YOUR EYES ARE LEAKING CORPORATE CUM™

A brief rant inspired by the lady who picked a fight with me at that party in San Francisco called me an amateur writer and then lectured me for 20 minutes about why tEChNoLoGy Is BaD and MoNeY is EvIL. Thank you for being my muse.

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I love consumerism. I love it. I love the plastic, the billboards, the jingles. Those flashing buy-one-get-one-free stickers that wink like slot machines promising a jackpot of nothing. The mannequins, dead-eyed in their glass prisons. The trash, the empty glitz, the glowing signs, the endless tidal wave of shiny, meaningless products. I love consumerism because it doesn’t bullshit you. It doesn’t hide behind morality or ethics or any of that dildo nonsense. It’s honest about who it is and what it’s trying to do.

And then there’s the critics of consumerism—the loudest, most insufferable, masturbatory little choir of self-proclaimed moral high-grounders you’ve ever met in your life. The kind of people who wear their disdain for technology and consumerism like a badge of honor, convinced of their uniqueness, yet eerily indistinguishable from one another in their self-proclaimed sophistication. Regurgitating whatever half-digested ideology their dipshit friends have deemed fashionable, yet never stopping to consider that they’ve become exactly what they claim to hate: a mass-produced product designed for maximum passive consumption, impeccably curated to fit the prevailing winds of Berkeley or Brooklyn or wherever the fuck it is they’re peddling their autoerotic plutonium.

These are the same dipshits who swaddle themselves in Theory like it’s tweed and tenure, whose moral superiority is as hollow as their words, and who lay analytical diatribes like stumbling masturbators at a woke confessional.

Please, tell me more about how the world is bad and corporations are evil. Enlighten me, Sartre 2.0, with your industrial-strength righteousness, your Louis Vuitton Knockoff. How much did those glued-on wings you’re wearing set you back? Who peddled them to you? No, really, I’m dying to know. Where did they come from, how were they made? Who brainstormed the design over a PowerPoint in some soulless cubicle, trying to reconcile “aesthetic” with “cheap”? Who greenlit the materials, who squeezed the margins, who called in favors to keep the supply chain from imploding? And who, pray tell, decided that $69.99 was the magic number to make sure those glorious wings ended up on your contrarian little back?

Because this shit didn’t just fall out of the sky. None of this is some stroke of luck or divine intervention. This was the product of a system—a beautiful, messy, indefensibly chaotic system that, for all its inefficiencies and pornographic excesses, still somehow gets all the moving parts to line up. It drags humanity forward by the throat, wheezing, choking on its own contradictions, but still manages to push forward, battered and limping, into the future.

But you already know all of this, don’t you? With your PhD in pure mathematics, and your very nuanced understanding of economics, and your elite little roundtable of soon-to-be-forgotten literary aristocrats who, unlike me—an amateur—are paid $27 per word for the privilege of writing forgettable op-eds and bad poetry that nobody reads. And yet, here we are. It must really hurt your feelings to have a pretty girl walk you by the leash like this, something I would never do unless you weren’t so incredibly rude to me at that party. But let’s not dwell on history. You were obviously in the throes of some kind of pharmacologically induced hysteria and let’s be honest, I know what it’s like to be kind of irrational and crazy sometimes. Maybe you can write a rebuttal letter that hurts my feelings even worse. I dare you.

If you are an artist, and your entire identity revolves around a knee-jerk rejection of technology, capitalism, and consumerism, maybe it’s time to do a quick reality check: you’re not a rebel. You’re not even an interesting asshole. You’re as edgy as a plastic knife. You don’t defy the market; you’re just too afraid to throw your work in the shark tank. Because if you did, if you ever conspicuously consumed the better half of capitalism, you might have to face a simple, terrifying truth: Nobody. Is. Buying. What. You’re. Selling.

Capitalism isn’t the enemy. Technology isn’t the enemy. Consumerism isn’t the enemy—it’s the mirror. And what it reflects back is a generation of fraudulent, dilettantish, bed-wetting moralizers who are less artists than they are orbiting satellites in the cold, dark expanse of their own hypocrisy.

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