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old world

[11]Technology

Feb 5, 2026

The feeling of the old world fading away

“Undone by a string of clues”

Heather McCalden on the struggle to articulate the present.

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For a long time, I’ve been experiencing something I can only describe as the
feeling of the old world fading away. It’s as if some deeply embedded internal
architecture is slowly dissolving and leaving in its particle wake a sorrow,
for which there is no name. The causes are spoken of: the global conflicts, the
ecological catastrophes, the social injustices—but the actual, visceral,
experience of losing a coherence that held reality together, remains under
examined. To be clear, this sorrow is not about nostalgia or “getting older”,
this is about living in a moment when the question, “Has the world changed or
have I?” is irrelevant because the separation of the self and the world no
longer makes any sense.

∞

I can tell you exactly when it happened, the moment the world cracked away from
me, or rather I from it. I was standing inside a narrow café on Redchurch
Street in London, distractedly scrolling Apple News on my phone when my eyes
caught a headline my mind could not understand “Reality Winner, N.S.A.
Contractor Accused of Leak, Was Undone by Trail of Clues.” Maybe it was the
overcrowding of the room, and the resultant heat which created a sensation of
being squeezed into a corridor, but as I read the words I experienced a
syntactical meltdown. My synapses spasmed. “Reality Winner” as a name, could
not be processed. Instead, I understood that a contestant from America’s Next
Top Model was moonlighting as an N.S.A Contractor. After a nanosecond of
bewilderment, this not only seemed plausible, but felt correct. It was 2017.

The composition of the headline, coming at me on a tiny screen, viewed
sideways, pointed toward a new way of existing: of information from other times
and places splintering the present moment into a mist of shards, fracturing it
open until all possible moments were all time. This time. The time of the
device I held in my hand. 

∞

In 1923, Cecil B. DeMille built what amounted to a city in the wide, empty sand
dunes of Guadalupe, California. The so-called “City of the Pharaoh” was
designed to simulate ancient Egypt for his epic The Ten Commandments. Used in
the film’s Exodus scene, it was considered, at the time, to be the most
extravagant film set in the history of cinema. 

Paul Iribe, a decorative artist and illustrator who precipitated the Art Deco
movement, was tapped for the production design, resulting in an Egypt of sharp
geometrical forms and the occasional sunburst. However, the stylish aesthetics
were secondary to the set’s sheer scale which included gates measuring 110 feet
high, four 35-foot-tall statues of Ramses II, an 800-foot-wide temple, and an
avenue of 21 sphinxes. Each sphinx weighed five tons and was assembled piece by
piece, as heads, paws, and legs arrived on trucks from Los Angeles 165 miles
away.

Aside from these creature components, everything else was fabricated over the
course of six weeks on location by over 1,000 craftspeople. The location, owned
by the Union Sugar Company, was rented to the production for $10 and one
stipulation: no trace of the set could remain. The sand dunes had to be
restored to a pristine condition, as if nothing had ever happened. For the
responsible parties, the cost of dismantling the set was unappealing, so the
idea of abandoning it, intact, and fucking over Union Sugar was floated. To
this, DeMille objected. He assumed other filmmakers would flock to his creation
and use it for their own, potentially successful, projects. Rather than leave
the set exposed, he preferred to detonate it; according to legend, dynamite was
taken to the City of the Pharaoh, leaving it in ruins, eventually washed over
by sand. 

Time passed, and other than the locals who lived near the site, knowledge of
this place evaporated from cultural consciousness. 

∞

We know the old world was definitely not better, more functional, or even more
beautiful than the current one, but it held together. By the “old world” I mean
the 20^th century and slightly beyond but, this is less to do with time and
more to do with what was inside those years that carried us forward.

    We know the old world was definitely not better, more functional, or even
    more beautiful than the current one, but it held together.

∞

The phrase “undone by a string of clues” implies a betrayal, implies the
technology Reality used ratted her out. The famous printer signature, or the
tracking dots, are all anyone seems to remember, though this was old tech,
invented in the mid-80s by Xerox and then deployed worldwide as a failsafe
against counterfeiting. The real mistake, if it even can be called that, was
pretending the surveillance of certain types of documents didn’t exist, or
didn’t matter. That it could be overwritten, or outrun, which is to say she was
undone by the ethos of the previous decade: move fast and break things. 

∞

The City of Pharaohs was briefly resurrected in a single line from Cecil B.
DeMille’s 1959 autobiography:

“If 1,000 years from now, archeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of
Guadalupe, I hope they will not rush into print with the amazing news that
Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of Nile, extended
all the way to the Pacific coast of North America.”

∞

Cultural theorist and writer Mark Fisher remarked in a 2014 lecture that,
“Smartphones shouldn’t be thought of as objects which we have, but as portals
into cyberspace, which means that when we carry them around, we're always
inside cyberspace.” By cyberspace, he meant a specifically capitalist
cyberspace, in which the nervous system is radially seduced/assaulted by an
uninterrupted flow of content. The consequence of this condition, of living
online and offline, simultaneously, is not just dysregulation, but a
recalculation of physical space. From Einstein, we know that if space changes,
so does time, the two components interwoven in a single geometric structure
called spacetime. So, as our spatial reality shifts, we find ourselves immersed
in a new temporality, which Fisher touched upon in his essay “The Slow
Cancellation of the Future.”

