 What I would like to do with you is a little experiment Who has read the book and I suppose very few of you, right? Okay, at least one person and a half the half is my publisher So I'd like to have Ten words are very short sentences from anyone in the audience About those Expectations and dissipations what the book suggests to you to you anyone wants to start Could be one word light I was easy Mass advertising City yes philosophy and I heard voltage, right Technology irony buzzing Okay Self thanks for that one because I really don't know what I will say about voltage So self is helpful Existence Yeah, that's more than 10 so let's stop here anyone that I didn't hear that is frustrated because I didn't hear because I Thank you piss is that a word? Okay All right So we have lights mass advertising nostalgia cities philosophies voltage technology irony Buzzing message interrogation human Was that human? Humor humor self Existence element an Emptiness and we'll start with that self and mass advertising Tradition of the French essay is more like you write as an adventure you have this Intuition you have this impression and that was really how the book started. I was walking along the Louvre one night alone and Suddenly in the middle of this very Traditional classical Paris the Louvre the point of really You could almost see dead corpses from the Middle Age suddenly there is this neon That said fast food crepe kebab tea coffee Pizza, it was the entire globalization in one near and as we heard This was really striking and I tried to avoid writing about that it suddenly took over and One of the things that I Realize is that well We are a bit like neon signs today It became an investigation on identity in the 20th century this idea that You know as a neon is made of gas and glass a very free element chaotic which expresses metaphorically All the possibilities you really can't place those particles They seem to be even sometimes in two places at the same time And then the on the other side is very rigid shape That is given to the glass that once given cannot be modified and I thought this was a really interesting metonymy for what Identity has become in the 20th century This idea that we do have in order to survive sometimes we do feel like we have to become neon signs And we go to a job interview and We have to compress ourselves into these glasses. Yeah, and this person I am me and then you go to another job interview take another shape And in fact, of course we that there was you had another shape perhaps to know And so that was one of the things I started to This idea that okay, so what How could we imagine a world in which we would be able to Express much more of that richness that we feel inside us, you know, I live in Sweden at the moment and Sweden is a wonderful place But it's a place where they really enjoy diagnosis So you meet someone it's not like hi Peter. Oh James. It's more like hi bipolar. Hi Any pick anything in the DSM five And I like to say we are multi polar That's what we are. We are multi polar and then of course because we need to exist in society We need to filter all that diversity into something and that actually Can have at least two Faces one that is Negative it if we actually are constrained into a fake image of ourselves But the other one is what artists have been telling us for centuries and it's called style and perhaps style is a good negotiation with between the necessity of arranging our Diversity into something coherent yet personal Yet reflecting the Some inner truth about the self although we can discuss with Sarge if there is something such as human nature And so that emptiness becomes in fact Those moments where we we feel low and we feel empty, but in fact perhaps we feel empty because we cannot express that Diversity I read recently that some people are starting to speak about neural diversity in the sense that you know, we have to accept more What are Considered abnormalities, you know like studying philosophy any of you have studied philosophy When I started and I was 2021 it was considered a disease And we got the word philosophy by the way good. They should they should cross them when I mentioned it. Okay, live We got that message mass advertising. Well mass advertising. We could Develop a bit in that expand as we say in academia cut or expand and where we could expand on is This time I will have a little bit of historical parentheses is The fact that neon were so popular in the 20th century that Okay, a little bit of an interrogation here That's another word. Okay interrogation Who was the nazi minister of propaganda? Yeah so gobbles Displayed a huge neon over the streets of Berlin With I'm for another example is how the Russian the Soviet Realized that neon was really an expression of The triumph of capitalism so they said we are going to have our neons to them. It was a program So neonization was we put neons to show that we also are successful And that our life is also shiny the promise that they didn't have enough shops So they decided to use neons on facades of University libraries for example Which is interesting because I discovered In doing the research that Neon was not only invented in Paris But in the first years it was considered an object Of luxury luxurious decoration and today of course When we think about neon It has become an an object of nostalgia indeed because it has been replaced by LED and One of the differences That I find striking between LED and neon lights is we were talking about that before is if you look At LED lights very close. You see that there are points Discrete points, right? Which is and now they are controlled by computers. So it's really analogous to the the bytes By the way, I was at the airport The other day here in London And I saw an advertising for a bank that I'm not named but you will recognize it And he was like a very triumphant slogan that said we are preparing a world of bytes and boxes and I thought is this ironic or irony. Yeah, okay, that's done I didn't do vaulted yet, and I don't know how And that's really the world that actually we might feel Nostalgic for a world that was yes in a way already Representing the for example the capitalization of night Right with but still a world that was ambiguous enough To leave some space For the myth of freedom for example, which was so important and which was perhaps transformed through the marketing of self-realization into this Again this nearness but today Even that fiction of freedom one might argue is disappearing and we might be again in the world of progressive full control Bites and boxes and so the paradox is suddenly neon which was a symbol of capitalism Becomes a more ambiguous symbol because there is still this Plasma this gas this Freedom that actually we one might expect can still explode the glass but can LED light Explode the glass probably not it was self-replicate like terminator. I think they're on 7 now And here it would be easy to place voltage. I Just did someone said buzz. Yeah. Yeah, that's sound right Yeah, so that's a very good conclusion because Simon and Garfunkel Call it the sound of silence and here I stop. Thank you