“Identikon has convinced its customers that their egos and bodies are the properties and agents of the brand. A synthetic identity may or may not have a use-value that coincides with its natural characteristics, but in any case ego and body can only take action within the stated framework for ‘owning identity’. That is, as the Identikon corporation develops and markets its products and identifies commercial territories and targets for its own profit.” — Lilian Lioski, The Identikon Files

Education was data, and bureaucracy hedonism. Information was knowledge, love was pornography, and philosophy software. The purpose of Art was to remove suffering by becoming an adjunct of pseudoscience. The blockhead office clerk was a religious icon, the snake oil salesman an intellectual genius.

All the characters in the fiction processed language to let imagination breathe within the confines of a novel strategy in which the arc of Nasrul was a trivial pursuit with no winners or losers. Nas had been invented by an unacknowledged legislator of the world for their own amusement.

Scholars whose chosen subject matter was the political ambience of the environment in which they lived, moved and had their being, were writing about politicians as if describing the structural preconditions which had produced such creatures would cause a revolution.