Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

Adeline let Baby hold court. She didn’t interrupt. She talked to Christine.

“Tell me, you charming girl,” said Adeline, “Do you think Baby is going to screw the brains out of this twink ? If so, do you posit that this screwing out of brains will occur at my apartment?”

Besides the twink, Baby brought along five other sycophants. Adeline and Christine listened as they asked Baby pointless questions about Annie Zero.

Like: In chapter fifteen, when Annie Zero demands that the agrarian class enter a state of permanent revolution, does this preclude allies from the proletariat?

Like: Who does Annie Zero marry in the end?

Like: How did you think of the thing with the anteater?

Neither Adeline nor Christine were part of the conversation. Adeline suggested that they pass the time by doing what Baby had done, which was to invent a lot of bullshit words.

Adeline came up with pregnot: the time between the last unprotected sex and the onset of ovulation.

Christine came up with jeejoonjaz : the sensation of existing, simultaneously, within three different calendar months.

Adeline came up with celebusikenz: being made sick by the accidental radiation of a D-list celebrity.

Christine came up with shizpaz : the problem of needing to urinate and defecate at the same time and the confusion that arises when a person can’t figure out which to do first.

Adeline came up with haksiksad : the feeling a person gets when they hear their cat wretch but before the feline has vomited.

Christine came up with disaguit : when a handsome young man invites you back to his place only to take off his shirt and play the guitar.

Adeline came up with terrofucked : the moment when an empire is destroyed by 19 guys carrying box cutters and a few cans of mace.

Christine came up with sloslopped : the slowing of time as you spill liquid across a linoleum floor.

Adeline came up with twinkiwink : when you’re not sure whether your best friend, who is leaking mucus from every orifice of his countenance, will bring a twink to your apartment for sex.

Christine came up with oldthunked: when you conceive, in totality, the full life of a person who you have met in their final decade.

Adeline and Christine exchanged numbers.

They started hanging out.

They saw each other about once a week.

Baby screwed out the twink’s brains. He took the twink to Adeline’s apartment. They made orgasms and earthquakes of pleasure. They shook the guest bedroom.

Baby was coughing and leaking the whole time. The twink didn’t care.

Adeline put on headphones.

Everyone who’d been at City Lights came down with a cold. This included Adeline. This included Peter Maravelis. This included the twink . This included Christine.

Baby had coughed all over the audience and infected them with his germs. This was only slightly metaphorical.

J. Karacehennem had moved to San Francisco at an insane moment in its history. The beauty of the city was not outweighing its annoying residents.

The word used to describe the insanity of the moment was gentrification, but no one knew what gentrification meant, not really, and most people did not understand what was happening.

Christine was one of these people. She had lived in the city for almost two decades. She was caught up in a whirlwind of change. She had no idea what the fuck was going on.

It was as if she’d been hit by one of the Ford F-150s advertised on Twitter.

Gentrification was what happened to a city when people with an excess of capital wanted their capital to produce more capital while not attributing any value to labor.

The point was this: in 2007, the American economy had crashed.

In the decades leading up to the crash, a series of US Presidents had done everything they could to make sure that capital, rather than labor, was the driving force of the American economy. This process was called deregulation.

These Presidents were: Ronald Reagan, George Bush I, Bill Clinton, George Bush II. None of them had any eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.

Ronald Reagan was a former actor who had starred in a movie in which he taught morals to an ape. He was the Governor of California before he was President of the United States.

George Bush I came from such an old money family that his father sat on the board of a bank under Nazi control. George Bush I had been the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Bill Clinton grew up poorer than dirt. He positioned himself in the imaginary political center, which was a polite way of saying that he governed from the Right while mouthing platitudes of the Left. He loved three things: (1) Women. (2) The sound of his own voice. (3) Deregulation .

George Bush II was the son of George Bush I. He was a draft dodger. He was President when America was terrofucked . His brother, Neil, was a sex tourist who caught herpes from a sex-worker in Southeast Asia.

George Bush II was an alcoholic and one of the worst Presidents in history. His inexperience led to him being manipulated by his Vice President, another draft dodger who loved three things: (1) Torture. (2) War. (3) Self-righteousness.

The Presidency, which was limited to eight years, had an incentive for deregulation .

The incentive was simple. The short term gains caused by deregulation appeared very fast. The damage took decades to arrive.

It’s worth noting that the one constant in all four Presidencies was the presence of Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Alan Greenspan loved deregulation.

He was also one of Ayn Rand’s disciples. He’d sat at her knee whilst she talked about poor people being garbage who deserved to die in the gutter.

Ayn Rand was the most formative intellectual influence on the man who oversaw the Federal Reserve during a period of intense deregulation.

The predictable result of this deregulation was a series of speculation bubbles that destroyed the economy.

It’s arguable that Ayn Rand’s finest achievement was not the authoring of two shitty novels. It’s arguable that Ayn Rand’s finest achievement was crashing the economy twenty-five years after her death.

A speculation bubble was a scheme in which people with money convinced people with less money that things have value greater than their actual worth.

People who get in at the beginning of a bubble and then get out before the bubble pops make a ton of money. Everyone else gets screwed.

When the economy imploded, the response of the Federal government was to institute a series of half-assed reforms which kept the status at quo.

Part of keeping the status at quo was lowering short term interest rates to near zero and instituting a series of quantitative easing programs which pumped billions of dollars, monthly, into the economy. The latter had the effect of lowering long term interest rates to almost zero.

If interest rates were near zero, traditional outlets — savings accounts, treasury bonds — would no longer offer returns on investment. This would force people with capital to move that capital into other parts of the economy.

By putting money into investment opportunities, cash circulated and the economy was stimulated.

In theory.

One of the models by which people invested their money was venture capital. Venture capital was the dominant investment model of the San Francisco Bay Area.

Erik Willems was one of the men who worked in venture capital. He moved money in the desired directions of his masters.