9:27:22

1987

When teenagers were adults. Practicing, working, fucking.

The 80s was the last decade when America didn’t deny the realities of class struggle and all of its libidinal economies.

Because we live on the internet now we have fallen into a decades-long denial of the material reality of needing money to live in the world. COVID lock down, and the laptop class it enabled, has made things so much worse. Even your face doesn’t exist for real anymore. A face is for a computer, for a selfie, for Instagram, for makeup, for cosmetic alteration. It’s been encased inside a literal mask. The Covid mask is the new face.

As Jerry Seinfeld darkly joked in his pre-Corona virus 2020 comedy special, 23 Hours to Kill:

“Why would I wanna get information from a face when I could get it from a nice, clean screen?”

This cynical smartphone joke is an updated version of a joke Seinfeld first made in season two of his 1990s television series, Seinfeld. In an episode, “Phone Message,” he fantasizes: “I wish I was a phone machine. I wish that if I saw somebody on the street I didn’t want to talk to, I could go, ‘Excuse me, I’m not in right in now.” Well, Seinfeld got his wish. The joke, and its thirty-year evolution, exposes not just the misanthropic, anti-social origins of Seinfeld’s 90s series, but the anti-social atomatized origins of all big-tech digital technology. We are not here anymore. Please live a message. Money is pretend. Food costs a fortune. Elites throw it in our faces and we continue to celebrate their awards (another economy) and dominion.

Learn to fix your car again, practice your instrument, fuck.