Private Citizens

by Tony Tulathimutte

So then what? Why, Linda thought, of every possible experience, the beach? It was a failure of the imagination, budgeted and scheduled.

Here the raindrops were smaller, the hustle slower, everything tolerated. And cities that tolerated everything tolerated mediocrity.

Seeing her college friends after two years made her sad. It was clear now that they’d all avoided experiences, capitulated on their desires, afraid of disturbing their little routines.

She hadn’t written, much less published, anything since college, and for this she partly blamed San Francisco, this little ukulele-strumming cuddle party. A They Might Be Giants song set in concrete.

Though, yes, throwing parties for money was somewhat cynical, and presumed that young people cared about progress only insofar as they could still have fun.

That was of a piece with America’s double exceptionalism: how you judged your nation as the most godblessed or goddamned on earth, but also stood apart from it.

For all the debasement, though, she never felt like the job was beneath her—activism was all about responsible cringing.

It was so depressing when women depoliticized themselves with hotpants.

never alienated by conviction.

But dating her had started to feel like paying the upkeep on a prize Lamborghini. Now he had to do things like clean his room or select clothes with attention to fabrics and seasonal palette. And smoke less. Or not really less but faster.

So it was almost too bad that Vanya was worth the effort, surpassing every unrealistic standard that his friends had always insultingly urged him to lay aside.

I think an apology—, he began to text. But he knew it’d make him seem petty, even though against the general current of his insecurity ran a riptide of vanity, insisting in its mirthless way that he totally deserved Vanya;

But this weather. So nice. Days like this you have to have fun or you’ll hate yourself when you’re older.

and studied public pedagogy and community organizing theory,

He’d formulated the relationship between pragmatism, profit, and pride: put two in conflict and forget the third.

Nonprofits, he learned, supplicated the idle rich, ate young hearts, and defrauded the middle class.

Whereas he was paying for the piano lessons and body-positive dolls and computer camp; if he didn’t, he risked warping her with that ubiquitous American materialism borne of aspirational envy, plus he’d go to jail.

Maybe go to the library to read case studies of companies whose bosses died. Or call Will and ask him to look up info online.

It wouldn’t be awful to be killed by them, she supposed: the Chomsky and Klein, Gramsci and hooks, Freire and Alinsky and Hall, even Atlas Shrugged, which she’d read just to hate it better. But none of them told you what to do when your boss died.

In Cory’s stoned brain, Roopa had seemed ideal, and they moved her in ASAP. But it turned out they weren’t equally political, just equally pedantic.

Roopa was rigid, the way free spirits often were, about the romance of naturopathy and well-being as morality.

Roopa leaned in and seized Cory’s hand. Cory hated rhetorical touching. “All politics are spiritual issues first,” Roopa said.

But more to the point, Roopa had this kernel of willed impracticality, like when Cory proposed a common-area cleaning schedule and she’d said, I don’t believe in linear time. Irrationality was comprehensible; Roopa was prerational.

How could people be moral when morality obliged you to know everything?

Hard work redeems mediocre intelligences, as Seneca says.”

Will resented the influence that this type of moisturized prettiness had over him, but it was an appetizing substitute for dignity.

His atheism, his dislike of the outdoors, the tongue-thrust that made it hard to say thesauruses, past, present, personality, inexperience—insignificance. Death by a thousand denominators.

For no one who wholeheartedly shares in a given sensibility can analyze it; he can only, whatever his intention, exhibit it. —Susan Sontag

Cultures of permission valorized bad taste as liberation. Ecosystems needed predators. Yet San Francisco was nothing if not vegetarian.

But only idiots expected sincerity; anyone with life experience perceived things through a proper corrective filter of mistrust.

No ideas, only intellectual property; no avant-garde, only controversy; no ars poetica, only personal essays; no major writers, only writing majors.

How pathetic to only resemble ambition, to grab at the sun from the stepladder of institution.

She was better than this, better than . . . herself?

Greatness was a moated metropolis you were born into or not. Linda occupied its exurbs; she was bridge-and-tunnel to genius, faux poet, proseur. Maybe she could translate. Edit. Copyedit. Serve superior souls. Art was so useless that effort meant nothing without overwhelming success. Process was the booby prize.

As a scientist you implicitly checked your dualist beliefs at the door and accepted that free will and consciousness were side effects. But it didn’t feel right, that mass was just mass.

College just gets you from one desk to another. It gentrifies your mind.”

He was losing it—losing sex. Linda once said how odd it was that you had sex, not did sex, but you did do “it,” “it” being sex, not love; you neither had nor did, you made love. But sex was something you had or didn’t have, and thus could lose. And just like having sex, you could lose sex over and over again, if it was going to be that kind of night.

Porn was obviously art: it just had weak criticism.

Maybe Will liked porn for not insulting him by pretending it had anything to do with the reality of sex, or with him.

Render times were a bottleneck in the workflow, so he hauled his old desktops out of the garage, popped in some spare RAM, and fashioned an HPC cluster to distribute the processing.

What was porn, after all? A set of expectations.

Together they observed Henrik and Linda’s mating ritual with disinterest, agreed that couples were inherently selfish, encouraging vicarious egotism and demoting friends to second-rate conveniences.

Her hair Venned interestingly between morning neglect and political statement,

“The Internet is a vile, omnivorous privatization machine. A technological vector of capitalist domination. Heidegger.” “Yo, you don’t win arguments by saying ‘Heidegger.’”

plus, as technology became more complex, it got harder to regulate and appropriate, so technological progress was regress to mysticism.

“People want shopping malls,” Will said, “and they’ll make them, because convenience trumps freedom every time. Don’t blame tech for that. Dismissing the Internet is like dismissing buildings.”

And a relationship was nothing but a profound invasion of privacy: invasion, followed by occupation.

“Dank. Can I post that? You want attrib, bro?” That way he said bro with an ironic dip only made Cory loathe him in a different way. She used to think the language of power was just a substitution cipher of shibboleths. But it was more like an insect language: dense pheromone clouds communicating fear and attraction, hunger and envy, have and not.

I mean, everyone hangs out there on weekends anyway. It’s right off the J. Young and participatory. Forty years ago that park was only good for getting murdered in; now it’s a symbol of civic rehab.”

They were seated and the waitress came. This was that vegan restaurant where you had to order in a humiliating way. “I Am Transformed,” Henrik told the waitress. “I Am Vibrant,” Cory said, “without guacamole.”