#142 - April fools pranks & thoughts on Tech Magnates
or: cultural obfuscation caused by the iPhone
Good morning/afternoon/evening, welcome to April!
The best April Fools Day prank I've ever seen happened when I was in the fourth grade – the local radio station (95 triple X) pretended that a Krispy Kreme had opened in Burlington, Vermont and that one of their correspondents, Chantal, was live on the scene, talking to patrons about their orders and general excitement about Vermont finally getting their own chain.
They kept it going for the entire morning. Cutting back to Chantal regularly and pretending the calls from people who were desperate to know the address were getting dropped just before the reveal.
Pandemonium ensued.
People called in for days afterwards, bemoaning how much time they had spent driving around looking for the building that did not exist, feeling foolish for believing that Vermont could have anything cool/good.
It was 2001. There were cell phones, but they had fun tactile antennas and little green screens that displayed the clock and phone numbers. End of list.
The prank only worked because there was no way to crowdsource information – there was no Google Maps to check or reddit threads on r/southburlington where people could collate the spots they'd already searched for the magical new doughnut chain that Vermonters were desperate for.
(The only way to secure Krispy Kreme in Vermont was to order frozen doughnuts wholesale through the mini door-to-door salesmen tactics of the high school band kids. It! Was! Not! The! Same!)
(This was also when Having Chain Stores was something that stirred a lot of support in Vermont. The day Macy's finally opened their store in the downtown mall they launched a "We are NOW in all 50 states!" campaign. The people were begging for a Target while also praising the state for being the sole holdout in having a McDonald's in the capital city. To grow up in Vermont is to learn a lot of fun facts about corporations that steadfastly ignored the state altogether – and to simultaneously crave the uniformity offered while maintaining pride in the Outsider status it granted.) (The box-store I got my first job at is now a Target btw. Oh, how times...they sure do change.)
It was really the perfect prank. I would have loved to be in that meeting where it was brainstormed. I feel like when The Idea hits, it's such a jolt for everyone. The perfect idea really is out there!
Technology limits creativity in many ways. Ask any creative fiction writer – phones render a lot of traditional plot lines unusable. Ever wonder why we don't see a lot of Spielberg films set in the modern era? That's why! The ability to communicate is steadfast when we're all carrying around communication devices. (Also, post 2020 I'm haunted by how few things feel like they're being made to reflect the world we're actually living in. No character has ever monologued about their guilt re: changing mask wearing tendencies. I know that in fiction to show someone coughing is only used to signal to the audience they will die in act iii but like – idk maybe our world has so thoroughly changed that it might be time to evolve our creative standards.)
Could also just be my yearning for an increase and diversity of thought within creativity.
What I fear most from hearing the casual dismissals of people's minor revelations is the creeping sense I have that because we've thoroughly recorded every mundane interaction/reaction there's an overwhelming sense that it's just silly to discover new things, or process how an event personally effected you.
There's a lot of "what's done is done" energy out there. A defeatist attitude that we can't unwind the damage, so we should suppress those expressing how they were harmed. Discoveries are treated with disdain because what if we have to actually like make a change in our behavior?
(So unwilling to feel bad about a misguided life choice we refuse to feel anything at all.)
In general, I don't find there are a lot of people willing to even entertain conversations about what the future could look like if we got rid of cell phones, or cars, or took all the iPads away.
There's this embedded eye-roll at the idea of things slightly less convenient because, "No one is going to go for that."
But we're not even giving people the chance to try? And the dismissiveness of the notion of change itself causes most people to fall back in line.
The internet made everything really fast.
(Manic is another good word for it.)
Can't slow down, can't stop, the clock is ticking and time is money and without money there is nothing because the social safety nets have been so thoroughly eroded. And part of that is on purpose because crime has plummeted in this country but since companies also rely on unpaid prison labor for a lot of the "endless growth", they need people steadily sent to these private, for-profit carceral centers so, if people can't afford their homes they then won't have one (because we protect landlords "investments" over the real human beings inside of those dwellings), and if we make being on the street illegal, we can arrest them and once they're in the system it will be near-impossible for them to get out since the prerequisites for getting a job include having a cell phone, email address, permanent address, "professional" clothes, and transportation. Oh and no criminal background.
It's just depressing to me how many people are willing to listen to Mark Zuckerberg just because he coded a website in college. The man is growing macadamia nuts to feed en masse to his special cows so that the meat he eats can taste 0.5% better than the other Finest Wagyu Beef Money Can Buy and thinks that's an okay thing to admit in public.
(He's doing this in Hawaii btw at his fucking compound. The same place he attempted to force a sale of land that is unpurchasable, because Hawaii is an occupied territory by the United States and I can't imagine the level of soul-rot that would allow him to feel comfortable staying there with the demands he has attempted to enforce.)
The internet made it easier for the masses to adopt elitist tastes, rendering them non-elite, forcing those who desire the appearance of superiority to take it to absurd levels.
It's the most wasteful thing I can think of. Because Elitism is wasteful. On purpose. Because it can afford to be.
