Come Join Our Disease Quotes

“I wanted to say to them: I don't even know what we're doing. There is no scheme. There's nothing we want or hope for. I felt as if everything was pressing in, as if my mind was a sludgy and toxic as the slurry that covered the floor, the walls, our skin. There is no difference anymore, I realised, between what we were taking in and what we were expelling, between what we were and what we might aspire to be, between what we consumed and expelled, and what we'd become. It was all shit. We were shit. Our world was shit. Everything was a single, flowing, un-dammed, undifferentiated river of filth, and within that river we were formless and liquid and horribly free, and all anyone wanted to do was to fashion new moulds into which we should pull the cooling and hardening putrescence of who we were, so they could force what was formless into a form that they could comfortably condemn.’ (p.290)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“Sometimes, looking back, I try to isolate a moment to change, a day or a night on either side of which things were demonstrably different. I never succeed. Partly, I think, is because it's simply not possible. Outside of sudden, violent events, changes is ongoing; we measure it only by holding what we've become against the memory of what we once were. But it's also because, in that space, at that particular time, We were so enmeshed in change, so completely caught up in it that singular, momentary factors became lost and blurred. Day and night slipped their boundaries. Our bodies ached, contorted, then were numbed with narcotics and went slack. My fingernails became sharp, then broken. In regular life, the life we'd left, we would have managed these processes, checked them, turned things back to how they were and how we liked them. There, in that concrete room, we surrendered ourselves to time and all its effects. The heat was unrelenting, pooling us in sweat and thickening the stink in which we lived. (p.271)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“Routine was a system, a machine that would make me, well. Where before I had noted the ease with which routine arose, here, I felt its implacability, it's remorselessness and determination. It was a schedule designed to stifle possibility, because an excess of possibility had made me ill. At night, the lights in my room snapped off and told me that it was time to sleep. In the morning they flared and told me it was time to wake. After I woke I showered. After I showered I ate. Then I washed down a rainbow of pills and went to my first class or session. My body was irrelevant, my desires redundant and discouraged. To each external stimulus, only a single, pre-approved response was acceptable. (p.319)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“We could barely even recognise each other, let alone differentiate. With our hair slicked down with awful, a faces glistening with translucent slime, our clothes rotted and tattered, and revealing bodies in equal and complementary states of decay, we appeared to each other simply as shining, semi-fluid forms in the darkness. We reached for anything we could consume - food, old and new, detritus from the floor, are own squelching shit - and washed it down with all the booze we could manage

[...] If we kept on, I knew, our skin itself would leave us, rotting from our bones and pooling at her ankles, until there was nothing at all to tell one of us from the other, or any of us from anyone else. Even in the haze, I understood what I had achieved. I’d stripped everything back, rendered myself down to nothing but the shit I contained. I had transcended even wildness and animality, become bacterial, amoebic, viral. I was infinite and self-dividing, no longer near to death, but death itself, airborne and particulate. The skin of the world had been peeled away, and what was beneath, I knew was the true face of God: pulsing and writhing and ugly with life. (p.300)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“We were inundated with food. Delivery, vans from local supermarkets arrived, laden with crates of booze, fine chocolates, cooked meats, exotic fruits....
