highway 64

the trail of tears is a flat circle

Everything Philip K Dick said came true and the scanner darkly is you.

The cloud has captured your existence. Not just your social media and your search history but everything you are.

Everything you love.

Everything you hope for and everything you need.

The bots know every sliver of every shadow of loss and lust in your heart, every dark urge on the far side of your skull, every flicker of desire under your skin. The bots know things about you that you don’t yet know. Because they feed on your data. From your shopping cart at amazon to the ambient data tucked into every transaction on your banking app. From everything you ever liked or lingered on in the zuckerverse to whoever you last fucked on tinder. And it’s not just your search history and social life but the whole above and below that is the cloud, the humming buzzing churning hornet’s nest of humanity.

The cloud is all of us.

In the late nineties and early aughts, when post office shootings and postmodern serial killers Bundy and Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy entered the collective consciousness to take up residence in the aftermath of the unabomber being snapped up in a primitive shack in the middle of nowhere, I was on a real world alt weekly news desk in Santa Barbara.

I was in the real for the post office shooter and the kid who mowed down students with his car and for the Neverland ranch trial. I was there for the trials of dozens or hundreds of rapes and murders and abductions of nobody anybody heard of.

Always the hills were on fire.

Close your eyes and scroll back to 1999 when the internet was barely an idea, when the matrix was a daydream. The dial up internet was just a spiderweb between tree and rosebush, just strands of silver glinting in the light.

The sociopaths and killers, the trolls, the creepers and bullies, they used to write letters to the editor. They filled up notebooks like John Doe in the movie Se7en yes, but they also composed thousands of what are now endless crazy jackass with an opinion on twitter reddit chan trading furry memes on some dark side image board where the fuck ever letters.

Those letters, we had a stack.

Every paper at every city in America had a stack. We published letters to the editor from real people who gave a fuck. Who knew some shit. The letters that said something. The letters that shared something we had not yet thought of, something no one else had said, something that mattered.

We published one or two nutters if they were funny.

Dropped the thousand other nutters assholes weirdos in a box. The real freaks, the ones oozing manifesto vibes and the ransom notes might get passed up or sideways along the intelligence chain. The back page classified ads, now. Those were paid. There was no dropping those freaks in a box. But they were paid by the letter and by the inch. Imagine if since the jump all the sociopaths had to pay a dime per article of rage on twitter. They would go back to the bathroom wall. They would also disappear into the cracks and shadows of the real world churn where it took longer to find them.

The back page ads were written in code and they were terrifying if you analyzed the darkness between and within the evil summoned in the unsaid. All the dark terrible shit happening now in front of your eyes online was yeah always happening.

The badlands are endless.

The crossroads, the interstate highways and truck stops, the cowboy car culture all of it is perfect for murderers thieves shooters serial killers and suicide bombers, perfect for disappearing people and killing kids.

This is America. The no country for old men.

This is where we created the perfect dream nightmare playground and nameless endless ever repeating highway landscape between the crossroads and harbors of interlocking identical boxtowns, all the motels the stripmalls the parking lots the dark alleys the jails the abandoned smoldering factories, all of it the perfect hellscape for killing people for killing ourselves and killing each other same as the internet is now the perfect liminal underworld for the politics of fear and schizophrenia to fester and spread like wildfire.

For hundreds of years we figured out which train to get on without a phone in our hand or pocket. Now you cannot function without a smart phone somewhere in your car bag jacket some goddamn pocket or other. Try going to a foreign country or strange city in America and walk around for 24 without a phone without losing your mind.

If we had only hung onto the landlines and phone booths we would be in the Neuromancer future right now.

If you missed the days of wandering lost in a strange city looking for a pay phone at a gas station on the crossroads or down a ghostly tube station you have not lived.

Lose your phone now you don't exist.

Please pay attention people substack may save us, stupid as that sounds.

We raised our children to be cowboys and pirates. To be gangsters and soldiers and artists and assholes. To be layabouts and lollygaggers. To be white hats and black hats. To be terrorists and insurrectionists. To be robber barons. To be killers and rapists. To be rebels and slaves. To be gamblers and liars and poets. To be outlaws and saviors. To be drug addicts. To be rock gods and porn stars. To believe they might be kings. To believe in the end times. To believe in three different versions of the same god and no god at once.

In the ‘90s and every decade before that it was much easier to disappear and disappear someone else on both the lost highways and in the middle of Times Square. Now the psychos assholes freaks and would be killers congregate on twitter and reddit and deep in the bowels of the dark web. Twitter is not and never was the town square. Twitter is the bathroom wall.

The journalists had and still have a code.

We need the reporters. We must be vigilant. The writers must get this. The writers keep the rest of us from unraveling. We don't have time for this shit. When journalists in the ‘90s saw what rule 34 meant. What the fuck it meant and would mean on the ground. What it meant to open the abyss. To live inside pandora’s box was to be prometheus lashed to the rock. Have you not seen Zodiac and American History X. Do you not remember the Oklahoma City bombing.

First rule of the stalker assignment is pay attention to detail. If you're a troll fuck off. If you're a writer please get it.

