It is here that we confront the “unthinkable” and come face to face with the horror of it all: that our enemies have been able to take the words out of our mouths and appropriate them to their semantic and expressive intentions, as much as we have appropriated theirs. In 1964, well before his notorious speeches on immigration, Powell put forward a conception of politics as a practice of creating collective myths by intervening in the “corporate imagination,” his term for the imaginary institutions of society. “The life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived largely in the imagination,” he argued (Powell, 1969: 325), proposing a definition of Little England neonationalism that shares an almost identical conceptual structure to that which underpins Benedict Anderson’s post-Marxist definition of nation as “imagined community” — “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983: 6).

“‘It’s going to be raining tomorrow’ is software,” the artist Les Levine explained. “Images themselves are hardware. Information about those images is software.” 

As far back as the 1950s, Lewis Mumford’s critique of technology suggested that, rather than seeking to destroy the machine, we should rehumanize it or give it a human personality—“a human pattern, a human measure, a human tempo, above all, a human goal.” Mumford cites ornamentation as an example of one such human goal: in the Middle Ages, people embossed their shields, even though doing so added nothing to the protective efficiency. In fact, this concern for ornament slowed down the process of production, using energy and ingenuity that might otherwise have been applied to making something more directly useful. Mumford considered the idea of giving something personality to fall into the domain of art.