Jarett Kobek: I Hate the Internet

Suzanne was an alcoholic.

Back in the early 1990s, when they decided to publish Trill, both Adeline and Jeremy Winterbloss recognized that their project suffered from two structural disadvantages.

Structural disadvantage #1: the principle products of the comic book industry were 32-page monthly pamphlets containing drawings of gargantuan breasted women. These breasts resembled over-inflated volleyballs, much like the ones spiked and served by the cast of Gidget.

This focus on gargantuan breasts meant that most of the industry’s output was subtle pornography for the mentally backwards.

There’d been a few successful books that featured talking animals, but Jeremy could think of only one semi-successful comic book about an anthropomorphic cat. That book was “ Omaha” The Cat Dancer .

Omaha was created by Reed Waller and Kate Worley. Omaha was a stripper in an urban milieu. Being a cat dancer got Omaha into all kinds of trouble.

The pornography in “ Omaha” was not subtle. Most issues depicted Omaha having sex with other anthropomorphic animals of many species and genders.

Jeremy showed Adeline a few issues of “ Omaha” The Cat Dancer. Adeline thought it strange that Omaha, a cat, had a dense patch of hair on her mons pubis. But that was comics.

Structural disadvantage #2: as with any business, the comics industry had its own culture, and that culture was soaked in sexism and racism like a Christmas ham marinating in syrup and ginger.

Jeremy had experienced the sexism and racism first hand, having worked for several years in the late 1980s as an intern at Marvel Comics.

Jeremy Winterbloss was an African-American man, which meant that some of his ancestors were brought to the United States in bondage and put to work in the service of his other ancestors. This second group of ancestors owned the first group.

Many of Jeremy’s ancestors were part of the social construct called the White race, and they raped many of Jeremy’s other ancestors, the ones who were owned and were part of the social construct called the Black Race, whose members were also known as Coloreds or Negroes or Nigras or any of hundreds of other derogatory words.

There were not many derogatory words for members of the social construct called the White race. The ones that did exist were sort of useless and packed almost no offensive punch.

These were: honkey, cracker, hillbilly, redneck, peckerwood.

Peckerwood had some possibilities. The others were pathetic.

Sometimes when Jeremy’s male ancestors raped Jeremy’s female ancestors, the underlying biology would produce babies. When these babies were born, they were owned by their fathers or their fathers’ families.

You could rape your property and make new property and that new property would earn you more money. It was a nice time to own people. It was a bad time to be owned.

The social construction of the White race was pseudoscience revolving around the misapprehension that inessential physical features represented biological distinctions amongst members of the human species.

Of all the inessential features that led to the social construction of the White race, differences in skin pigmentation were the most prominent.

There was a widely held belief amongst members of the White race that their skin was uncolored and thus White. In fact, members of the White race were an unfortunate pink somewhere around the shade of a newborn piglet.

According to certain people who self-described as People of Color , which was a remarkably offensive and unexamined phrase, and members of the White Race, Colored skin was the visual byproduct of eumelanin’s presence in the stratum basale layer of the epidermis.

Eumelanin was the product of melanocytes, which are cells located alongside the basal cells in the stratum basale layer of the epidermis. Under histopathologic examination, eumelanin looked a little like a dried mustard stain.

Most members of the White race were so accustomed to their piglet pink that they couldn’t see their own pink. To them, their piglet pink was invisible as the genocides committed by their forefathers.

An entire social order was built around the inability to see what was right in front of, and on, their faces. An entire social hierarchy was built around mustards stains in the epidermis.

This is one of several reasons why many people considered the human species to be a bunch of dumb assholes.

Of course, the social hierarchy’s racial component was a generalized dodge to avoid talking about the only real factor in establishing order. Which is to say money .

According to many first year graduate students in economics, money was a general agreement amongst a group of people that certain tangibles or intangibles represent the ordering of value.

In fact, money was the unit by which people measured humiliation.

What would you do for a dollar?

What would you do for ten dollars?

What would you do for a million dollars?

What would you do for a billion dollars?

Adeline didn’t have eumelanin in the basal cell layer of her epidermis and was thus a member of the White race.

This offered her a great deal of social prestige, particularly as she was from a rich family. But she was a woman. Being a woman detracted from that social prestige.

All women in America, even the rich White women, took a ton of shit. They were doomed if they did and doomed if they didn’t.

Men had spent millennia treating women like crap. One theory as to the origins of this social ordering suggested that women’s lack of upper body strength made them worse at ploughing fields and swinging swords.

Ploughed fields produced food.

Swung swords produced dead humans.

Most societies, being dominated by men, put premium value on eating and killing. This emphasis on strength over intelligence neatly avoided the fact that women are smarter than men.

Women’s lack of upper body strength was only one explanation of the social ordering. There were hundreds of ideas for why women were treated like crap but very few practical solutions.

A little bit before Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, a billionaire named Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead . Sheryl Sandberg didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.

In her book, Sheryl Sandberg proposed that women who weren’t billionaires could stop being treated like crap by men in the workplace if only they smiled more and worked harder and acted more like the men who treated them like crap.

Billionaires were always giving advice to people who weren’t billionaires about how to become billionaires.

It was almost always intolerable bullshit.

Sandberg became a billionaire by working for a company named Facebook.

Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals.

This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives.

Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

What is your gender? asked Facebook.

What is your relationship status? asked Facebook.

What is your current city? asked Facebook.

What is your name? asked Facebook.

What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook.

What is your favorite music? asked Facebook.

What are your favorite books? asked Facebook.