The ability to communicate by meme and metaphor has never not been a thing.

Those same skills that helped us survive ice age and black plague allowed for the French revolution and the underground railroad, for the Black Panthers and the Turner diaries and the Arab spring. Those same skills allowed for and created the perfect storm that led to one angry uninformed misguided edgelord killing another in the heart of white maga and mormon country under the sun in full view of the open internet.

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Close your eyes. Find the clip with Carlos and Kanye West come on dude get it then open your fucking eyes. If you’re a writer if you want to survive. Read this. Read this and the rest of Katherine Dee’s stack. Tell every writer you know to read it. Please get it, please remember we have to fight for the real for the stories the voices here fuck we need the writers who live on the ground who punch a clock anybody who has a real job in a kitchen or behind the wheel.

The writers still holding a weapon or wearing latex gloves.

The writers who know the smell of gangrene. The writers who ever saw somebody bleeding out. The writers who know the weight of the dead from lifting a body. The writers of fiction and poetry must fucking get it. We must protect these stories, we must hold the line for the reporting still coming from the ground. We protect the dreams and the poetry the other worlds in the sky and how to build them with our hearts but we must protect with our lives the stories from reporters telling the truth or we are lost.

All of this is about to make the jump to light speed and we will truly grasp the meaning of the word exponential.

The journalists rode along every war and chased killers alongside the cops since before, since forever. Go watch Natural Born Killers and Full Metal Jacket again. The journalists matter, none of us have time for this shit. We all of us have pages to grind the fiction I’d much rather be lost in trust me. Remember what and why the printing press exists. Remember the all of it from shadows on the cave wall to Homer the odyssey to Dante’s inferno to the zodiac killer.

All of you who get it.

All of the writers who grasp the real world implications of jumping from the zodiac killer to black mirror to one percent of the one percent carelessly feeding the unabomber manifesto plus 1984 divided by american psycho compounded by the book of revelation and mein kampf into goddamn alpha go and turning it loose in the cloud without stopping to think where is this going and how might this bring us to Luigi and the Utah kid.

They fed our novels to the machine without asking if we wanted to be the voice of skynet.

Life or death is coming.

The stories are how we survived the ice age the black death and the wild west. This is not about which cool flash fiction to go read. Not about the nine story the velvet or which ever sick poet you never saw yet. This must not be about followers or likes. If you adjust the dial of the message or bend the facts for likes and clicks you are the problem. This is about how our society is disemboweling itself on the internet and we all are letting it happen. Our lives are consumed by the cloud.

The black mirror is us.

The bots within amazon and zuckerverse know more about you than you do. If you work any real world gig where they pay attention to what you say on social media you must realize where this is going and how dangerous it has already become to write or even say aloud what you believe. The writers on substack and working elsewhere within the subscriber economy, we are fighting for control of reality from inside the machine.

The writers have fought for control of human mythology and who will take the wheel behind the narrative since the dawn of the cave dwellers and it has so far been fucking awesome, the human story has been a thrill ride at the state fair since day one. Why do we write stories at all. Because when you write one that kills, one that nails the human condition, one that makes the other humans cry, it feels like falling in love.

Have you not seen All the President’s Men.

Did you not shiver every time Rust opened his mouth to drop some wisdom from the abyss.

Do you honestly not get it.

Remember To Kill a Mockingbird and The Lottery, remember Deliverance and The Fire Next Time but know too these are stories of how we truly are and what we’re capable of.

Remember too that one of your neighbors might be Burt Reynolds standing in that canoe with a bow and arrow, one of them is the barefoot kid with a banjo and one of them is the toothless hillbilly snatching your best friend and no you never know which one of them might rape you or kill you and which one might save your life and you never will if you don’t talk to them. If you don’t listen to them, hear them and see them.

If you don’t, or for whatever reason don’t care to see or hear them, trust that some of the journalists and undercover law enforcement and counterintelligence investigators moving among them are doing so for the good of society as a whole and if you don’t listen to them or at very least don’t let them work without attacking and undermining them, how will you know which crazy asshole neighbors you can trust and which ones you want to keep an eye on.

The writers must get this.

The story doesn’t sleep or sit still, it doesn’t wait for us to control it. The narrative of the human condition is now slithering between the cloud and the psych ward at light speed and we’re shooting each other in the street. We have killers sitting behind us on the train. The missing kids and lost girls are raped and killed and stabbed in the neck somewhere on or off camera every day. Laura Palmer is never not disappearing and the oddball white dudes it’s always I’m sorry the school shooters are our jihadi suicide bombers.

The reason newspapers survived as long as they did was they kept fact and fiction, money and the truth separate. The sides editorial and advertising tried like hell to never acknowledge each other, the journalists for hundreds of years understood church and state.

Now we are in a hamster wheel and self destruction loop inside the simulation. The stories coming to life are our own stories. Please just read this and read the harrowing, read Katherine Dee if you give a fuck about reality and where this is going. Journalism is why the last two hundred years of America were before the internet bloody and horrible but kind of cool.

