This machine is obsolete: a listeners' guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile

The industrial music group Nine Inch Nails' album The Fragile (1999) is a gritty meditation on The End. Dominant approaches in late 1990s cyberculture criticism are critiqued, drawing on millennialist subcultures as dynamically emergent from ideas, social change and religious traditions. NIN's Trent Reznor is posited as an industrial music practitioner comparable to David Cronenberg, Mark Dery, Kodwo Eshun or Greil Marcus. The paper then provides a hermeneutic and phenomenological analysis of The Fragile as an ur-text of Reznor's (attempted) cultural adaptation and psychological survival in a fragmented world, where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. At millennium's end, industrial and electronica music like The Fragile capture the 'assimilation gap' between 19th century 'war on self' worldviews, the Sadeian aesthetics of Dark Eros, and the dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge.