In this article, you can read the editorial from our last newsletter of this year written by Eidolon-editor Endre Cserna, which was sent out on September 18, 2025. We publish our monthly editor's letters, in which we reflect on recent events, approximately a week after the newsletter is out.
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Dear Readers,
In the course of research for an upcoming Eidolon project, I came across an abundance of camera and mobile phone advertisements from around the turn of the millennium. Their imagery and the designs themselves of the devices radiate the full force of Y2K aesthetics: fluidity, minimalist and cold futurism, hyper-connectivity, multiculturalism, chrome sexuality, androgyny, and a very special kind of optimism. These visual worlds did not merely promote devices but projected a horizon where technology and human experience were merging into a seamless flow, promising empowerment through mediation.
At their core lay the wager of cyberspace: It sought to use the tools of cybernetics to blur the boundaries between the sphere of technological-digital virtuality and the philosophical-ontological meaning of virtuality. However, I would not want to make the mistake of describing the unchartable and hyperabstract system of cybernetic capitalism as if it could be neatly summarised like a simple equation. The situation is far more complex, and we are sorely lacking the means of understanding it. Still today, we all flounder within the exceedingly intricate labyrinth of digital networks, economic systems, and processes of consciousness.
The neoliberal hegemony of the 1990s and early 2000s provided the ideological framework for this. Instead of the suffocating, oppressive milieus of twentieth-century factories and political regimes, it placed at the centre the incessant impulses of consumption and popular culture. As Hungarian scholar of ideology Viktor Kiss puts it in his book Outside/Inside: A New Political Logic* [Kívül/Belül. Egy új politikai logika], today technical progress and global challenges have led to a situation in which capitalism guarantees the everyday happiness of individuals not merely through commodities but by reshaping reality itself into something multidimensional and fragmented.
“Capitalism today not only creates images of reality and renders them attainable through consumption, but directly produces realities themselves, selling the places, the spaces, the very foundations of sociality.”
Among these spaces, Kiss distinguishes three:
Spaces of consumer realities (gyms, malls, entertainment venues, etc.), which, through their aura, suggest they can provide experiences unattainable elsewhere. Decontextualised spaces, those “non-places” stripped of all context, history, and identity (residential complexes, highways, airports, and American motels, among others). And most importantly for us, the spaces of virtual worlds, which can potentially generate any constellation of reality and make it into a lived experience. These include, among others, social media platforms, online marketplaces, and videogames. “The fragmentation and multipolarity of reality, the production of consumer, virtual, and decontextualised spaces, have resulted in the position of outside and inside becoming fluid, relative, and complex.”
The Janus-faced – part digital photography, part digital trace data – images we create and share on social media platforms are not merely products of popular or online folk culture through which the ideologies of our age’s sensibilities are expressed. Their platforms are simultaneously formative virtual worlds of Cybercapital, where perception, within their interiors, is subordinated to the logics of consumption.
“The cyber-self, therefore, is no longer a subject, for it does not regard itself as the bearer of social relations, but as an isolated (unconstrained) actor of a consumer universe.’” Accordingly, our “cyberpunk” present is at once total and fragmented. It offers no exits, but neither does it provide stable points of reference. From the standpoint of the individual, one might call this a kind of “psychedelic” capitalism. Much like the closed experience of a psychedelic trip, there is no stepping outside of its immanence, and recognising the patterns among the overwhelming, thrilling, and to us illogically shifting stimuli proves especially problematic. Yet despite this, our inner experience is that even as our sense of self dissolves, we are, somehow, still in the right place. When we share images, we not only generate these stimuli but also absorb them into ourselves.
But there is another twist. This aesthetic has once again become fashionable online, recreated both through traditional means and AI-generated imagery. (Maybe we also included some fake ones here as illustrations. Who knows?) While such works reproduce the look of Y2K with perfect surface fidelity, they miss the ideological point. What was once embedded in a cultural logic of cybernetic optimism and neoliberal expansion is now often reduced to a hollow formal gesture, a nostalgic style detached from the conditions that first made it meaningful. And yet it is telling that the techno-optimist world of the late 1990s and early 2000s now appears as a place we long to return to.
Perhaps back then a future still seemed to exist.
Still, we have every reason to be optimistic! The second Eidolon Grant open call received more than 300 applications, and we are very grateful for the trust and creativity of all applicants. We are very much looking forward to presenting in October the projects we would like to support. Meanwhile, the works of last year’s winners are being published one after another – you can read the newest ones on this link.
Best regards,
Endre Cserna
Head of Programming at Eidolon Centre
*Unfortunately, Viktor Kiss’ book has not been translated into English, so all quotations are my own translations.
You can find all previous editor's letters at this link.
