Fear and Loathing in San Francisco Int’l: Repertorial Miscellany
I was somewhere on the edge of that “museum” when the spam musubi began to take hold. It hit like contraband adrenaline, that sugar-slick rice and salt-fat meat. The unearthly intimacy of plastic wrap torn too fast. And suddenly there was a terrible roar, neural-networked boundaries announcing themselves and vanishing at once in the very same neoned bang: how I am tortured for my hauteur, my gall, as a sense-having organism.
The floor gleamed at me with the antiseptic confidence of empire. Time stuttered. I felt watched by algorithms with no eyes and appetites I could not name.
This is what now passes for culture at the nation’s choke points. A soft, coercive hallucination piped in at security clearance, telling you who you are supposed to be before you’ve finished unlacing your shoes.
Security had always been a bloated pantomime; the rub is whether it’s ever been this artless. Context and content once pretended to matter — there was a grip, however greasy, on the social imagination. We were not always this drag-rag debris of ourselves, so shredded and slop-ridden. This loose confetti of civic will.
I should consult my boot’s TSA-installed LLM. He’s thinking hard about me.
My brother made his diagnosis over the phone. “You have a pathology,” announced he, clinically delighted. “A crippling deficit of adventure. You gaze into the heart of the world and see only sadness, as if there is nothing else to feel. Absurdity greets you every instant of your waking life and rather than grab him by the lapel, you sigh and avert the eyes. What existence is that? You live with neither panic nor optimism, without any extremity of emotion or experience. Fix this, dear brother. Tout suite.”
I love my brother, my clone, my echo with more testosterone. He is my forever gospel. Heeding him, I did the only thing making a perversity of sense: I hurtled toward that mecca of the redpilled and AI-based, the alpha-leveraging disruptors, where the cracked grapple with clankers in embryo. The beating heart of the state in which I have always lived, though I have only known its lower portion. Where else in times of crisis and psychic outrage to go but THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA.
What a monument to adventure indeed. That shimmering laboratorial city-state where capital, technofetish, and spiritual vacancy conduct their most aggressive trials, hallucinating the dreams that stuff is made of.
The pilgrimage began — all do, in modernity — with ritual humiliation.
I commit the following to text:
— MY TSA ATTENDANT, having perused my performance on the authenticating camera, frowned with bureaucratic concern. “Now, with more energy — remember that.” (It felt scathing; I am scathed.) Evidently, I am too pensive for this part of California: or, my energy is simply too strange and wrong. Insufficiently eager, insufficiently legible. Here, even the face must pass inspection. I nodded obediently, filed the correction away. A terrible eagerness consumes me for any and all human elements; I must meet his human presence with human respect.
I can learn. Memory affords it.
— THE POKE TO THE MAX OPERATIVE, distracted but kindly, rebuffs my request for water with the reflexive austerity of a system trained to deny. But then — mercy! — she reneged, sliding a plastic-cup offering across the counter like classified material. “Okay — just don’t tell nobody.”
Hydropolitics remains turbulent in this slice of the republic: cruel, slippery, rationed by mood and machinery. And yet warmth lives in the maelstrom also. God bless that woman, her small act of treason.
— THE NEW YEAR’S SFO EXHIBIT, titled “Women of Astrofuturism,” advanced that cause only questionably. A glut of AI-generated shlock stared back at me: smooth, soulless women gazing coldly into futures no one bothered to imagine properly. The slurry was not, however, without real stuff: a few photographs, some fashion, artifacts that bore the unmistakable scars of human decision. No “text-to-image” in those captions. For that reason alone, infinitely superior to all that roboslop, thrumming with fleshy confidence.
The center is not holding, it was never meant to, but this is the worst kind of collapse. Not fire and rupture, but tawdry replacement theater. Simulation dressed as inevitability. Let us work terrible things in better ways: for there is, still, the trying; we have not exhausted it, not yet.
So there’s another thing to remember.