2025 Winners II: Inside the dream machine
Inside the dream machine
by Anna Lamche
Ours is an age of incompletion. This is the message at the heart of Vincenzo Latronico’s Perfection, which is largely narrated in the dreamy ambience of the conditional tense. In spare and exacting prose, Latronico tells the story of Anna and Tom, two Italian ‘digital nomads’ living in Berlin in the 2010s.
It is both a response to and updating of Georges Perec’s Les Choses, a book probing the spiritual vacuum created by the unbridled mass consumption of the post-war era. And while Latronico shares these concerns, Perfection is more than a simple tribute to Perec’s earlier work. Latronico’s tale offers a diagnosis of the ills of the internet age, which has served to accelerate and intensify the discontent Perec detected in the 1960s.
In Latronico’s telling, the internet is a machine of dream and distraction that stops work getting done. Anna and Tom never finish anything: books lie half-read on armchairs, political causes are picked up and set aside, creative work goes unfinished. They even leave Berlin, the city they adopted as part of their “identical struggle for a different life”, in the hope of finding a place that “hadn’t yet been spoiled by the internet”.
They buy wholeheartedly into the myth of the digital nomad and find the myth wanting. As the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has it, the “categorical imperative of late modernity” is: “always act in such a way that your share of the world is increased.” Anna and Tom always act in accordance with this imperative. They travel Europe, seduced by the images they both consume and produce on social media. But beneath the images they create and the objects they accumulate, the couple are gripped by a profound dissatisfaction: “Reality didn’t always live up to the pictures”.
They are forever distracted by the relentless flow of images on the “glaring rectangle” of their screens. Latronico renders the absurdity of online life with a precision and eye for detail we come to recognise as being typical of his style: “An egg became more famous than the Pope”.
The consequences of this distraction are both personal and political. Social media taunts Anna and Tom with images of alternate lives and futures that could be theirs. This is a source of existential dread for the couple, who are dogged by the fear they are somehow missing out.
The political implications are illustrated too in their stunted attempts to join a political movement. They are briefly galvanised by the now-infamous image of a small boy drowned at the height of the migrant crisis. For a short period after the German government “opened its borders to a million Syrian refugees”, they volunteer in a refugee camp in Berlin. It isn’t long before their enthusiasm cools, and they return to their old lives. They reassure themselves: “There would be other crises, in the near or not-so-near future, to which they would be better equipped to respond. Their current efforts had been misguided and probably pointless.”
Their tragedy is that they perceive themselves to be living outside of time. They regret they were born too late to witness “the raging seas of a century that had now ended”. They experience a form of historical FOMO: “They would have liked to have been in their twenties for the summer of ’68 or when the Wall fell. Previous generations had had a much easier time of working out who they were and what they stood for.” They are the babies born at The End of History and fail to see themselves as “belong[ing] to a specific time and place”. Instead history is something that happens elsewhere, to other people.
This attitude breeds disaster. Latronico’s lesson is clear: distraction begets stasis. Those who never complete anything are doomed to live in a permanent conditional tense. Socially, economically and geographically mobile Europeans like Anna and Tom slide across the surface of the world, failing to make the arguments in favour of the liberal politics that make their lives possible. Readers coming to the book following the recent success of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland will be left in no doubt where this complacency leads.
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Intended target audience: A magazine audience, e.g. New Statesman’s ‘The Critics’ pages.
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“Inside the dream machine” by Anna Lamche is the winner of the review category of the Orwell Society/National Union of Journalists Young Journalist Awards 2025. Anna grew up near Bicester, a market town in Oxfordshire, and went on to study English Literature at University College London. She is now is a journalist at the BBC, where she writes news and features and produces videos for the website.
This post is the second of a series of the winners and runners-up in 2025.
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