Fisher writes, “In the last 10 to 15 years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile
telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience
beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing
sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or
it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and
articulate any more.”

∞

Nighttime, late June, the strange lights of Hollywood melting through the
windows of my friend’s white Saturn Ion sedan. It’s 2009 and we are parked on
Ivar Avenue off of Hollywood, talking a mile a minute about music. Nowhere to
be. No one missing us. No money in our pockets. This is how we spend many an
evening, stationary in a vehicle, near the glamour, but always outside of it. I
am just back from London where a single song seemed to play across the entire
city, La Roux’s “In for the Kill.”  I keep trying to describe sound, and I keep
failing, “Imagine the voice of a wood sprite climbing over a jagged electronic
throb—” She cuts me off by shaking her head, and then pulls out her brand-new
iPhone, which is so jet black and sleek, I actually gasp. “Let’s download it,”
she says.

“You can do that? From here?”

She taps a thing, and very slowly, the album begins to materialize on her
phone. It feels like if we can do this, well, what can’t we do?

∞

The feeling of the old world fading away comes from witnessing culture lose
“the ability to grasp and articulate the present,” but it is not, as Fisher
says, because the present no longer exists, it’s just that the present, now, is
so beyond what a human mind can hold.

∞

Over drinks one night in the autumn of 1982, Bruce Cardoza tells his friend
Peter Brosnan about The City of the Pharaoh lingering, theoretically, somewhere
in the sands of the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Brosnan’s life has recently burned
to the ground, a fire having claimed his house, and wiping out all traces of
his professional, creative output. This is why he finds himself crashing at
Cardoza’s, and now, having a strange conversation about a lost replica of a
lost civilization. Eventually, DeMille’s autobiography is pulled off a shelf,
and the sentence about the city is read aloud. This incites a eureka flash for
Brosnan: he decides, then and there, to make a documentary about excavating the
film set. 

The idea, though laser sharp in its hook, appeal, and simplicity, takes an
unexpected thirty years to execute, the production thwarted by almost every
imaginable circumstance including environmental concerns for the western snowy
plover and city politics. A reprieve comes in 2012, when a cash infusion paves
the way for exactly one archeological dig, during which, the plaster head of a
sphinx is gingerly unearthed. Brosnan has described himself as an “obsessive
lunatic,” but aren’t we all at this point?

∞

Sometimes I think there is nothing more difficult than articulating feeling
because nothing is more true and more stupid and more brilliant than a simple
one scraped off the surface of the heart.

∞

It is a cold night in December 2016, and instead of watching shadows spread
across my thoughts I’m streaming four ten-year-olds on bikes, frantically
peddling down a suburban street. On the back of one bike is an elfin-girl with
a shaved head wearing a Crayola blue jacket. She stares down a white van on a
collision course with her party, and with a narrowing glare, sends the van
airborne, flipping it in a somersault above their heads, and for reasons that
are quite difficult to explain, I’m crying like a motherfucker. Something
deeply buried in my brain is sending out a sonar ping; I know this autumnal
color palette, the synthetic textures of the kid’s clothes, the freedom of
getting lost on a bike. All of this looks like my childhood, or actually, it
looks like my fake childhood, the one I used to watch on TV. The show is about
the 80s, but it is also made to feel like it is from the 80s, without quotation
marks, and this very sincerity makes it appear benign. This is pure
entertainment, right? Not cultural commentary, except the pinging in my mind is
growing louder, and my heart is sinking lower, because somehow I understand
that the only way to address what is happening now is through the past. It
contains the thing we are currently missing: the wonder of the future. 

    It contains the thing we are currently missing: the wonder of the future. 

∞

In order to relive the anticipation that the future once held for us, we
venture backwards in time, creating cultural artifacts cloaked in the
aesthetics of previous decades. A constant, obsessive regression in the face of
everything Now. The feeling of the world fading away is the same as the
sensation of losing a memory. We can’t quite remember how people once thought
about the future, so we search for it endlessly, and perhaps this is why
history repeats itself.

∞

DeMille’s last motion picture was a VistaVision version of The Ten Commandments
shot partially on location in Egypt three years before he died. At the time of
its release, in 1956, it was the most expensive film ever made. Despite the
fact that it was not a remake of the 1923 film, the set possessed an enhanced
replica of The City of the Pharaoh built just outside Cairo, complete with a
series of alabaster pyramids positioned on stilts to create a more visually
striking horizon. However, the most impressive element of this déjà vu was the
Gates of the City Per-Ramses, standing 107 feet high and 325 feet long, or the
equivalent of a ten-story building and a standard American football field.

At the conclusion of production, the Egyptian government offered to turn the
Gates into a museum. DeMille refused, preferring, again, to obliterate the
set.      

Next Read

[16]britney cover

Dec 19, 2025

Tabloids predicted the future

Jeff Weiss on Britney Spears and her scribes.
Read More

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