The article reflects on the book by Valery V. Savchuk “Blood and Culture”. Conceived in the late 1980s and first published in the mid-1990s, it receives a new - expanded and supplemented - edition on the eve of the 2020s. The key reason for reflecting on the book is to show the impossibility of reading it retrospectively. A new context - media reality - has become our lifeworld and formed a new text that lives in a mode of relevance, answers the questions of the topology of pain in the digital, the hermeneutics of the victim’s discourse on the network, the latent work of negative experience in communication, and new forms of violence in gadgets. While the first edition was an experience of self-reflection of culture and recognition of alienated forms, the second one is a guide to the new technological reality. Indeed, the more complex is the construction of our reality, the more fragility it can manifest and the more primitive energies it can release. For that reason, the key plot of the article relates to th