Screaming at ashtrays | More TK #2

The first thing my group of college friends after learning about Donald Trump’s brand-new definitely-not-a-bribe plane was put dollar amounts on our own principles. Turns out we can all be bought for about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I must immediately emphasize that the above is a joke—not that the conversation didn’t happen, because it did—because we were doing a bit! That’s pretty much the only thing one can do at this point. Things are so deeply cooked, so far across the board, that the only sane-feeling thing to do is retreat into our little Discord servers and make shitty jokes about how cooked we are.

There’s this old half-joke about Scientologists screaming at ashtrays. It’s an evocative visual metaphor, at the very least. There you stand, commanding an unmovable object to stand or sit or walk. It’s a resonant visual, I suppose, because we are currently trapped in a deluge of system collapse and are often unable to effect change. Tesla gets hit with worst-ever sales numbers and sustained protests against its Technoking (that’s literally Elon’s title) and the share price rebounds. Trump, as mentioned, basically gets handed a plane by the Qataris, approved by his former-Qatari-lobbyist attorney general, and the only guardrail is, I guess, Chuck Schumer meekly posting through it with a pretense of concern. Columbia keeps its gates locked to the rest of New York and arrests a whole new batch of students, and my best recourse is public embarrassment, and private disdain towards every new mailer I get from the university’s development office asking me for money. A.I. investments and products continue to bleed unbidden into every corner of our lives, despite those products not working, and those investments appear desperate and shambolic at best.

No wonder Ed Zitron’s most recent column is basically an extended paean to his inability to remain sane in the face of willfull bullshitting from all levels of power. No wonder we feel terrible and unmoored, searching for meaning in Knicks games and minimalist phones and TV shows about the political realities of some space revolutionaries. Our media is totally captured by billionaires. What else is there to be done? Sit down. Stand up. Thank you.

more tk,

Luis

Thank you for reading this edition of More TK, which turned out to be more of a link dump than anything else. I’ll try to write more soon, but we’ll see.