It’s the Fourth of July, 2018, on the cusp of what feels like something important. This is weaponized post-postmodernism, where the unthinkable and profoundly tacky are accepted and enforced as reality without irony or self-awareness. This is Hitler’s vision as produced by M. Night Shyamalan and John Waters. This is an alternate universe where reality television star and orange spray-tanned fuckface Donald Trump is President of the United States and Leader of the Free World.
This is a reality where MaBell/AT&T won. They effectively own data access in America. Here, the idea of anonymity is vaporized. Your email provider knows when you sleep and what you eat and what type of sex you like and how fast you can run. You feed them this information willingly. They monetize it in ways you’ll never fully understand.
In this America, local cops drive around in tanks they bought at wholesale prices. They use sonic weapons to disperse citizens who protest. The far-right has taken over all three branches of government and white supremacists are marching in the streets armed with tiki torches and donning cheap polo shirts. Little refugee humans rot in tin foil blankets like forgotten baked potatoes, far away from their parents, in cages on the edge of an imaginary line drawn somewhere in the desert long ago.
Tomorrow you will step over several dozen of the 60,000 homeless people in your city to get to your job in one of the richest cities in the world. You are so connected yet disconnected through technology it feels like this is all happening somewhere else. It’s happening just inside and outside of your front door.