What once had felt necessary, then abundant, now began to feel obscene. In part, we revelled in that obscenity. We took pictures of ourselves awash with food, not, just eating it, but rolling in it, lying on it, burying ourselves in it. When people found this offensive, we simply absorbed and digested their disgust in much the same way as we re-absorbed the shit we produced from our bodies. Zelma, in particular, enjoyed this aspect of what we did. It harked back to her adjustment of adverts. Her violent hatred of consumerism. This isn't our life, she wrote in the caption of a particularly excessive and indulgent image - Kim lying on her back while from above eight bottles of champagne were emptied over her face - it's yours. The post attracted a particularly high level of outrage. What was this? People wanted to know. Was this a protest? Or just debauchery? Were we anti-consumerist, as many seemed to feel we should be, or in fact, hyper-consumerist, an idea which some people found it offensive as the idea that we were some sort of plague cult. (p.266)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I came to understand that this truly was what it meant to go back to nature, that this was nature in its truest form. No forests and campfires, no rolling hills and reassuring rambles. Just rivers of shit and decay, a chamber in which we ate and shat and ate and shat and lived among the carcasses of all the things we didn't want and couldn't fully consume. The processes of the world were known to us. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I began to feel as if we were merging with one another. The process was more than simply emotional. It was biological, systemic. Each of our bodies was a biosphere, slick with bacterial and insect life. Reteamed, and what we teamed with brought us closer not only to each other, but to the ecosystem we inhabited, fed off, and nourished. Bacteria bred in the ooze of our waste, our discarded food remains and puddled shit, then travelled onto us and between us, carried not only on the thickened air, but by the fleas and lice that hopped and crawled from one body to another. There was no difference, I began to think, between the puddles on the floor and the streaks of filth on my skin and the acne that erupted on Margot’s face. It was all just life, matter, the biome. We were leaking out into the world, and the pooled primordial essence of the world was soaking back into us in turn. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“Margot felt self-conscious, timid. She had a fear running into people when she was unwashed. She seemed particularly worried about the people who worked on the estate, most of whom were men, most of whom, I tried to explain, were filthy in their own ways - smeared with grease and dust, or spattered with spray paint and oil. I tried pointing out to her the unfairness of this divide, the way some kinds of dirt were associated with honest, masculine labour, while others were associated with malaise or inertia. She understood this, warmed to it as an idea, but whenever the moment came to leave, she found it some excuse to stay. (p.198)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“You know what I think?’ said Zelma. ‘You got to start small, start symbolic, then grow it until it's huge.’
‘Meaning what’, I said
‘Meaning take back certain moments, enjoy certain moments starting with your body. Starting with how the only shit you can actually save her is at the weekend. I mean, Why? Why is that?’
‘In the morning I'm rushed. And when I get and then I get to work and I'm busy. And I feel like people notice when I'm away from my desk. I feel like either they think to themselves that I'm skiving, or that they just immediately know that I'm shitting.
‘Why shouldn't they know that you're shitting?’
‘I don't know.’
‘From now on, she said, I want you to prioritise your shitting. In your day now starting tomorrow nothing matters except shitting. Your sole purpose is to shit. I want you to get professional at shitting. And when you get good at it, celebrate it.’ (p.141)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“But what aren't you doing already? What more can you possibly do?’
‘I guess he means the team stuff’, I said. ‘The bonding. The camaraderie I've never really been –‘.
‘Don't start judging yourself’, she said sharply. ‘Don't start seeing yourself in the light of those kinds of standards.’
‘No, but it's true. There's always been the part of work I've struggled with, the unquestioning side. The feeling of joining in. I've always tried to do it at this kind of remove. Maybe what he's saying is –‘
‘Of course you've done it at a remove. How else are you supposed to do it and still be you?’
‘But maybe those days are gone’, I said. ‘Maybe I have to accept that. Maybe there just won't be those kind of jobs anymore - the ones where you can roll out of bed and staggering without speaking to anyone and keep your head down and just do it, you know? maybe this is what work is, now’
[…]
‘Definitely. Simple tasks can be automated. They've already almost got the machine learning to do what you do. It's about what else a human can bring to the table, which is, literally, their humanity.’
It was possible, I realised, to imagine. A semi-global future in which the bulk of paid human employment would revolve not around hard skills, but around the messy, blurry business of interpersonal success. A new divide would open up, between the well liked, The easy to get along with, and the awkward, The rude, the unfriendly. I pictured the encampment on which I had lived, filled not as it was then, with migrants, unfortunates, hard drinkers, the out of luck. But instead, the abrasive, the poorly adjusted, the excessively reserved and painfully shy. (p.136-7)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“For Zelma it was less about expression and more about reply. She couldn't tune out the exhortations but neither could she allow them simply to pass through her unchecked and uninterrogated. She had to respond and yet the responses that were expected of her work proscribed. It wasn't enough, she often said, to discuss these things online. To do so, she felt, was to accept the space she had been allotted. She wanted argument and debate to unfold in the same location it was initiated. When an advert invaded her mental and visual space, she invaded its physical and aesthetic space right back. In our rush to the web, she said, we had ceded ground in the physical world. As a result, ever more overt expressions went unnoticed and unchallenged. What once would have found itself defaced was now, instead, photographed and shared online for critique. But its form, its face, remained unaltered, untarnished, clean. (p.128)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease