# kenophobia surfaces and cosmic error > why you're nothing but an image of some books on cheap printed cardboard > ~ alice stuck on planet ikea closely examining the titles on a diy elf-assembly chipboard bookshelf involves a commonly held unconscious belief or rather creeping existential suspicion that everything in modern big scientific life is just a so-called sheltering sky - an often repressed recognition of the transient interdependent nature of big scientific reality a thinly painted-on surface or stuck-on frontage - mere window dressing behind which lurks an infinite screaming black hole void-eye of absolute nothingness that researchers are nothing but forever lost wandering stars in the blackness of darkness forever for avid avoiders of big ken modern existence appears little more than a series of inherently fragile and malignantly useless facades that just beneath the shiny exciting dynamic and apparently complex solid and dependable outer skin of things lies a terrible nothingness - and the more aesthetically complex well constructed and seemingly dependable they seem the more likely they are to induce sickening big ken levels of fearful paranoia somehow the merest break or scratch in such surfaces will result in a big rip and the entire fabric of spacetime itself will tear apart - indeed that the sentient void is always trying to find a way to break on through to this side and must be resisted at every opportunity hence the rise in hoarding among modem researchers of big science - "these data fragments i have shored against my ruins" hence (so it's said) the associated rise in average intensity of the modem neurospectacle of physical and symbolic solidity - harsher and brighter stage lights ever more intense colors ever more fantastical rat design - car doors tuned by world class acoustic experts to shut with ever more precise heavy and satisfying clunks in short a world of nothing but advertising - but for what exactly - proponents of the suspiciously painted-on nature of the modern sky of existence say "hang on a sec that sky has corners do we exist in a toy box" - for them it's the ceaseless advertising of the alleged non-fragile non-plastic anti-fakeness of daily existence - that structural integrity (and resulting symbolic existential solidity) is in fact somehow remotely believable at all hence the reason those kind plain white cardboard containers displaying only one word like food in (often suspiciously empty) amerikan malls always feel disturbing to those with such creeping kenophobia - such objects symbolize the emptiness glaring out at us just behind ir awful superficial surfaces fellow researcher of big science henry swanson: it's all cobblers of course the void isn't something terrible because it's blank but rather expresses a positively charged fullness a space of infinite light and possibility // republic of bob