Hello…
Hello…
Helloooooooooooooo!
The other end of the call has been picked up, but no one is really there.
Instead, [they’re] perusing a limited-edition sneaker drop, or collectible figurines on eBay, Bhattacharjya says, recalling some of his recent scrolling. Everything in stores looks the same these days, he finds, but online he can jump down a rabbit hole into random micro-communities and inspiration. Turning his attention from the work on his computer monitor to e-commerce on his iPad Pro gives him a jolt of creativity and energy.
A middle manager correspondent. Relaying phone calls and emails between different verticalities. Not quite a personality higher.
“It’s so seductive,” says Michelle Drapkin, a therapist in New Jersey who works a hybrid schedule.
At home Keurig® K-Cup Coffee Cups - Dunkin'® Original. No longer on the Turnpike. New neurosis developed through insulated isolation. Private space. Padded room. Managed. Controlled. No more Newark. No more channel flipping SiriusXM. No more Folgers.
By the time the purchase arrives, though, she’s usually forgotten what’s inside the box.
Milling virtualized engagement and dopamine farming normie core shopping rights activists. She votes with her wallet on Esty buying Chrome Hearts dupe charms crafted by a 30-year-old woman from St. Paul, Minnesota. The system of soon to be hard blue counties across the Midwest supported by cabalic networks of product managers and email aficionados. Grifters and algorithm manipulators. Work from home by the pool. Manager.
There is an evolving paradigm shift incoming. Grab a hold of your ThinkPad. The laptop developed for business travel, water proof, heat proof, banished. Replaced by the newly minted Space Grey MacBook that gives the other people at the mutual aid work space the idea that you have chosen to do something important. Climate Impact Assessment for effective altruism charity programs in Puerto Rico.
Who the fuck is grocery shopping in New York. Screamed at by a woman stomping a butterfly to death in Brooklyn on my way to the co-op. The bull is in the china shop. The wave of security, nostalgia for certainty. The opportunity for generational wealth is upon all of us. Some of us. We are all going to make it.
Milk your memories. The world you were born into no longer exists. The world you will die in has yet to be created. Resets are coming. There is something in the water and it's more than just estrogen and fluoride. Microplastics. Fish excrement. Fentanyl backwash from a raised upper middle class in LA sex workers asshole. The bidget spits back at me.
The average person in America spends over ten thousand dollars a year online shopping. Is that true? I’m not sure. Does it matter?
“Would spending that $500 on something else have been as life-changing as belting out your favorite song in the stadium? If not, you made the right choice.”
Refreshing StubHub after I bought my Morgan Wallen tickets. Taking deep breaths in the work bathroom. The seats next to mine sold for 200 less than I paid. I want out. Relisted. I’m going to swing trade concert tickets. Bought. Burned. Flipped. Another 300 dollars in payments. 80 dollars go to fees.
‘Desloge, who lives in Tallahassee, Florida, recently tried to give the Rolex to his son, who turned him down. So, it remains tucked away in favor of a Garmin smartwatch, which has a fitness tracker, alerts and email, among other features. Purchased for about $500, the Garmin can multitask in ways his Rolex cannot.’
You will be destroyed. A son won’t take his dads Rolex because he can’t demonstrate wealth to his social group. Dad doesn’t see a watch as ‘useful’ derived from utility framing instilled by a system of psychological governance. Gives himself a tracking device on his wrist. So much more functionally. Need to control your heart rate when you see a flood of immigrant workers come to fix your vacation house in Cape Canaveral? IBM employee stock options starting in 1984. Rolled into a Roth IRA. Such good returns, right? Finally, 67 and a half. Pull out. Less tax. Report all your income. Desloge would be disowned by his great grandfather for legacy company investment. Black Monday. Send it. MY BROKERAGE FROZE MY WITHDRAWL. Dev fix this.
I walked into an interview. The recruiter is mixed Black and Latino. Apple Watch barely fits over his fat wrists. Poorly colored light blue shirt. Plastic cotton blend. Not complimentary to his skin tone. Gelled back hair. Unshaven. When I hear the light clink of aluminum on the faux wood desk of the HR office I clank my own half Skeleton stainless steel band and I look him in the eyes. There is grease on his goatee. It’s after lunch. He had DoorDash. You can smell the neurotoxic gas of Febreze wall plugins and the spray on deodorant emitting from his pits. I’m here at my mom’s request. I look at him. I look across the office. There is no one here of value. Sad. It’s horrible what’s happening here. He is in Skechers business shoes. Horrible what’s happening here. I can’t make it through the interview. He shows me a laptop running Windows 10 I would be working on. Company doesn’t allow them to upgrade to Windows 11. There is Excel without the plugins installed. The I.T. guy watches the female employees with low-cut tops through their webcam. He works remote. He doesn’t know all of them are fat.
Dave Campbell, 70, and Beth Keenan-Campbell, 64, planned to retire together. Last year, Beth left her nursing job and Dave retired from the Secret Service. They made plans to travel to Budapest and spend more time at their beach house.
Shortly after Beth retired, she received a dream job offer and returned to work full time, as director of clinical operations for a Maryland hospice agency.
Beth logs her meetings on a joint Google Calendar so Dave knows when not to call. Every morning, they FaceTime over coffee and talk about their plans. On Wednesdays they each get takeout from the same type of restaurant, recently Ethiopian.
