In our age of nostalgia as we sort through and dust off relics of our past and recuperate them for future emotional and financial investment old attitudes of rebellion are becoming resonant again I write to assess current and historical movement towards fascism on the one hand and liberation on the other Neither currently dominate the world we live in both are opposed to it I write therefore to ask questions of our collective imaginary To do so I put pieces of entirely different puzzles together unexpected conjunctions that may evoke interesting results As Anna Tsing puts it To write a history of ruin we need to follow broken bits of many stories and to move in and out of many patches In the play of global power indeterminate encounters are still important Or for those who like dialectics The philosophy of dialectics reveals that everything develops through the unity of opposites of what are paradoxes to simple observation To truly know anything then is to embrace paradoxes and to find beneath the surface the underlying sub stratum of reality where contradictions interact