Shift from government-run to commercial dream tech indexes social democracy’s eclipse.

Evidence

The differences in the way that the concept of shared dreaming is handled in 1977 and 2010 tell us a great deal about the contrasts between social democracy and neoliberalism. While Inception’s dreamsharing technology is – like the internet – a military invention turned into a commercial application, Priest’s shared dream project is government-run. The Wessex dream world is lyrical and languid, still part of the hazy afterglow of 60s psychedelia. It’s all a far cry from Inception’s noise and fury, the mind as a militarised zone. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 521

Categorization

• XREF: Directly continues the book’s core thesis of lost futures and the transition from social democracy to neoliberalism; connects to the Miners Strike content of ch15 and the 1979 breakdown claim from ch18. — connects to: The ego’s loss of mastery now stems from corporate forces, not the unconscious. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 532
• ADDENDUM: Pairs with the public destruction thesis — Christopher Priest’s government-run shared dream stands as a concrete fictional instance of a public good.
• SEED: Angle: use a fictional technology’s ownership (government vs corporate dream-sharing, 1977 vs 2010) as a diagnostic for an era’s political imaginary.