The 'postmodern' condition of alienated, disjointed late-20th-century humanity was officially upgraded to 'pre-apocalyptic' Monday, when new findings from leading postmodernist theorist Richard Rorty were published in the new issue of Semiotexte. 'I was flipping through the cable channels the other night, trying to get an abstract sense of the way emergent processes of change and transformation generated by contemporary high-tech society are challenging cultural assumptions regarding diverse aesthetic forms to create a novel state of history,' Rorty said, 'when, all of a sudden, I realized that everything I was looking at was the biggest load of unimaginably horrific crap ever.' At this point in the socio-cultural discourse, Rorty said, the key question is no longer whether or not social fragmentation, cultural meta-juxtaposition and socioeconomic problematics require new modes of experience and interpretation, but rather, 'When will the seven-headed dragon of the End Times descend upon us all in unholy fury?' 