations to the ideas of media theorist Marshall McLuhan
- Conspiracy theories, semiotic excess, and pattern recognition
- 9/11 as a "Hyksos event"; a catastrophe presaging a new epoch
- Neoliberalism and Silicon Valley capitalism; the commodification of human relations
- Trump phenomenon as the return of Caesarism; immanentizing the eschaton; the internet as Terence McKenna's transcendental object at the end of time
- The philosophical problem of transhumanism; catastrophic climate change
- Reality television politics and the Truman Show; the Truman Show Syndrome, the Mandela Effect, the Berenstain Bears Conspiracy