We are so Cooked, Girl
do more, do enough, and become what you are meant to be at the right moment. be aware.
where do connection and hyperconnection reside when the hiss and wail of ambulances steady the conglomerates of my overaccumulation. something vastly more comprehensive than mere strenuous striving.
I am more than myself, and even that is merely an overaccumulation of signs and indicators predicting for me a perfected memory and a future acidic enough to reveal capitalism’s promise. an artificialized, intelligenticized capitalism where the algorithm performs a minimal introspection on my behalf, a retrospection in which I would have failed as a tradwife, incapable of concentrating on words uttered with the faintest trace of deliberate malice. A hypercapitalized capitalism where monopolistic industries monopolize even affect itself, and subjectivity turns into an autogenerated tool inside an Excel sheet too saturated with data to ever be opened.
We can still get out of here; we can still temper ourselves over a less fatal heat. We manage dangerous situations and satisfy our joys through the joys of others, in which we never partake. What could be more seductive and delicate than an exclusive party and after-party where you are not allowed to bring a +1? Reserved dinners and comfortable chairs waiting to be filled and emptied over the coming hours. There is something calming and resigned in the force with which we cope, with which we refuse resignation, and with which we perform normalcy and habituation every single day. There is something phlegmatic and liberating in the pragmatism through which we unionize and immunize ourselves against collective vicissitudes.
I can still try one more time. one luck, one landmark, one gigantic functionality. Referential isolation, isolation from everything, especially when I see camps of masculinization, alpha-ization, and incelization. When I dissociate amid noise and steep sidewalks. When I do not even have time to chew before the most colossal car horn represses my FOMO. What kind of system is pierced to its core if it only reforms
itself through tenebrous apparatus that end up suffocating every microorganism?
The red light keeps vigil over my sleep. A body senses my pain and pleasure although we are attached to no procedure of coupled cryogenics. Everything feels sluggish and careless, almost nonchalant. Like a lint-covered overcoat that no longer fits, triggering the memory of a situationship you invested in more deeply than other relationships, and knowing you are already cooked. Undervalued labor within an anti-Marxist economy where you exist as a permanently extractable resource, as though you had never been anything more than a mind made for extraction, even for the anti-attachment situationship.
In the end, insignificance comes from a leakage of post-attachment, post-interactions, post-relationships, and confessions uttered at the first sign of softness and exhaustion. Something twisted, pathological, and doomed to repetition. Something orbits around someone else, around others, while a colossal shared good lingers at the center. Like the scab of a wound that has dried, only to sting more intensely when you tear it off. You must labor relentlessly, becoming a meritocratic emblem of achievement and completion, so you can prove to others that this is the only normality capitalism can sustain, that its ethic could never materialize in any other form. What challenges you also admires you within an interior spacious enough only for the self. The same with half-measures and muted connections through which we try hard to balance an appearance between work and relationships emptied of affect. At the bottom of the nude swimming pool, a silhouette decomposes into purple ligaments and preventable hemorrhages. Thousands of workers were forced to keep working. It's sick we are forced to be loyal to an exchanging net, to set up transactional subjectivities.
***
Every day you wake up roboticized, almost algorithmized. As though you were an entire current of sensations and cooling systems. An overheated mechanism fed by gloominess and fragile overcrowding. Clips about how soothing and fulfilling it is to be a tradwife, to obey a man and care for him as though the deepest layer of a person should depend entirely on an oppressive other.
What level of compensation is enough when you still cannot enjoy an unfulfilled fulfillment? It is another register of absence to make do with what you have, with a compact form of care you probably never trusted in the first place. Like a chronology inside a world where decisions cannot truly be voluntary, only refracted. What crushes you cannot keep up with you through ordinary causality or repetition. It feels perfectly legible when you discover yourself scattered across multiple places, with limbs still trying to rediscover you. Those who do not know you can never truly know you, and I shut off my phone. Pleasure begins with a technological detox where the only remaining form of digitization is bionic cloning. I turn onto my side and try to fall asleep while notifications accumulate, illuminating the scaffold-shadows stretched across the walls.
A fascist patrimony under which we are forced to incorporate ourselves, to internalize the graces we never wished to encounter. Multilateral cooperation. Schismatic privileges. Beneath a domain widened into something odorless. A system belonging to no one, financed by money and existing only for money. Endless algorithmic glitter smeared across expired stories. Whatever keeps us trapped within the same coefficient of adjustment and survival. Who might you have become if your skin were not capable of regeneration? Which platform would you have preferred to harvest your data? Extractive value layered upon surplus value.
Between concrete slabs and walls there is a profound stillness. not vacant silence, but indirect silence, spilling over from other forms of determination. Elsewhere, taxes are levied on accumulation and revolt alike. a green miracle where I can finally feel the tips of my toes without pins and needles. How much degradation can one swallow inside an exponentially expanding workplace, and how much of yourself can you censor for the sake of discipline’s remaining signs?
A peanut shell slips into my mouth. I focus on sensations, on colors, on vibes. I try to distinguish a beer-smeared bottle from the screen of a dead phone.
What year were you born in?’ my self was asked on a forum. I wrap myself up, keep everything contained inside me. I am close to a seed, how much do I lose through expertise, how much of myself can I still gather together and decide upon? I am hesitant, uncertain. There is something calming in a gathering of people with very little in common. And the present is made of other things we do not know about, not only subtle meanings and satisfying interactions. I look at myself and none of it makes sense; meaning itself is perceived algorithmically through a network of human interfaces, colonized and subjected to discontinuous performance. We were trying to have fun, to feel as much as we should and as much as we could, enough not to miss out and not to become the ones left out, excluded from involvements we never truly make our own. Posthumanism lives inside a shared playlist on a music app both of us hate. It is the same with externally validated certainty, with attention fixed on bleeding frequencies, internalized in the very membranes where you were formed and slowly disintegrated. The confusion lingers, but I had expected it.
I cannot fall asleep. I turn toward the nightstand. The screen no longer lights up.