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L’Absinthe, Edgar Degas. Source: Wikipedia Introduction There is a peculiar sensation attached to contemporary life: the feeling that reality arrives already organized in advance. Music appears before we search for it. Information is filtered through invisible ranking systems. Social platforms determine what becomes visible, urgent, or forgettable. Increasingly, experience itself is mediated before conscious reflection occurs. What makes this condition unsettling is not technological dependence alone. Human beings have always relied on tools. The deeper issue is existential: we inhabit systems we collectively created, yet those same systems increasingly confront us as opaque structures shaping perception, attention, and behavior from the outside. This problem has a long intellectual history. From Karl Marx to Henri Lefebvre to Jean Baudrillard, critical theory repeatedly returned to the same question: what does it mean to be human in a world organized by impersonal systems? Yet t...

Introduction: No Escape from Boredom There is a familiar motif in Romantic literature: the restless subject who travels in search of relief, only to discover that what he flees has accompanied him all along. Lord Byron gives this intuition a memorable form—one may cross borders and seas, yet the inner condition remains unchanged. In this sense, boredom appears less as a situational inconvenience than as a persistent feature of human existence. If this condition has always been with us, however, why does it feel so different today? Is it simply a timeless psychological state, or has it been reshaped by modern social and economic structures? This article argues that boredom is not an invention of capitalism, but neither is it untouched by it. What begins as an encounter with lack —articulated in different ways by Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Lacan—is transformed, in late capitalist society, into a managed and monetized condition. Through the work of Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard,...

Introduction Baudrillard Before and After Simulation: Signs, Everyday Life, and the Digital Present Jean Baudrillard is often invoked today as a prophetic voice of digital culture, cited whenever images, simulations, or artificial intelligence appear to eclipse lived experience. Yet this retrospective aura tends to flatten the internal development of his work. Baudrillard did not always write as the theorist of hyperreality and simulacra. His early writings emerge from a sociological and Marxist horizon shaped decisively by the work of Henri Lefebvre, while his later texts abandon both sociological explanation and Marxist critique in favor of irony, paradox, and theoretical performance. Distinguishing between these phases is not a merely academic exercise. It clarifies what Baudrillard was attempting at different moments and helps determine how his concepts can be productively mobilized for analyzing today’s AI-saturated environment. This article argues that Baudrillard’s traject...