Towne might have hoped for some acclaim with these calmly beautiful visions of ancient civilisations still present, in ruined fragments, in the contemporary landscape, and sure enough he found patrons in Exeter.
Narrated by writer and philosopher Alan Watts and produced by Pay Attention and Why So Serious Studios, Paradox's animation passes through wave after wave of his nighttime wanderings, from religious imagery and visions of ancient civilisations, to modern ideas and ideograms, all set to a moving score by Zach Hemsey.
With the uncanny prescience of someone with an acute, laser-like artistic vision, Kafka anticipated the future of civilisation - not Orwell's boot forever stamping on a human face, but tiny minds not so much bending the rules to suit their ends, as using the very idea of rules to grind down their victims to the point where humanity can be plausibly denied.
Frank Herbert's grand vision of a feudal human civilisation scattered across countless planets is present in the very structure of No Man's Sky.
This surrealist nonsense is reminiscent of Jackson Pollock's 1946 expressionist painting The Tea Cup, which also portrays this symbol of civilisation as a vision of chaos, with people talking nonsense or at cross purposes, constantly interrupting one another.
"Imagination is the fundamental virtue of civilisation.
By contrast, Buck Rogers's vision of a post-apocalyptic 25th-century Earth in which the detritus of civilisation struggles to defend itself against rampaging warlords and evil "Mongol" hordes seems relatively veracious (if a tad racist).
In the early 1990s he described himself as an "advocate of civilisation, definer of civilisation, teacher of the rules of civilisation…leader (possibly) of the civilising forces".
Surely, the end of civilisation.
