Much of the richness of life lies in the imagination. The notorious alienation and anomie of modernity, whose legacy and genesis we are constantly in danger of forgetting in the rush to adopt and replace new technologies, practices and aesthetics before we truly understand or can benefit from them, is mainly a product of the mismatch between the expectations produced in the imagination for the content of our lives, and the concrete realities later substituted for them by a seemingly endless array of cultural artifacts, many of which remain startlingly unoriginal despite being constantly repackaged and sold as genuine innovation. It is rather the idea of the limitless potential of such artifacts that constitutes their perennial appeal, in contrast to the typically banal applications of their actual or eventual use.