Here’s music. Enjoy.

★★ The blowing drizzle under the dark gray sky was too warm to be raw, the way it ought to have been. It stopped for a while and new dry leaves landed on the old wet ones. The honeylocusts were dropping entire compound leaves now, not just scattering leaflets. Rain came quietly and passed quietly, and then the evening and the night were finally, genuinely cold.

In the early spring of 1836, a British “hygeist,” as some practitioners of pill-based medicine were called, was found guilty of manslaughter after he advised the deceased, a formerly “stout, healthy man” identified as Captain Mackenzie, to ingest 35 pills of questionable origin. The pills were Morison’s pills—also known as Morison’s Vegetable Pills—and were touted as a miraculous cure-all, good for treating everything from a bum knee (like in Mackenzie’s case) to soreness around the eyes. These deadly capsules were created by one of the most famous charlatans in European history, James Morison. The chief ingredient was gamboge, a powerful laxative and diuretic derived from the sap of deciduous trees found primarily in Cambodia.

Morison’s story is nastily familiar. Like today’s snake oil salesmen (and saleswomen, lest we forget GOOP and Amanda Chantal Bacon), Morison “appealed to the general public because of the missionary-like zeal in which he opposed ‘orthodox’ medicine; in particular, he attacked physicians’ excessive fees and toxic medicine.” He claimed that his vegetable pills, which he began peddling in 1825 at the age of 51, cured 35 years of his own “inexpressible suffering.” But it wasn’t long before these crap laxatives—made from gamboge, aloe, colocynth, cream of tartar, myrrh, and rhubarb—got the good doctor (and his salesmen) in hot water.

No, it’s not just you, everything is noxious now. You spend your day ingesting poison. Whenever you wonder why you’re feeling unwell you need to remind yourself that everything you take in each day is toxic. It is painful, it is pernicious and there’s no escape. It’s all poison. Anyway, here’s music, enjoy.

★ The extra hour, which was to say the already depleted hour, was dim gray, and the next hour was grayer. Figures hunched up against the darkness as if it were cold. Something began dampening the outdoors and a gray blur smudged away the river and now and then parts of buildings. From the angles where it wasn’t invisible, the drizzle was raking down and sideways. The marathoners made their slow, grave way around the sidewalks wrapped in ponchos, with their foil blankets peeping out around the edges. Water beaded on the plastic sheeting of the pedicabs swarming in search of debilitated runners. The blowing drops made the civilians trying to be festive for their runners just wince themselves. The paper of the bakery sack got too soggy to be trusted to bear its burden unsupported.

Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.

I’m sure this will all be fine and in twenty years there definitely won’t be an uprising of brainwashed youth. See also, the Fake Peppa Pig problem, stuff that slips through the YouTube Kids cracks, The Elsa + Spiderman rabbithole, and the lucid nightmare of toddler YouTube.

Image: Leo Hidalgo via Flickr

Struggling to start a paper on the theme of identity in King Lear for my eleventh-grade English class, I googled “quotes on identity.” I included the sentence I found from Albert Camus’s The Stranger as an epigraph to my draft of the paper and blithely went to meet with my teacher about it; it was only when he asked me if I had read Camus that I realized I had done something wrong, only when I saw his disdainful, frustrated response to my “no” that I started to feel mortified. My teacher’s message reached me loud and clear: that one sentence, taken out of context, could not communicate anything significant about Camus’s ideas to me, and so indicating any tie between my ideas and his work could not be honest. The quote, as I had used it, was a collection of words that had more to do with me than Camus. Scrap the quote.

This was 2011. It was early in the days of the Instagram square; Rowan Blanchard, Disney star, was not yet posting Audre Lorde quotes for her five million followers; Tumblr, at four years old, had not yet toddled onto the computer screens of tweens everywhere. The force of a high school teacher’s dismissal was still strong enough to convince a sixteen-year-old that she should be embarrassed to claim any understanding of The Stranger until she had picked up a copy of the book—although the internet was already letting her access the work in fragments.

“How do you know when you’re really in love? And it’s not just an infatuation?” —Lovesick Louie

I have no idea. I thought we’d all be dating robots by now. Or, at least, roombas. I’ve very carefully and very specifically designed my dating life to accentuate the fun stuff and ignore the things that are hard and unpleasant. Like feelings, emotions, trusting people, intimacy, trips to Home Depot for anything. This is why I’ve stayed single all this time, probably.  I’m happy to say that I’ve never been in love, or been in love with someone who was in love with me, in my entire life. I feel like love is overrated and we’d all be better off living single and just having robots. I really do like robots, especially ones that clean up.

Someone on my Twitter feed wrote recently that “Love is Stockholm Syndrome.” And I feel like this is true. Stockholm Syndrome is like when hostages fall in love with their captors. I feel like if you put two random people in an elevator and got it stuck for a while on the 83rd floor, they would fall in love. And yet most of our literature and stories revolves around falling in love, having kids and all that. What does our biological responsibility have to do with who we want to hang out with for the rest of our lives? Can’t we just have babies, give them to the Matrix people, plug them into that whole giant thing, and then hang out with whoever we want?

Weren’t we just here? Wasn’t it moments ago that we were waking up to a new week, full of dread and barely able to drag ourselves to the starting line? Didn’t we just complain about how exhausted we were and wonder how much more we could take? I guess the good news is I can copy and paste this exact block of text over and over again until it finally all comes down, because we live in a world where it’s always like this now. Here’s some music. Enjoy.