EXCERPT We are sinking into a new Middle Ages. Traditionalism, fundamentalism, and the regressive policies of the new Right are corroding modernity from within, holding back its driving force, and bending technological means to military, propagandistic, and repressive ends. Extreme climate phenomena, epidemics, armies from the East pressing at the borders of the West, greedy commercial corporations, financial crises (increasingly reminiscent of waves of famine), apocalyptic paranoia spawned by millenarian cults—these are the divine plagues raging on a tormented planet. One would almost be tempted to say that the past has never been so close to the future, to the point where we cannot help but doubt whether the modern age was nothing more than one long dream: the Promised Land, peaceful and skilfully governed by cybernetics, is turning into a cybergothic nightmare marred by conflict, bigotry, and superstition. Indeed, across the globe, reactionary movements are calling for the end of modernity and a return to various prior configurations.…