So many people crowded together in a modern city that each of us has thousands of tiny interactions with strangers every day. Each of these others may be physically present in the street or seated next to us but mainly locates themselves in transitions between imaginary states and in multiple circles of memory and community in which they were, or are, more or less answerable, more or less acknowledged, or called on to acknowledge their own others who also have.... All of this is made comically concrete in the current epoch, in which so many carry around a small and fetid portal to their private worlds clutched in their hands. Often they converse with a remote friend oblivious to the fact that their words are overheard by the anonymous person beside them. The extraordinary overlapping complexity of social worlds places new burdens on the functions of identity. These must mediate transitions between ever more diverse contexts each requiring its own sensitivities and ecologies of value, and these in turn leave their traces or encrustations on the icon of self, the virtual core and stabiliser of these identities. What circulates are constructed artifacts of meaning, surpluses to the natural combinatorial dizziness of sign-systems that embody a uniquely human charisma and anxiously graded verticality. Even death can only be one more performance in this dance of memes, a self-conscious finale in which everything is revealed as built out of colourful toy bricks as these begin to topple and collapse, emptying every foyer and habitation.