{"id":3558,"date":"2025-09-23T14:47:29","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T14:47:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everydayphotography.org\/journal\/?p=3558"},"modified":"2025-09-23T14:47:30","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T14:47:30","slug":"editors-letter-september-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everydayphotography.org\/journal\/editors-letter-september-2025","title":{"rendered":"Editor\u2019s Letter \u2013 September, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you'd like to receive the latest editorials and other updates on Eidolon's work without waiting, please consider subscribing to our newsletter here!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Dear Readers,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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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<\/em>* [K\u00edv\u00fcl\/Bel\u00fcl. Egy \u00faj 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cCapitalism 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among these spaces, Kiss distinguishes three:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Spaces of consumer realities (gyms, malls, entertainment venues, etc.), which, through their aura, suggest they can provide experiences unattainable elsewhere. Decontextualised spaces, those \u201cnon-places\u201d 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. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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