Identity Zero
The unemployed have nothing in common with each other. The uprooted, coddled as expats or diaspora, have nothing in common. Corporate employees, devoid of unions, with very short tenures at the same company (and in the same location, when it comes to a large corporation), have nothing in common. Gradually, under the pretext of mobility, universality, and the rapid pace of technological change (though, in reality, it takes years for new technologies to reach commercial viability, unless artificially propped up with public funds), all fields become precarious, any sense of guild solidarity disappears, and the pride of belonging to a profession identifiable throughout history is replaced by smartphone-wielding, stressed individuals chasing after an extra buck, often settling for a prisoner-like status, paid in meal vouchers, coupons, and arbitrarily designated bonuses by other precarious individuals slightly higher up in the communizing hierarchy of the brave new world we've collapsed into.
All of them, lumpen.
The goal is to make all states resemble one another, stripping them of both the trust and the ability to act independently, stealing the meaning of their existence as authorized identifiers of a specific, unique community that once even worked on myths to set itself apart. Now, the lumpen, former citizens, pay for progressive advertisements that denigrate their state, history, and cultural, ethnic, and religious identity.
The virtualization of existence, where nothing holds value because everything can and must be subject to change, brings us closer to computers, algorithmizes our actions, and erases our identities.
This is how the soul disappears, how all connections to a real, finite, limited world—necessary for life in its physical form, both as a foundation and as a step toward divinity—are diluted. Transcendence is forbidden to the lumpen through the systematic severing of the link between the material and the spiritual, with maximum efficiency not so much in the realm of outright prohibition, persecution, or inhibiting mockery, but in the gray area of correctly reproducing the landscape from which the soul draws the information needed to define the boundaries of the earthly. The virtual has no borders but offers no anchors either. And so, the soul dissipates.
Living dead lumpen. It's no coincidence that zombie movies are shoved down our throats. They strip us of ourselves and mock us, as the living dead lumpen deserve.