At the same time, a significant number of young writers—many of them teenage girls—are chatting online with Tao Lin or some other depressed man in his early 20s. They call this “Alt-Lit.” This is before one Alt-Lit woman turns up in an anarchist space in San Francisco & starts sleeping with one of the editors of a communist journal called Endnotes but after Kenneth Goldsmith “transcribes” the September 11, 2001 issue of the New York Times. publishes The Day & writes about being the most boring writer that ever lived. At the same time, more & more young artists & writers move to East Austin. It is recommended that you spend a few good years teaching English in Korea or Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed by the United States. If talking about the past historically doesn’t mean recognizing it “the way it really was,” to what extent does it involve something like translation?

Does translation require a person or just language anymore? What is the legal age of consent in New Jersey & New York? These, perhaps, were some of the big questions some people were asking. “Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South?”—that was another. Aaron Swartz left Reddit. Open access is nothing like an exhibit at a museum. It’s not even like a museum membership. Not even like a highway shut down. The tech buses have been around longer than many people think. Fukuyama had predicted an obsession with form removed from anything like political life, as if the hipsters of the mid-aughts would invent nihilism. Some poets begin to speak in terms of a sincerity / irony binary. It’s possible the binary doesn’t apply to anything of note—not even in the always late United States where young people in black fuck up Starbucks & the Gap during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Then again some of them claim a swastika can be ironic, while others claim it’s merely cultural, which is to say marginalized people should calm down, which is to suggest a swastika is a swastika is a swastika, which is to say it’s the swastika you’re afraid of, what the swastika can do & not the history of the people who make it what it is, which is not over, which is dead wrong.