Thinking casually this evening about the hyper-connectivity of The Modern Internet and how it's broiling ever closer towards overt puritanical fascism because a single evangelical group (Exodus Cry) is strong-arming payment processors, and randomly remembered bathroom wall graffiti.
Always anonymous, it was an effervescent and disgusting way to shout into the void. You had "Jesus Saves" next to public contact information of queers. You had slurs and ongoing arguments that lasted until they were literally buffed out of the steel panels or painted over. Depending on the locale, the walls would be thick with the words of people long dead. Carved into the wood, granting them a fleeting immortality in a vacuum. Coated in piss, grime and shit, but still there after all this time.
Long after the words themselves had been wrote over, blacked out, buffed out, coated and pissed on. Something of those people remained. If you took the effort, if you peeled back the swastikas and Sherman Williams, something was writ that said "I was here, I existed, I was real. Remember me, please god".
I don't remember the last time I saw that kind of graffiti.
I don't remember the last time I was in a truck stop and I saw "ON THIS DATE IN HISTORY, JOHN DOE SUCKED MY COCK RIGHT HERE". I don't remember the last time I saw poetry, pictures, art, stickers, arguments so trivial, insults so fucking obtuse in nature that you had to be there, man. Every time I stop for a piss or shit in public now, it's all clean. The walls are bare. They didn't just patch the gloryholes, they replaced the entire fucking wall.
The world has grown sterile and strange and persistent, an entirely liminal space with a corporate logo sign over the door when you walk inside. FFS, the doors don't even chime anymore. And used to, you could at least avoid this gross, brutalist corporatizing by escaping online. You had escape hatches into the unfiltered insanity and beauty of human nature so long as you had a modem.
Maybe the art sucked, maybe the ramblings were incoherent. Maybe it was someone just calling me a [Litany Of Slurs here] for having a different opinion. But in the filth and grime and shit and piss of the world, I was still able to feel something. I could be traumatized and laugh my head off and cry my eyes out in the course of an afternoon.
But gone is the bathroom graffiti. Gone is the reality of choice, and in it's place is a convincing funhouse mirror of curation. The paths towards learning new things, being exposed to new ideas and concepts and ways of life have been made clean, clean as those steel walls between the toilets. They put guard rails up so you don't accidently hurt yourself on enlightenment and damnation. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, et al.
It's not just us freaks, geeks and faggots either. That's the really depressing part. The internet has become so grossly corporatized that life saving resources, educational opportunities and more are now being blocked in schools, public libraries and sometimes by demand of the state. You can't do research, you can't find new art, new music, new ideas without a fucking VPN anymore just to access legitimate and legal resources.
And for what? To what end? So some corporate entity can have a 5% increase in earnings that quarter?
Evil isn't always some dude with a cape and a mask cackling. It's not always some elderly senator begging for us to bomb more people. Sometimes, evil is a slow poison that rips the soul out of something. Sure, what's left still walks and talks and smiles, but it's off, man. And so it will limp along until it's violently fish hooked into the Akira-like fleshmass of some corporate interest.
Denying the grime, piss and shit of human existence, denying us a chance to experience the ugly, the mundane, the horrific and the divine in equal measure is to deny us an inherent path towards understanding ourselves. Safely curated corporate spaces don't beget curiosity and questions-it holds a pillow over both of them in their cribs, applying pressure until they stop flailing. Then it tries to sell you the pillow at a discount.
It takes the multi-faceted splendor of the human experience, and shoves it in a sterile room with other similarly-minded people. It bolts the door from the outside, and by the hour begins reducing the oxygen within. It gets sold as some kind of cleanse in one of those instagram ads you see, posted by a robot with art created by AI and at no point in any part of this series of Posting Good Capitalism was a human touch ever involved.
Capitalism kills in meat space, and it's being predictably successful in online spaces as well. They're not just blocking access to DIY HRT and queer history, they're removing any evidence of it from servers. They're seizing your ability to buy drugs (if you want, as a consenting adult). God forbid if you want to look at porn (again, as a consenting adult) anywhere south of the mason-dixon line.
The net isn't just getting cleaned, it's getting made sterile through a slow series of psychological assaults on our very existence.
So before the whole shit-house goes down in flames, a few things.
You gotta keep being openly, loudly fucking weird. If we're going to be subjected to data curation from AI, your posts have to be so openly radioactive they'd make the flesh slip right off an entire advertising department. You gotta make a CEO afraid you're gonna shit on his desk and piss all over his paper work. Who cares if you get bullied or people think you're cringe. Fuck, at least you'll be you. At least you'll be authentic. At least you'll be fucking human and feel something.
And you find these words somehow, some way, buried beneath the off-white eggshell paint, carved right into the sheetrock above that freshly-cleaned porcelain.
we were here, we existed, we were real. Remember us, please god
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
ellievsbear
2087
kaledo-art
dailybridgerton
areudirty
dededos
janainaart
stormborns
