F. F. F. F. F. F. F. The slender tone is a belt that exercises for you. Strap it on and press a button and you will shortly emerge, claims the

advertising spiel, as if you had done some tens of thousands of sit-ups all without moving

a single muscle yourself. It's a hack, a shortcut, away from moving an unnecessary obstacle to fitness, namely exercise.

So much of our aesthetic world these days is about the jump to the finish line, about the speed up,

about the assertion of an intimacy between ourselves and the media we consume.

Tic-Toc and live streams are the go-to example of course.

The effect goes way beyond that, into new styles of fiction and new ways of doing politics.

And all this simulation of immediacy is going on even as the technical systems that produce it grow endlessly in complexity and scale.

Anna Kornblu is a writer and professor of the University of Illinois Chicago.

Her new book, Immediacy, or the style of too late capitalism,

sets out to explain this feeling of intense overcloseness.

Immediacy, she says, is not just about speed,

but the absorption of all previously distancing devices

into a single unbroken aestheticised flow.

My name is Richard Hames, and on this episode and Devara FM

I spoke to Anna about autof-fiction, flea bag, terrorism,

and the strange animisms of generative AI, and also about how the desire for

immediacy might thwart the work of Palestine solidarity.

I'm very excited that we're doing this interview because I feel like in my life at the moment I have fallen into the trap of Mediacy or fall into the trap of wishing for greater

and greater immediacies from experience there is a clip a sort of a meme that is just

a headline from the Guardian. The headline reads, Noel Gallagher,

the driving force behind the Britpop band, Oasis,

...