what has become clear — though it is rarely spoken outright — is that the systems we inhabit no longer care whether we are present for them. value transfers execute, forms auto-complete, cycles recur. the hum goes on. the horror is not rupture, not disaster, but continuation.
to make this felt, consider food. once, taste was an anchor: sharp lemon, bitter chicory, the burn of pepper. taste was the sensory insistence of presence. salt on the tongue could not be outsourced. but in the procedural economy of now, taste itself has been subjected to the same smoothing logic that cancels despair.
continuation without flavor.
processed foods — the term is too gentle — are manufactured not to taste like themselves but to sustain the repetition of eating. "cheese-flavored," "fruit-flavored," "smoky barbecue" do not describe things in the world but endlessly circulating approximations. what is consumed is not taste, but the continuity of tasting. one bite is identical to the last. presence becomes redundant.
banality as anti-flavor.
when every sip of cola tastes the same, awe becomes impossible. the anti-awe of flavor is the sensation that no sensation has occurred. eating here is not pleasure but procedure: the loop of sip-swallow, sip-swallow, sip-swallow. the perfected insult is that it does not fail — it delivers exactly the same flat sweetness forever.
retroactive erasure.
flavors that once existed are recalled and then cancelled. "real strawberry" is replaced with "strawberry note," a laboratory afterimage that erases both the fruit and the memory of it. the past is rewritten as extract; the future, as shelf-stable packet. the strawberry does not disappear violently; it is administratively nullified.
smooth horror of eating.
the meal becomes an interface. taste becomes a baseline hum. hunger is satisfied procedurally, not experientially. despair and delight alike are irrelevant to the function. what matters is that the system of eating continues — endlessly, smoothly, with or without us.