Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

(12) Join the Learning Revolution

This billboard advertised a product called Litmos, offered by CallidusCloud. Litmos allowed companies to create videos and training materials that worked along the moronic and ill-conceived principles of e-learning , which was an ephemeral system of pedagogy designed by people who hated teachers and formal education.

(13) RingCentral. Many locations. One cloud phone system.

This billboard advertised RingCentral, which was a company that offered cloud-based phone systems. RingCentral had raised funding from the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital.

(14) TAKE A BREAK FROM HAVING IT ALL TO ENJOY IT ALL.

This billboard advertised the Bay Club, a chain of private fitness clubs and spas located throughout the Bay Area.

(15) TechCrunch DISRUPT SF 2013

This billboard advertised the TechCrunch DISRUPT 2013 San Francisco conference. TechCrunch was a website that provided biased, pro-industry pseudojournalism about developments in imaginary technologies. DISRUPT was the name of TechCrunch’s many conferences, after disruptive innovation, a popular Silicon Valley concept developed by a Mormon who believed, literally, that he was in verbal communication with God.

(16) The All New Droid

This billboard advertised the Motorola Droid, which was a smartphone. Motorola was a company owned by Google. The brandname Droid was a trademark of LucasFilm and licensed to Motorola. LucasFilm was owned by Disney.

(17) #1 for a Reason

This billboard advertised Trend Micro Inc, a Japanese company that sold consumer level and enterprise level security software and services.

(18) iPad

This billboard advertised the iPad. The iPad had changed everything.

It came to pass that J. Karacehennem and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter had packed up their lives. The movers had come and taken everything away.

Their apartment was empty. They were moving tomorrow.

J. Karacehennem spent his last night hanging out with Adeline. The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter didn’t mind.

She had her own plans. She was going to a dinner party full of people for whom she didn’t particularly care.

“It’s your last night in the city,” said J. Karacehennem. “Why would you spend it with people you can’t stand?”

“I agreed months ago,” she said. “Before we knew we were moving. I can’t just cancel.”

“Sure you can,” said J. Karacehennem. “Just don’t show.”

“That’s not how I am,” said The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.

So she sat around eating mediocre vegan food while listening to the inane babblings of people for whom she didn’t particularly care.

The topic of discussion was Miley Cyrus.

Miley Cyrus was a pop star.

You could say MILEY to almost anyone anywhere in the industrialized world and conjure a vague neurological image of Miley Cyrus.

Her songs were about the same six subjects of all songs by all pop stars: love, celebrity, fucking, heartbreak, money and buying ugly shit.

People were talking about Miley Cyrus because she’d spent the summer changing her image.

Miley Cyrus’s career had started as a teenaged actress on the Disney Channel, a cable network owned by the company founded by Walt Disney.

Miley Cyrus produced a great deal of intellectual property for Disney. All of this intellectual property was targeted towards children. It dripped with sugar and tasted of bubblegum.

By the Summer of 2013, Miley Cyrus had grown into a young woman and adopted a public image resting on conspicuous consumption, drug use and open sexuality.

It was hard to remember, but there’d been a time when the Political Left had considered drug use and open sexuality as tools of liberation.

Then it turned out that Republicans liked to fuck and shoot smack, too.

Anyway, Miley Cyrus appeared at MTV’s Video Music Awards with an unmemorable pop singer named Robin Thicke, who had no eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

Robin Thicke had stirred some controversy over the summer with his hit pop song, “Blurred Lines.”

Social activists on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook had taken issue with the song’s lyrical content, which they believed promoted rape.

The song’s promotional video featured a gaggle of half-naked female models sporting glazed expressions and an inability to dance on beat. The models looked, basically, like they were full of heroin.

Social activists wrote many long screeds and tweeted heavily about Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” They were challenging the prevailing social trends that they found mirrored in the content of the song.

Their social activism occurred on mechanisms owned by the Patriarchy. Their social activism occurred on platforms designed for the sole purpose of advertising.

So all they did was advertise for Robin Thicke. The sum total effect of the protest was to make Robin Thicke richer.

There was Miley Cyrus at the Video Music Awards. She was on stage with Robin Thicke. She was engaged in a form of dance known as twerking.

Twerking was characterized by the twerker squatting low while thrusting their hips back and forth. This thrusting caused the twerker’s buttocks to shake in a manner that many moral scolds considered sexual but actually just looked goofy.

Twerking had been a traditionally African-American and Afro-Caribbean dance, meaning that it originated and was performed by people with eumelanin in the basale stratum of their epidermises.

Miley Cyrus didn’t have eumelanin in her epidermis.

So that was the subject of the dinner party’s inane babbling. A group of middle-aged White people sat around discussing Miley Cyrus’s cultural appropriation of twerking .

The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter suffered the evening.

Meanwhile, J. Karacehennem picked up Adeline in a rental car. He had rented the car for the next day, when he and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter would drive to Los Angeles.

“Darling,” said Adeline as she climbed into the car, “do you want to eat first or must we indulge your madness?”

“It has to be at 8PM,” he said. “I don’t think we have time for food before then.”

J. Karacehennem had told Adeline that what he wanted to do on his last night in the city was drive to the top of Twin Peaks and scream at San Francisco.

Twin Peaks were a pair of hills near the center of the city. They were marked by a giant television antenna called Sutro Tower. The tower was visible from almost anywhere in the city. From Twin Peaks, you could see every neighborhood with any importance to J. Karacehennem.

You could see the Haight. You could see the Richmond. You could see the Sunset. You could see the Financial District. You could see Hayes Valley. You could see Corona Heights. You could see North Beach. You could see, sort of, Fisherman’s Wharf. You could see the Presidio.

“It’s madness,” said Adeline. “ C’est fou! I shall accompany you if you insist.”

“What else is there to do?” he asked. “I want my John Galt moment.”

“Who is John Galt?” asked Adeline.

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” said J. Karacehennem.

John Galt was the central personage of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It is John Galt who organizes a strike of the world’s richest people. It’s John Galt who gives a 60 page speech about how poor people are worthless trash that should die in the gutter.

J. Karacehennem drove to the top of Twin Peaks. There was fog over the city. Neither J. Karacehennem nor Adeline expected the park to be very busy.