As for the order we live under, everyone knows what it consists of: the empire is staring us in the face. That a dying social system has no other justification to its arbitrary nature than its absurd determination — its senile determination — simply to linger on; that the global and national police have received a free hand to get rid of those who do not toe the line; that civilization, wounded in its heart, no longer encounters anything but its own limits in the endless war it has begun; that this headlong flight, already almost a century old, produces nothing but a series of increasingly frequent disasters; that the mass of humans accommodate themselves to this order of things by means of lies, cynicism, brutalization, or pills — no one can claim to ignore these things any longer. Anonymous, Call, p.3

But what is most striking, for the time being, is not the arrogance of empire, but rather the weakness of the counter-attack. Like a colossal paralysis. A mass paralysis, which will sometimes cause people to say that nothing can be done, but who will sometimes concede, when pushed to their limit, that “there is so much to do” — which isn’t any different. Anonymous, Call, p.3

We call the situation that we are backed into Global Civil War. Where there is no longer anything that can limit the confrontation between the opposing forces. Not even the law, which comes into play as one more form of the generalized confrontation. Anonymous, Call, p.5

Some have tried to name the desert. To point out what has to be fought — not as the action of some foreign agent, but as an ensemble of relations. They have talked about the Spectacle, about Biopower, about Empire. But this only adds to the current confusion. The spectacle is not an easy abbreviation for mass media. It lives just as much in the cruelty with which our own false image is endlessly thrown back at us. Biopower is not a synonym for social security, the welfare state, or the pharmaceutical industry; but it pleasantly lodges itself in the care that we take of our pretty bodies, in a certain physical estrangement from oneself as well as from others. Empire is not some kind of extraterrestrial entity, a worldwide conspiracy of governments, financial networks, technocrats, and multinational corporations. Empire is everywhere nothing is happening. Everywhere things are working. Everywhere the status quo reigns. We continue to see the enemy as a subject that faces us — instead of experiencing it as a relationship that binds us — we confine ourselves to the struggle against confinement. We reproduce the worst relationships of dominance under the pretext of an alternative. We set up shops for selling the struggle against the commodity. We see the rise of the authorities of the anti-authoritarian struggle, macho feminism, and racist attacks by anti-fascists. At every moment we are taking part in a situation. Within a situation there are no subjects and objects, I and the other, my desires and reality — only an ensemble of relationships, an ensemble of the fluxes that traverse it. There is a general context — capitalism, civilization, empire, as you wish — a general context that not only intends to control each situation but, even worse, seeks a way to make sure as often as possible, that there is no situation. They have planned out streets and homes, language and emotions, even the global tempo that drives all of it, only for that purpose. Everywhere different realms are made to slide by each other and be ignored. The normal situation is this absence of a situation. Anonymous, Call, p.4-5

Never have the managers of society known so well from which obstacles they are emancipated and which means they hold. They know, for instance, that the planetary lower middle-class that currently (and from now on) lives in the metropole is too disarmed to offer the slightest resistance to its programmed annihilation. Just as they know that from now on the counter-revolution they lead is inscribed in millions of tons of concrete, in the architecture of so many new towns. Anonymous, Call, p.24

The attitude of realism that dominant capitalism requires is essentially depressive. The management of this collective depression goes through a series of thresholds. First of all, we come to expect very little: nothing will ever happen again. Then we think that maybe the things that once happened weren’t actually so great. Finally, we accept that nothing has ever happened, nor could ever happen. The more that depression is normalised, the harder it is to even identify it. Radically lowered expectations become habituated. Time flattens out. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, For Now, Our Desire is Nameless - The Reality of Class Continues, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.598