nihilism today

Barthes said that while a little formalism takes one away from history, a lot of formalism takes one back to it. One might include, within the scope of formalism, the normative impositions of bureaucratic organisations. The Economist's designers' forgetting, and pretending to forget, what it meant to be a punk, what it meant to be a radical, and what Britain's current government actually represents, finally results in the expression of an unwarranted truth: that the current British government is essentially nihilistic. It really is.