(The amount of water it takes to grow one (1) macadamia nut should put Zuck on an environmental terrorist watch list.)
When we talk about rapid change, or feel off-kilter from the inundation of "screen time", the most depressing part about those conversations, for me, tend to be the indignance at the suggestion that not all "progress" is progressive.
And maybe that progress isn't linear.
And, most of all, that it's not unlikely for rich people to be bad people. In fact, it's more likely. (If capitalism works why is most wealth inherited?) These current tech guys are following in a long line of objectively awful humans who made decisions that relied on the dehuminization of others to carry out their profit-making. And since they attained capital, capitalism capitulates that they are the Good Ones. But I would wager that being good at capitalism, means you are bad at humanity.
Capitalism demands you to be.
Managers relaying horrifying information in dulcet tones, creating an environment where they can rely on social pressure to keep employees in line – and if the social pressure of Being Liked doesn't do it, the social pressure of Having A Home will.
The reality of capitalism is horrifying. It's having to go to work the day after your home is flooded because if you don't have a job, you won't be able to afford to fix your home, because the insurance doesn't cover it. It is such an indignity to have to pretend to care about things happening in Email Land when the home you touch and feel is quite literally underwater. Yet it is a daily practice across the globe, and most certainly in America.
And we offer no reprieve, and often there's very little sympathy because we all have to do it. We all have to continue on despite the degradation. And so few people have the energy to maintain grace, so we try and make our problems smaller by emphasizing the magnitude of others.
But the truth is, we are all suffering under this system. And making our problems small only hurts us, it in no way helps alleviate the pain of others. We're just compounding the suffering.
I've been reading Malcom Harris's book Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World and kept having to pause because the through-line of nefarious capitalism in American history is so devastating. It feels like it could have been stunted so many times, and we allowed it to fester for centuries. Granting it more power and land and human sacrifices.
I kept getting upset while reading it, so my sister kindly paused me to ask if I wanted to/should continue reading. My instinct was a hard yes. In unpacking it, I realized that while the book is full of horrors, I have the sense of the legacy that has allowed the modern oligarchy to flourish as it has. Where it was cultivated and the powers that allowed it to continue. It also helps me remember that this fight is not new.
(Finding out things about Stanford, the actual guy the college is named after, is deeply enraging but also like I am now aware of the legacy of exploiting contract workers and the resulting enshrinement in California law which is STILL RELEVANT.)
There have always been monsters in history. Sometimes they get lionized in ways that obfuscate their delinquency. Pulitzer is responsible for yellow journalism type shit.
But they've always been there. The fight is not new. Wanting things to be "over" that have always been feels, to me, like a direct consequence of life-changing technology becoming interwoven into the very fabric of society.
Surely we can't still be dealing with the same people we were before the entirety of the worlds knowledge was collapsed onto a screen that fits in my pocket? That must have changed things, right?
I've read a few birth stories from new moms lately that mention feeling like there was going to be a Real Adult who subbed in and took over at some point during labor. It's so human to feel like we are not adequately prepared to deal with life as it comes at us, and it's incredible to prove we are ready again and again. Humans do adapt. Fast!
I'm imploring everyone, to just imagine a better future. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What do you do there? How do you support other people, how do other people support you?
Pause, close your eyes, take five deep breaths. Try to feel into it.
Before you rush to reject the idea that a better future is possible, or to call me naive, I genuinely am heartbroken by the idea that we can't even pause to imagine it anymore because it hurts so much. That's what fear sounds like to me – pain.
(I think it's so interesting how often pain-absorption shows up in sci-fi/fantasy. The distillation of what we wish we could give each other. The idea that no I could bear it as long as it meant you didn't have to.)
It's April.
I really do believe in humanity. And I think we're all collectively in a lot of pain. But I think we are also coming to an understanding that the moral clarity of the masses cannot exist within leadership that is bought and sold by boardrooms who value profits above people.
(The people who make the profits but ANYWAY if you still haven't read the literal text of The Communist Manifesto there's no time like today it's short, it's really empowering – a true banger! You do not have to be a communist to intake the theory and find hope within a philosopher who believed that people are good. And they work really hard and maybe, just maybe, their bosses and landlords don't! Down with any system that forces you to rent for eternity! Buy physical media 2k24!!)
The horror at where we've ended up is hard to feel, but harder to ignore. We are at a tipping point, and it's a good time to review our own actions and what we're willing to stand against – and stand for.
Please, if you haven't called or emailed your representatives about what's happening in Gaza. Do.
Don't let any guilt about what hasn't been prevent you from taking new actions today.
We are more connected than ever before. The unintended consequences of giving us wireless social networks is the speed at which we formed bonds that could not have existed before.
It's a beautiful day to stand up for human kind.
Truly sending everyone so much love and hopes for peace. There is a galvanization happening like I've never felt before, and nothing will forgive what happened that brought us to this point, but maybe the world waiting for us on the other side of these moments will be better because of who we allow ourselves to become.
✌️ 🩵 & ☔️