She says it would be hard if they were still in the same house and she was working while he was retired. “I think I would drive you nuts,” says Beth, adding that she is younger and has more energy than Dave.
“I just can’t keep up with you,” Dave said, who had a stroke a few years ago and needed to slow down.
Her dream job is a death merchant. His is to be away from her. They both want to go to Nepal. A place neither of them have been. A place that doesn’t exist.
Everyone is their own marketing expert, interiorizing consumerism and eliminating antagonism. It is not enough to buy, but to be informed of marketing developments. To watch the news. The good news. To operate accordingly. To be a trend forecaster of your own consumption practices. You need to be in the comment section making suggestions. Work for your bags. Make influencer and review type content. Subject experts redirecting their energy towards specific policy ends. Onboard retail America. In a category where you don’t know what is in your food, turn to a brand you trust to get it crafted simply. Manufactured with intent. Dave’s Hot Chicken reaper challenge with your fiancé in Tacoma, Washington. 57 views. Marketing classes. Somewhat of an early adopter.
You know you can really do whatever you want right. I told my friend. 6 '3”, lanky, white.
You can sit on your hands. You can say things are going to happen for me if I continue working. Well. What are you going to do when it doesn’t anymore? When opportunity passes you by for the fifth time and you are still in your two bedroom, slightly too far away from the office with a roommate you should have left three years ago. What are you going to do then?
When you realize the only form of UBI we have is run by Amazon. Fulfillment center packagers and delivery drivers as no cost employment options. Workers paid enough to stay in their isolated apartments. To afford the machine they are plugged into at night. As opportunity declines, technology advances to cover those psychological gaps. The wealth divide will massively increase in the next decade. What are you going to do about it? Become a lawyer? Make partner so your children can be strapped into a feeding tube machine. Not so willing participants in a company town economy. Managed spending on what will become the social welfare program distributing the single room units that give you the space to plug in and excrete. This is all that is affordable under the social net. Comfortable in your room. Surrounded. Government dollars are given to you and quickly converted to a digital currency ran by the technocratic conglomerate and their nodal network of managers. This funnels the diminishing social net into oligarchical distribution, siphoning bailouts to line their pockets. But you won’t do this. You would spend those initial dollars on synthetic drugs. Sell your technology to the highest black-market merchant before everything can be territorialized. Convert it to strong dollar. Invest in bonds. Hedge your risks. Shoot up the government produced drugs as you roam the empty towns that paper the gap between the coasts in a hauntology of the van life videos you watched before gas cars were banned. There are no banks there to withdraw your dollars. Brokerages are closed and your investments are deducted and donated to the welfare fund. Did you not think everything was going to get bought? That you had more time before AGI? You are AGI-ing faster than you think. Everyone has moved to bitfarm mega cities. Server speeds are faster there. Death squads patrol the once was bread bowl of America. Trap houses are converted to multifamily units. But there are no longer families. There are units. Ex-pats are shot and killed. Their avatars are automated until everyone on their friends list logs off forever. Identity theft corporation so they continue the collection process. Money funnels in. Strengthening the dollar. It’s all coercive. The lack of choices you are making now is the condition for the wholesale slaughter of everything you will ever know. Inaugural class of the damned.
The global south in America went from cleaning nuclear missile silos to cleaning the excrement and bodily waste of their middle-class counterparts. Internet access is determined by your social security number. Your citizenship test fails you. A wave of immigrant workers process offshore food production under the guard of the surveillance robots. Tracked forever. Gagged forever. Conscripted from the equator that was deemed uninhabitable due to climate change. Mercy killed in the human factory farm. Denied access the social welfare that defines the middle class. You will work the jobs that define you from a corpse. Are you ready to die in a shit tube? Knowing they can automate these processes and choose not to. Psychological exploitation is necessary to keep people online. It’s better than the farm, right? You will be stuck in the back of the train. Enjoy your slop. Sterilized. You are managed from the cloud. An overseer of the new plantation reality. Everyone lucky enough will live in the company town of the new world order. Other countries don’t have to willing adopt. IMF loan programs ensure corrosive economic shifts. There is no escape. Drink or drown. There is no alternative to the US dollar. There is no alternative to US tech. Exit tax off shoring. Global starvation tactics. Population control through satellite states. The best of them sent to mine the newly exposed minerals in the Artic. The global south has shifted north. The others serve as indentured members of the life force army. Endless war. The war is never ending, but so is the war. There is no war. I love you. There is no war. You are too plugged into know. Virtuality is state controlled. Virtuality is comfortable. The genocided don’t pay AdSense. There is no reality. I love you. Someone needs to do something. Someone needs to tell me they love me and hold me tight as a first strike missile delivers us from our reality. But there are no challengers. There is no twink fighting with me over Zendaya. But I wouldn’t fuck Zendaya anyway. The sauna is getting hotter. Do you feel yet? The thermodynamics of these machines are expanding the ozone hole. The air is unbreathable. The guns are oxidized. The war is never ending because the war is integrated. The fight for the new internet is not on a trending tab. My gun is loaded with the last bullets in Los Angeles and I’m holding it to your temple while we lay in your bed. Our last night together before you’re sent to the tubes because your dad is in debt. My last night alive.
