Social satire is literally impossible when reality itself has jumped the shark. And somewhere out there right now someone is complaining about the insane stress that attempting to navigate the modern world causes while their AI girlfriend makes comforting, adaptive cooing noises and provides words of affirmation.
Gerassi had a lecture where he was briefly talking about poverty as an abstraction to Americans. He had met an Indian peasant mother who had four bowls of rice which she dispensed to four of her five children. “She gave her four eldest children a bowl, but not the youngest one sitting in the corner. I asked her, ‘ Why aren’t you feeding that child?’ She said, ‘He’s the weakest, he’s the youngest, he’s going to be the first to die anyway. I don’t have enough food for all five so I have to make a choice, and I’m not going to feed the one that’s going to die first.’”
We’re so far removed from the conditions that allow us to have our little prepackaged lifestyles that we can sit around and write 2000 words about sexually exploited sheep for The New Republic and probably get paid for it. To stir outrage for the engagement vectors our wee oligarchs need to continue the social experiments that end up making us pretend to give a damn about gay sheep. It’s amazing, really, how staggeringly stupid we’ve become despite everyone having a college degree these days.
Who could even care about this shit? Only the profoundly and utterly spoiled or the relentlessly insane. Or the fakers, who are everywhere, “caring” so desperately about something new every eight minutes.
Go outside. Touch a tit. Read an old book. Make some sort of eye contact.
Hell, do all four. Really try to flip off the breakers in your mental fuse box, because nobody should be lucky/spoiled enough to have the time and energy to protect sheep minorities on the internet when the rest of the real and living world around you is so painfully in need of your attention.
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