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Working for Xoth would make me rich. Rich as hell, in fact. Of course, I’d be getting rich because I’d be helping people much richer than me hang on to their money and figure out who to arrest before the guillotines could be erected outside their walled estates.
I hadn’t created this situation. Even with all I had done, I was still just a bit player on this huge board, and the game had been in motion long before I was born. Vast historic forces had brought this world into being, and I had to live in it with everyone else. If I took vows of poverty or swore myself to revolution, it wouldn’t overturn the order. In a world of winners and losers, choosing the losing side wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all myself. At least my comfortable couch in the outer halls of power afforded me enough slack to reach out and help a little, retail-style, one person at a time. And after all, that’s the only way people came, one at a time, even in a big crowd. We were born as individuals, and we died on our own, and even the tightest, best-coordinated group was just a bunch of singular individuals choosing to work together for a while.
All of this was self-serving, sure—it wasn’t just ethical cover for an expedient way of keeping my skin intact, but also oiled with the most expensive lotions the world’s luxury duty-free stores had to offer. But self-serving wasn’t the same as wrong.
“The way we stay free and safe and un-shot and all of that? Politics. Democracy. Holding them to account. It wasn’t so many years ago that Oakland was the first major city to pass a law forcing the city to put every new piece of surveillance, every new database, up for public debate. You saw how hard the surveillance tech companies fought that, how much money they poured into getting it killed. They were scared. Because you know what’s more powerful than all the crypto in the world? An accountable process. Politicians who answer to us, not the billion-dollar companies that hire them when they get out of office.
“Technology has its place. We can organize, securely, to a degree that the Black Panthers, the Free Speech Movement, the Yippies, the Wobblies, the Pink Panthers, the American Indian Movement, all those organizers and activists from this area, they couldn’t have even dreamed of. We’d be idiots not to use those tools. But we’d be bigger idiots to just use those tools. The most important tool we have for curbing official abuses of power is consensual, legitimate, democratic government. That’s what we have to use the tools for.
“I’ve known Masha here for a decade, and I’ve never doubted that she was a brilliant technologist. I mean, she was definitely worth every penny Xoth and Zyz paid her. But Masha”—and she turned to me, a gentle smile on her face—“you’ve never been very smart about politics. You’ve got tunnel vision, you think that if the tech doesn’t solve the problem, it can’t be solved.
“We can solve these problems, Masha. With your help, we can tool up to resist. When we resist we can organize. When we organize, we can win.”
cheesy but not wrong
“Technology won’t save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It’s like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.” She swung our hands to match her words, like we were playing ring-around-the-rosy.
The others all knew chants that I didn’t know: “If we don’t get it/Shut it down” “Whose streets? Our streets!” and one I’d heard in half a dozen languages: “The people! United! Will never be defeated!”
Everyone I’d ever heard chanting that had been defeated. They’d had hope. They’d kept chanting. I chanted it. Hope fluttered like a banner.
ok this is nice
She looked both younger (her haircut, her clothes) and older (her eyes) than she had in Slovstakia. She was so young. That was something I’d conveniently not thought much about when I’d been in Slovstakia. It wasn’t just the hair that made her look younger, though: in Slovstakia, she’d always had the brooding air of someone embroiled in a life-or-death struggle (duh) whereas now she looked like your basic Kreuzberg hipster, the kind of person you’d find discussing blockchain and Know Your Customer rules in a speakeasy while chain-smoking Turkish cigarettes.
why is this so funny lol
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
10:04
by
Ben Lerner
by
Ben Lerner
It was impossible, as at most openings, to look at the art; indeed, the opening as a form, insofar as I understood it, was a ritual destruction of the conditions of viewing for the artifacts it was meant to celebrate. [...]
[...] She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had an overwhelming sense of the world’s possibility and plentitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she’d brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.
lol
I would like to say my recognition of this asymmetry led me to meditate—as I added soy sauce and pepper to what was destined to be a meal of prodigious blandness—on the pleasure I was taking in cooking for my fellow man as he bathed, but I was aware at that point of no pleasure. I would like to say that, at the very least, I resolved to cook henceforth for my friends, to be a producer and not a consumer alone of those substances necessary for sustenance and growth within my immediate community. I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn’s boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism. Moreover, what did it mean to say that Aaron or Alena had prepared those meals for me, when the ingredients were grown and picked and packaged and transported by others in a system of great majesty and murderous stupidity? The fact is that realizing my selfishness just led to more selfishness; that is, I felt lonely, felt sorry for myself, despite the fact that I was so often cooked for, because, as I stood there in my little kitchen stirring vegetables, stood there at the age of thirty-three, I was crushed to realize nobody depended on me for this fundamental mode of care, of nurturing, nourishing. [...]
Headaches, disordered speech, weakness, visual disturbances, nausea, numbness, paralysis. Prosopagnosia, pareidolia. The softening sky reflected in the water. Silver but appearing rose gold in that light. The momentary sense of having traveled back in time.
With my chopsticks I lifted and dipped the third and final baby octopus and tried to think as I chewed of a synonym for “tender.” Imitative desire for my virtual novel was going to fund artificial insemination and its associated costs. My actual novel everyone would thrash. After my agent’s percentage and taxes (including New York City taxes, she had reminded me), I would clear something like two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. Or Fifty-four IUIs. Or around four Hummer H2 SUVs. Or the two first editions on the market of Leaves of Grass. Or about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held. I swallowed and the majesty and murderous stupidity of it was all about me, coursing through me: the rhythm of artisanal Portuguese octopus fisheries coordinated with the rhythm of laborers’ migration and the rise and fall of art commodities and tradable futures in the dark galleries outside the restaurant and the mercury and radiation levels of the sashimi and the chests of the beautiful people in the restaurant—coordinated, or so it appeared, by money. One big joke cycle. One big totaled prosody.