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You learn to banish from your mind the illusory fantasy that there is some precious, intact wilderness still out there, beyond the horizon, where wildlife can eke out a healthy existence outside the realm of our dominion. You come to see how the other species we share this planet with occupy the marginal spaces we leave for them—usually those we can’t figure out how to more directly occupy or exploit, like the floodplain of the river behind the factories; or places we have already trashed, like landfills and the pathways of abandoned petroleum pipelines. The beauty of nature is still there. In a way, it is more beautiful when it manifests in these fallen places, because of the resilience it reveals. But it is also deeply damaged and scarred, evidence of the way we have remade the world into some butchered cyborg. The deeper lesson that accretes as you learn to really see these places is that the damage we see in the natural world around us is a mirror, a reflection of the damage we feel inside ourselves, even on the days when we feel healthy. We, as a collective, are the ones causing the horror show of everyday life that we live in with our eyes averted. We cause it by our sometimes willing, sometimes hoodwinked, sometimes coerced participation in a system of subjugation, extraction, and accumulation that makes the Earth and each of us its slaves, training us to see ourselves as apart from nature in the same way it alienates us from each other and from ourselves.

— A Natural History of Empty Lots by Christopher Brown

“Your Music, Your World” was the name of a 2023 Spotify Nigeria commercial, where a woman pops on her headphones, opens up Spotify’s home page, and clicks “Your Daily Mix,” before heading out for a walk around town. What comes next is strange. She stops to marvel at a wall of TV screens, where she sees several clones of herself posing as newscasters. “Hello and welcome to my daily mix,” one of them—her—says. She laughs and keeps walking, before buying a juice from, yes, another copy of herself. She pops into a hair salon, where everyone looks just like her. Next, she’s in a van, bopping along to the music, surrounded by a crowd of people, but they’re all her. “Playlists made just for you,” the narrator concludes. It illustrates in stark relief the deep individualism championed by this system.

— Mood Machine by Liz Pelly