Sci-fi has depoliticised. Spectacle has replaced critique. Most sci-fi today just isn’t about very much, nor does it have much feeling to it: the feeling of not knowing who you are, like Deckard and Rachel in Blade Runner; of longing for someone you’ve lost, like Kris Kelvin in Solaris; the feeling of fear for your life, as in Alien; of pure awe and wonder as in Close Encounters with the Third Kind.

Every wave has its counterwave, especially in the internet age of hot takes and artificial outrage. The latest cultural backlash is against Black Mirror, the third season of which recently migrated from the UK’s Channel 4 to Netflix, where it debuted last week. Upon its release in 2013, reviews of the dystopian sci-fi drama raged with adoring adjectives: ‘prescient and wise, wicked and funny. But also touching, human,’ said Sam Wollaston of the Guardian UK.

In the area where I was born and raised, there is one remaining independent art school. This is because of the restructuring of Australian art schools that happened almost thirty years ago, a process that saw most independent institutions affiliate themselves with the major universities. The mergers, part of a reform policy by federal education minister John Dawkins, aimed to heighten the ‘international competitiveness’ and ‘national economic development’ of the tertiary education sector, and came just after free education was abolished in 1989.

Long before terms like global warming had entered the mainstream, Talking Heads frontman David Byrne was onto something: the fact that the environmental apocalypse won’t come with a bang, but with a gentle erosion. We won’t even notice it. In this world, cranked off its axis, we’re divorced from our own senses, living as if runaway ecological and social disaster is not imminent. Our politicians and parties offer no alternative to living apocalyptically. Zombies live here.