Grime, page 30
The virtual reality nutters, who are building a world where you can engage people whose jobs have been outsourced. It’s something nobody can afford or wishes to, these millions who are busy keeping busy. Just so they can go home in the evening and slide into their slippers with the trite feeling of having accomplished something. Conservative estimates put the number at 20 million nationally who are kept from committing suicide with absolute nonsense. Even now they stream to firms where they sit at computers and move around numbers that mean nothing at all. Insurance risk assessments, just to offer one of the stupidest examples. Consultants, bank administrators, all these schemes to placate people, the first of the cutback measures were the one-pound jobs. Work on demand. The attempt was aborted. Waiting for a job was not something people wanted to do. They wanted to be important, to justify the frivolous accident of their existence with an even more idiotic job. Virtually nobody is equipped to just be. Aside from millionaires, nobody is made that way, among the dull masses they want to earn an honest living, among the stupid masses they want to be able to offer a proud answer to the question of what they do.
“The smell, the smell is still missing.”—“Yes, but if you atomize the scent.”—“No, that’s not the same.” Exactly. VR nutters among themselves. Nobody takes the Matrix shit seriously. Keyboards that hover in the air, for meetings and virtual operations, the ability to hang out in the same room as holograms, that’s the kind of stuff that made money. Giving people a sense of purpose without being able to skim a lot of money off them? Hard to see the point.
And there at the window stands a cloud architect. The cloud, or in other words, the Upload-your-data-here-you-idiot-so-we-can-access-all-of-it-at-once. Next to him, standing around with utter arrogance, are the half-wits who run the system of karma points, citizen points, or, if you will, idiot points. All paid by people like Thome’s father. Cheers, lads. Great job.
The currency is being converted to 100 percent cryptocurrency. The crypto freaks, many from Holland, are new to the island, and not entirely of their own volition. Instead it’s thanks to the flooding in their own country. Since their country is 70 percent underwater. And that, dear friends, shows how serious the situation must be, for somebody to voluntarily move to England. Thome glances at the social media boys. Technologically uninteresting, but they are responsible for 50 percent of the new world order. Memes have the impact of atomic bombs. Bots can fell governments, send shares tumbling, put companies out of business—therefore: respect, lads.
Hello all you clever developer twats who’ve come up with all the clever shite that functions only with
Hallelujah—an app, and now soon the hand-implanted chip will, you can already guess, optimize performance. All the devices, the TVs, radios, virtual assistants, tracking watches, automobiles that report and record driving behavior, texts, conversations, banking activity, printers that read and save all images, passenger information. Fingerprints, blood types (Hey, test your blood online!), urine (Hey, your toilet checks your alkaline balance!), the smart vibrators and artificial vaginas. Political disposition, health status, life expectancy, risk potential, creditworthiness, the chances of a tendency toward violent outbursts. Consumer behavior, sleep habits, alcohol and drug consumption, religiosity, criminal energy, social conduct. Because of terror. Terror, terror. Terror. Terror. There could be a plan behind it. Or maybe not. Thome spreads his legs wider and plants his feet more firmly on the ground. He is part of the elite. Performance, dominance, merit, virility.
And outside in front of the window the fanboys stand around with their paper cups of cheap coffee in their hands. Script kiddies who have no idea about anything, who wear hooded jackets, have no skills beyond a few tech catchphrases, the idiots, and they stare at the masters with open mouths. The little failures, who have completely buggered up their synapses with nonstop chatting, listening to hacker radio, trying to program, to blog, watching Netflix, reading, talking on the phone, taking photos, and then comes another message in a completely encrypted chat, where little poseurs talk among themselves about hacker radio shows and Netflix series. They’ll never belong, to anything. Losers. Thome belongs to the winners. It’s like being a rock star, in the past, when there were still real rock stars. It’s like belonging to the illuminati. Here—right fucking here—is where the power is.
Well—or a few meters away.
