The exterior urban environment has unintentionally decoupled from the economy, and to spend time outdoors in these conditions is to re-establish a more direct relationship to space that normally extracts value from us at every turn.

… “surreal.” It’s a word Americans often reach for when something destabilizes the ongoing-ness of daily life, when life seems “not itself.” This “life” almost always means “one’s role within the economy.” To be pushed into surreality in America is to suddenly notice the strangeness of one’s relationship to producing and consuming. One of surrealism’s clichés is that it is “the art of the dream.” It seems, now, as if a long dream has ended. Rather than pushed into the surreal, we have been for the first time in decades dislodged from the surreal.