Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

Or inside your smartphone.

And, reader, don’t mistake me for one of your dopey male acquaintances who, after #MeToo broke, went and posted statements on Facebook about how they were learning to be better people, when all they were really saying was this: Please don’t get me fired because I tried to fuck you when I was drunk at the office holiday party.

I wrote an entire book about the horror of a society built around the whims of men, and I did it long before there was any obvious reward for performing this particular piety.

It’s called I Hate the Internet .

It made me famous in Serbia.

Serbia!

Despite its obvious virtues, #MeToo demonstrated why the Twenty-First Century AD may preclude the possibility of meaningful political protest.

In August of 2017 AD, Donald J. Trump returned to Trump Tower, which was a giant golden skyscraper that he’d built over Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue.

This was where Donald J. Trump had lived before he moved into the White House.

This was where he had staged his bid for the Presidency.

He hadn’t been back since he’d become President and earned the right to bomb the living fuck shit out of Muslim peasants in the name of American freedom.

A few days before his return, there’d been a White Supremacist rally in Virginia where a young woman was killed when a Neo-Nazi drove his car into a crowd of counter-protestors.

On the very same day as Donald J. Trump’s return, I happened to be staying on the eleventh floor of the Warwick Hotel, which is about two blocks south and one block west from Trump Tower.

From my hotel room, I could hear the protests outside of Donald J. Trump’s former home.

I walked over to Trump Tower, where the NYPD had blocked off Fifth Avenue.

Donald J. Trump still hadn’t arrived.

Like the novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy , Trump Tower was empty of its eponymous hero.

About two thousand people were barricaded on both the west and east sidewalks.

People were holding signs.

People were wearing T-shirts relevant to their political protests.

People were using their cellphones to record video of the protests.

People were chanting.

They were screaming: THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE!

When they screamed THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE, I think what they meant was this: Donald J. Trump, here is the face of the American public, and we oppose you in all of your manifold perversions. We repudiate you in your evil. A change is gonna come, Bubba .

The scene was straight out of Tolkien.

A few thousand people, restrained by the Orcish Host of the NYPD, had been corralled into pre-approved places from where they shouted impotent chants at an impregnable empty golden tower.

The protestors were right.

It really was what democracy looked like.

In an era when significant amounts of social protest occurs on the Internet, it necessarily means that all of that social protest is monetized.

And not by the protestors.

#MeToo generated unbelievable amounts of web traffic.

For months, it was an international spectator sport.

Almost every time that someone interacted with #MeToo, they were generating income for Facebook or Google or Twitter, which were the three companies that dominated advertising and political expression on the Internet.

Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Facebook, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Corporation, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital World Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Northern Trust, Morgan Stanley, Invesco, Geode Capital Management.

Together, these ten companies owned just over 31 per cent of Facebook.

Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Google, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, BlackRock, Fidelity Investments, State Street Corporation, T. Rowe Price Associates, Capital Research Global Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Capital World Investors (a subsidiary of Capital Group), Northern Trust, BNY Mellon, Wellington Management.

Together, these ten companies owned just over 31 per cent of Google.

Here’s a list of the major institutional holders of Twitter, circa September 2017 AD: The Vanguard Group, ClearBridge Investments, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, Slate Path Capital, State Street Corporation, OppenheimerFunds, Coatue Management, First Trust, Northern Trust.

Together, these ten companies owned just over 27 per cent of Twitter.

With one exception, none of these institutional holders was operated in any meaningful sense by anyone other than some old white guys in suits.

And the job of these white guys in suits was to make money for the people who owned everything.

In the case of the one institutional holder that was run by a woman, the woman in question had inherited the company from her father.

This literally was the Patriarchy.

And #MeToo had made them, and their clients, a huge amount of money.

The general consensus of opinion was that Twitter, more than any other company headquartered in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, had destroyed America.

It had turned everyone into kindergarteners, it had murdered journalism, and it had almost certainly helped Donald J. Trump get elected.

In the seven years following its initial public offering in 2011 AD, Twitter had never made a dime. It lost money for twenty-seven straight quarters.

Yet when it posted its results for the fourth quarter of 2017 AD, which was the time period encompassing the Weinstein revelations and the subsequent social fallout, Twitter revealed that in the final three months of the year, the company had made $91,000,000.

It was a #MeToo miracle!

And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer group of men!

In the early days, it felt as if the organic uprising of women was going to be the main story. It was one of those rare moments of social openness where the rules are up for grabs.

Anything could happen.

But this was America.

#MeToo became the same story as every story in America: a nexus of how power and money played out amongst the Celebrity branch of American governance.

The revised story fixated on the three industries that were the locus of Donald J. Trump’s power: the entertainment industry, journalism, and politics.

The organic outcry was lost amidst stories of the appalling behavior of certain men with professional careers in the public sphere. These stories tended to run the gamut: they went from unfortunate comments to groping to flat-out rape.

A handful of the stories weren’t even about sexual harassment.

They were about consensual relationships with deeply unsavory people, which had been recontextualized after the #MeToo moment.

Literally every woman alive who’d engaged in the biological imperative of sex with men had undergone the routine humiliation of consensual sex with at least one deeply unsavory person.

This was the bullshit con of heterosexuality.

But most of those women, who were poor and didn’t work in media, weren’t given the opportunity to write opinion pieces for Variety about their shitty ex-boyfriends and old lovers.

Their shitty ex-boyfriends and old lovers weren’t members of the Celebrity branch of American governance.

The unspoken social undercurrent of the revised story revealed itself.

#MeToo became about the way in which encounters with men had stymied the ambitions of women who had wanted to achieve upward social mobility in the industries that were the nexus of Donald J. Trump’s power.

Which, look, by itself this was no small problem.

But it’s a very far cry from what kicked the whole thing off, which was a story about a serial rapist who actively worked to destroy people after he raped them.