In the office of a friend of
THOME’S FATHER
A few old men are sitting around feeling pleased. Red velvet curtains, thick carpets, porcelain dogs, bookshelves, fireplace, all the shit that signals tradition and power.
A man who is sweating profusely had just given a PowerPoint presentation about various steps in the campaign.
“PowerPoint? Really?” Thome’s father had asked, leaving the young man briefly unnerved.
“So,” he said.
The young man.
So—this stupid word that people use to introduce something to which they wish to give extra heft,
So.
“As you know, a new crisis must be engineered, potential unrest, indeed, that is before the surveillance tools can be fully utilized and linked to private security operations, before all citizens can be documented and the point system establishes itself…”
“Would you be so kind as to tell us something we don’t yet know?”
Thome’s father interrupts the
SWEATING MAN
ANXIETY DISORDER: worm phobia
SEXUALITY: obsessed
FINANCIAL STATUS: not creditworthy b/c of compulsive gambling
Who is in his early forties, and who has a breathtaking career as spin doctor, internet strategist, and campaign advisor
behind him
And is now a crisis manager. He features, promotes, and markets crises, and though they’re the constant state of the world, one isn’t permitted to sell them as the normal state of things; they must rather be used, focused on, highlighted in order to—feature their core brand value.
Though there had never been an even-keeled, calm, wonderful life. The calm, peaceful life is an invention of the advertising industry to fuel the economy, to sell diapers and all that shit in order to keep the people quiet, whose natural instinct is to run through the streets plundering and savagely killing game. Or other people. Or just breaking shit. This instinct needs to be channeled into profitable avenues. “It’s no bed of roses,” says the sweating man whenever he is asked about his profession.
Having spent recent years working abroad—the sweating man never refers to his clients by name—during which he had rebranded Islamic terror, in part by curating attacks himself and coordinating the entire press relations operation in order to fuel the deterioration of the European economic zone, in order to boost Brexit and the defense industry—yes, it was just as dull as you can imagine when you’re sitting on the toilet—there is now a new domestic project lined up. The sweating man has no reason to feel bad or guilty, because people need a bogeyman, it intensifies their lust for life. Awareness of the peril of the evolutionary fight for survival fine-tunes the intensity of their lives. Treat every second like it is the last. But
His penis. The sweating man, as befits a highly eloquent man of action, has a lot of sex. He has on overly tight pants, which stretch across his overly voluminous posterior; he’s wearing light brown welted semibrogue shoes, a must for assholes; his sports jacket, Savile Row, opens over his bottom like little wings. His hair, once pale red, has yielded to a very high forehead and these days he dyes it a striking rust tone. He can’t get an erection anymore, or rather, for a week now he has had no desire for anything. That is, neither for his work nor for women. He looks at the naked bodies lying before him and thinks: So, what now? What good does it do me to ejaculate into this orifice? He looks at the white bodies before him—humans really aren’t overly aesthetically pleasing. The red spots caused by epilation in the pubic area; the wetness, probably created artificially in the bathroom, that makes the slit glisten; the makeup, the ears, my god. Puzzling, this absence of desire. But even more astonishing is that he has occasional misgivings about his occupation. “Yes, I get it,” he says to himself. “Humans are a herd of absolutely moronic animals. I can’t even think of another animal that is so moronic that you can make them do anything—well, no, we can go further, to the stirring event in New York, which must be seen as the beginning of new era. As the accelerant for the reconfiguration of the structure. After the event the entire world spoke of Islam, which up to then nobody had given a shit about, to put it charitably. What successful linguistic fireworks were sparked there. Islam, Islamist, fundamentalist, doesn’t matter, all the same, the enemy. But it’s so boring, so simple.” The sweating man is no longer excited by his occupation. The parameters are always the same—specify an enemy, disparage, ridicule, generate fear, have bots programmed. Dull.
The sweating man has for some time been downright crazy about wormies, as he playfully calls them. He loves videos of people showing any sort of worm infestation in their bodies. Worms in their feces, tapeworms that have been removed, worms in infected wounds.
But even fear and disgust no longer reach the sweating man’s arousal center. Nothing gives him a feeling of being alive anymore.
Who cares.
Thinks
THOME
He has nodded off on the toilet of the café. From outside he hears the excited breathing of one of the workers behind the bar. Is it possible to complete a visit to the bathroom including proper hand washing in under a minute? Fast excretion raises one’s point count. Was as little water used as possible? The use of less water is achieved by a solid consistency of stool. That can be achieved with a good, fiber-rich diet.
Thome takes a glance at the new app that he created. Well, it was built by a programmer who is a bit more on the ball, but what counts is the idea.
Your Fear
Is the name of the app. Wherein you can share your deepest fears with the community. One could of course also find out people’s phobias in their harvested metadata, but it is much more fun with the app. Once in a while Thome indulges in a bit of fun by fulfilling this or that fear of app users 1.0.
What’s this then?
Respect, lads—sunlight?
The unfamiliar sight
Leaves
DON
Squinting.
Wow.
This light in Shoreditch, how beautiful the present is. Never before had a present been so beautiful. The formerly poor district of the city. Social housing, seven children, three stillbirths, boozers, fighters, leukemia patients, TB bacteria shuffled down the damp, narrow alleys shared with rats. And just look what’s become of it all: an open-air museum of a successful lifestyle. Organic bakeries, oat milk lattes, muesli, smart clothing boutiques. And the people. So international, so colorful, with such incomprehensibly interesting lifestyles.
Don watches the breakfast café in one of the former industrial buildings. A few hundred men crunching disgustedly on kale chips. They built the new world order. The reinvention of the world by—men. It’s simply up to them. One fucked-up system swapped out for the next fucked-up system. Always done within the limits of their comprehension. The women were busy. With their children, their makeup, the question of how to find a fascinating, world-altering man. And because they don’t understand, the bitches, why a hoover needs to talk to a soldering iron. Or why dildos need to talk to a pizza delivery service.
Everyone talks too much already.
There’s no more escaping the sound of talking now that the giant screens have been installed all over the city. Don looks at the screen next to the nerd café.
“Have you never had the need to work for a living?” asks a blonde reporter with a microphone. A man, whose teeth are all missing, starts to laugh. He inadvertently spits in doing so. In the background, bedraggled children play with a dead cat. Ah, it’s about suicide in social housing blocks. “I’m in therapy now,” says a train driver accusingly. A woman had thrown herself onto the tracks. You see various body parts and hear the sympathetic voice of the reporter, who commiserates with the train driver. A boat pilot on the Thames complains about recurring nightmares after an old man splattered on the roof of his boat. The mother of two private school children grumbles about coming upon a corpse hanging from a tree while driving through Hyde Park in her SUV.
Next to Don a man stops, sweating heavily. He leans against a wall and tries to get control of his bodily secretions.
He’s applied that particular hair dye, the one that is supposed to get men’s natural hair color back but is in every case: rust-colored.
“These losers can’t even manage a proper death,” says the man with the rust-colored hair, sweating. Don looks at him; he looks wretched.
“You have on pimp shoes,” says Don.
“Yes, of course I have on pimp shoes,” says rusty.
On the giant screen now is an old man at a rubbish heap, in the background the body of a rat is turning on a stick over a fire.
“Loneliness is only tolerable with money,” says the sweating man. “If you have money, you can buy things, and parcels will arrive. Someone will want something. At least someone will take an interest in you, even if it is just an algorithm. Without money, all that’s left is the kitchen, the clock, and the yellow paint on the walls, a park that belongs to somebody, the parking lot in front of the supermarket where you can stand until the security detail shows up. Most people’s lives consist of waiting. For something to happen, which will jolt them out of their waiting, which will make them take stock and realize that they’ll regret not having enjoyed life. But how? How do you enjoy life if nothing is burning inside you? And how much TV can you watch? Especially if the electricity has been cut off. Especially if your bottom hurts from sitting and from being reamed out by all the bullshit you stuff yourself with, and that’s what we mean by freedom. The freedom of self-actualization and possibility that was bestowed upon us all by the free market in reality gives most people nothing more than the possibility to watch the rich being free. The poor are theoretically entitled to freedom, but they just have too little money to live it out, freedom.”
“You put that well,” says Don, who had stopped listening after barely a second.
The sweating man nods quickly and disappears into the unbelievably multicultural neighborhood. Don watches him go. She scratches her hand, scratches off the scab that had formed over the red splotches that look like disgusting little islands.
The first few dynamic, nonchalant young men are coming out of the café across the street. With the crumbs of chips in the corners of their mouths, they flow into the street, which had been filled with tourists enjoying the last great amusement. Take a flight for ten pounds from someplace or other, day ticket, and then wander the streets, hit McDonald’s at lunch. There you can get cheap meat in a kale wrap—back in the evening, or, if it is to be a really wild outing, to one of the box hotels for £19, where people sleep in something like lockers, stacked up in sheds next to motorway on-ramps.
They stand in the streets. The tourists. In front of buildings where every flat cost at least £30 million, with ten subterranean levels where the Chinese store their Ferraris or stash their whores. Time and again a street somewhere in the city center collapses, bringing down a building with it. Structural integrity, you know how it goes.
Speaking of which—
Don has never traveled. But she has Google Street View. Had. Google had explored every last corner of the earth, mapped it, that’s the kind of thing you do only if you want to own it. You have to have an overview of the inventory.
Don could always imagine exactly what it would be like elsewhere. And what she would do there. On those unspeakably ugly beaches in Spain, what are you supposed to do there, in the sun, with a view of high-rises, surrounded by burned pink-colored people with swollen feet? You’d sit on the beach and wonder: if this is the high point of my life, there’s no reason to be present for the rest. This principle of going on holiday as a reward for a shitty life. These so-called destinations around the world whose very names used to sound out of reach. And now—thanks, Google!—you can spare yourself any effort at all. With Street View you can walk down the street in the middle of any dream destination. There are no trees, just the same buildings everywhere; they look like they’re from another millennium. In the south they’re moldy. People in little boxes. People everywhere and far too many for them to possibly be able to be happy still. But. Nobody promised that, the whole happiness thing.
A new breaking report on the screen. A drunken couple have killed their two children, the shot lingers on the corpses. Baby children. Very small.
Then back to the father. Unpleasant face,
Right
BERTA AND HENRY’S
SOCIAL CONDUCT: don’t separate recycling. no exercise. eat poorly
FEAR: losing each other
HEALTH STATUS: not available
No karma points, you fuckers
fate is perfectly suited to a social drama, the kind that would certainly win a prize at a film festival. People would emerge from screenings full of concern. A couple women would have tears in their eyes.
Berta and Henry had a flat in Birmingham, where they led a bog-standard lower-middle-class life. The two children were talented, both could already read and write at four years old, when
Berta was diagnosed with cancer. That was at exactly the moment when some areas of health care that had previously been free were privatized. For some time now, the costs of unusually expensive care must be borne by the insured, unless they had bought supplemental insurance, which nobody did, because—not important. Right. So they tried to cover the costs with crowdfunding. Henry sat next to his wife on the sofa, the children in clean clothing beside them.
He spoke into the camera: “This is my wife, Berta. She has lung cancer and it has metastasized, and the insurance company won’t pay for her treatment anymore, now that the departments of oncology and cardiology, orthopedics and oral surgery have been sold to a Chinese holding company. You out there! Any of you could be hit the same way tomorrow. Today it’s us. These are our children. This is my wife, this is me. I used to be an architectural draftsman, but there are no more architectural draftsmen. I worked as a street cleaner before the automated sweepers came in, worked in construction, in industrial kitchens, and what I earn is enough for—nothing. Please help me save the life of our family.”
