Letke 1 Construct, Console, Connect Jo Letke The Huggable Atomic Mushroom (2004) is a speculative art object made for people who want to be cured of their fears of nuclear annihilation. The material is soft for holding and comes is different sizes according to fear—when one has a “healthy” fear of complete annihilation, one outgrows the huggable mushroom experiment. The material is soft, but the practicality is also soft, like the bomb drills and songs sung to remember to duck and cover in the cold war era. No one, even including those closest to complete omnicide (which includes everyone), understands the political and aesthetic dimensions of extinction; so guides and experts in this field are nonexistent. The Huggable Atomic Mushroom cannot be understood from any one vantage point—or even examined or dissected—from the position of the living, from life. This is rather problematic, since it is known (and rehearsed in Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound) that life evaluates (life). In Bernard Stiegler’s Taking Care of Youth and The Generations, a title that reads like a government sponsored survival manual from the cold war,