Table of Contents

Chapter.........................................About
Prelude
Am I?.........................................What is the Extreme Self?
Fame and The Face....................Beauty, celebrity and being seen
Intimacy Industrial Complex......Love, sex and situationships
Post-Work..................................Life after labour
The Comments Section..............The loudest voices are is the Real World the most anonymous
The New Crowd..........................Ways to be together yet physically distanced
Micro-Culture/Micro-Othering...Why has ‘cancelling’ become so appealing, so addictive?
Virtue Power..............................Performing social justice in public Inner
Revolution..................................A return to spirituality, well-being as escape
The 0.001%................................The extremely wealthy as Extreme Selves
The End of Democracy................Democracy under threat from itself
Wizards and Charismatics...........Techno-Utopians and techno-salvation
Towards the End.........................Crisis, hope and eternity

About the Author

Shumon Basar is a writer and cultural critic. He is Commissioner of the Global Art Forum, a transdisciplinary summit held in Dubai and beyond, where recent editions focused on automation, trade, technology and the future. He is a founding member of the renowned 'Thought Council' at the Prada Foundation in Milan and is Adjunct Curator at Art Jameel. As Editor-at-Large for Tank magazine and Contributing Editor at Bidoun magazine, Shumon has written extensively about culture, technology and globalisation. Ever since his debut novel, Generation X, in 1991, Douglas Coupland has been a futurist oracle of contemporary culture. His novels Microserfs and J-Pod took place in tragi-comic tech settings, with Generation A fast forwarding to a near eco-apocalypse. Since 2000, Douglas' return to visual art has included sculpture, paintings, installations and performances, exhibited in notable museums around the world. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of London's Serpentine Galleries, is known as the most influential person in the art world today. Intrepid and globally omnipresent, he has curated over 300 exhibitions and conducted 3,000 hours of interviews with the greatest minds of the 20th and 21st centuries. His recent books include Ways of Curating (2015) and Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects (2016).

Reviews

As laid out in The Extreme Self, the book endures as a technology to help us see; to help us make sense of our mediatized lives in anxious times.--George Kafka "Eye on Design"

A forceful reminder that we are living through a moment of extreme change. Change that is affecting everyone.--Iain Akerman "Wired"

A probing new graphic-novel-like-book that seeks to answer the big question: who are you really in the age of the Internet?-- "The National"

A work of prescient graphic literature.-- "Canvas magazine"

In awe of how contemporary it can be.--Adam Thirlwell

It's superb. Expresses the zeitgeist of the moment.--Jim Stoddart

Poses a journey of reckoning and reconciliation with our parallel digital selves.--Anna Bernice "Global Art Daily"

Posits that the radical shifts in our reality supersede our ability to apprehend them in language.-- "ArtReview"

Readers interact with individual pages which allow associations that are sometimes cringy, not always euphoric, often even dystopically frustrating. But that's the way it is in IRL.-- "Monopol"

Shows how the near daily conveyor belt of change we experience impacts how we feel.--Becky Anderson "CNN"

Takes on the usurp of 'real' worlds by digital realms.--Lucy McLaughlin "Metal Magazine"

Teeth-achingly self-aware, with biting humour and both crazed and insightful predictions for the now and near-future. Inhale it in one compelling, uncanny sitting, and you'll have a mind-expanding understanding of our current crises.-- "Dazed.com"

The Extreme Self bares the soul of our extreme present. It is a marker of emotional intensities that reveal the discombobulated stasis of our neurally networked selves.--Dorian Batycka "Ocula"

The Extreme Self throws lists, images, questions and theses at you, in order to capture a present in which everything is different than it used to be. The self is no longer what it was.-- "Welt am Sonntag"

Three decades after Generation X, the authors wonder whether - after Y, Z and now C, for Covid - individuality will become obsolete.-- "The Guardian"

Tiny but packs a punch!-- "coupland.corner"

We connect with ourselves through screens, and it is this idea of the self [which this book says] is under threat as a consequence of our widespread digitalization-- "Arab News"