A a regular reader of Fortean Times since the mid-1990s, I have noted recent articles and letters describing the hostile conditions for forteana at present. I want to argue that the opposite is the case: that there has never been a better time to be a fortean; nor a time when the world needed its forteans more.

The conditions are complex, of course. Factors include the accumulated working of mass media and Spectacle (in the Situationist sense) for over a century, eroding the stability of things and steadily replacing the production of solid commodities with their representations. The emergence of digital technologies accelerated this ‘spectacularisation’, removing the textual authority or ‘media of record’ once preserved and protected by monks, scribes, journalists and not a few blinkered bigots. More recently (I am drawing on experiences of the UK, US, China and Russia rather than elsewhere) there has been a gradual morphing of a capitalist (and state capitalist) society of production into a neo-feudalist one. This is partly the result of neo-liberalism’s exhaustion. Which is ironic, as neo-liberalism’s key text, Hayek’s , was meant to warn against the