The trail of tears is a flat circle.

To kill a mockingbird to dead poets society to scanner darkly. The fiction sustains us. Edgar Allen Poe. Cormac McCarthy. Philip K Dick. Billy the Kid. Tank Girl. From nevermore’s raven to blood meridian to blade runner, the fiction saves us from ourselves but the papers, the code and ethics of journalism are what held the bill of rights together.

Remember why journalism exists.

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The writers must get this.

The writers, we have been in the business of writing simulations for thousands of years. If anyone can glimmer what lies around the next bend in the dark it’s the writers. The fiction, the other worlds are why we write, the why we give a fuck. The poems are how we don’t kill ourselves but journalism held society together.

All of you guys have novels, we need those first novels. This decade and the next will be defined and possibly saved by the first and last pages of first novels coming from unknown authors and voices we have not yet heard from. The only hope for alignment will come from the writers.

They fed all of our best novels and stories of our most painstaking and obsessively written most unreliable antiheroes, our most tragic heroic villains, heartbreakers, liars, grifters, con artists, seducers and genius sociopaths into the machines and turned them loose on the other humans with no warning or safety instructions. What the fuck did they expect would happen.

The analog was halcyon.

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Look at it this way. Every movie you ever saw, the cops the reporters the hero the villain somebody was holding a newspaper because papers mattered, the papers were how the characters figured shit out for the past five hundred years. And look you may have never been a reporter I get it, but we slit our wrists when we killed the fucking papers. The journalism mattered.

Why it had so many codes.

The papers held society together since Jack the ripper. Fucking read Sapiens. Spin up Scanner Darkly in your mind’s eye. Remember too, the collapse may always drag and stretch into years. Everything Carl Sagan said about the climate came true and it’s still coming true and all of you, we may be spinning this wheel for years but we may also have very little time to fuck about.

Remember what exponential truly means.

How fast a pool of blood moves from a teaspoon to an olympic swimming pool when you keep doubling the spoonful.

Now the bots are writing your kid’s essays and your dating profile and your life story moving forward. If you are a writer you must get this quickly, you must connect the dots and remember the papers are how this wild west slasher film survived for three hundred years. Now go watch The Matrix again and realize the journalists have and had a code for a reason and there is shit ever brewing in the cloud that we cannot and must not tolerate.

The idea that a reporter might be fired from a major news outlet on the left or right simply for observing that hateful ideas lead to hateful words that lead to violence, this is not a democracy any of us should want to save.

And maybe that is the whole point.

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I remember a lot about the day of and the days after Oklahoma City and one thing I can say with razor certainty and total recall, nobody anywhere in the real world, not the freewheeling anarchist poets artists and punk rocker types I hung out with in Boulder or Memphis, not the paranoid libertarian drug runners and dealers or the fire fighters park rangers and off duty cops I ever spoke to, nor the christian moderate democrat or republican voters still in my orbit back home in the south, none of them was for a minute sitting around hoping the identity of the bomber turned out to be a radical on either the hard left or far right.

Because we still recognized plain old crazy.

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Maybe because everyone old enough to stand outside to smoke cigarettes and talk about it was aware that the last two lone wolf white guys to do something so violent shocking disturbing and out of left field as blow up a downtown building in OKC were motivated not by left or right ideology but by a deeply incoherent misreading of the catcher in the rye and a hopeless unrequited pathological crush on Jodie Foster.

If you really want to make yourself uneasy I recommend Three Days of the Condor.

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The weekend after the unfortunate incident in Utah was also the first cool fall weekend after labor day, the weekend after the 9.11 memorial. The weekend most americans start to think about college football and christmas. If you happen to be watching a game this weekend, especially one of the thousands of middle school and high school soccer and football games happening this weekend, I’d say close your eyes if you feel safe.

Listen to the roar of those voices and go inside the mind’s eye behind those those voices.

Now consider every crazy idea that ever took root in your own head. Every fucked up gonna get us all killed plan your idiot nephew or outlaw brother in law ever cooked up. Keep in mind that if you have more than a hundred public school kids white black brown and other in any urban or country setting that some of those kids believe in Santa Claus and some of them never had a christmas stocking. Never fail to grasp that some of them have not been taught the truth about America or what we have done along the way and that all of those still forming minds believe different things about reality.

Some of them believe Jesus of nazareth died for not just the whites but for all of our sins.

Some of them believe their jewish and muslim neighbors will burn in a lake of fire.

Some of them believe in science.

Some of them believe seventy-two virgins will anoint them if they only have the courage to pull that cord. Some of them believe that women should not vote. Some of them believe the south will rise again. Some of them believe Jesus rose on the third day and walked like the undead. Some of them believe they ought to practice with a crossbow because the real zombies are coming. Some of them believe women should cover their hair and faces.

Some of them believe perfectly normal not entirely crazy shit.

Some of them are busy thinking about nothing but pixie hollow and minecraft. Some of them believe they are the next Patrick Bateman. Some of them believe the handmaid’s tale has already begun. Some of them believe chem trails control the weather. Some of them believe Israel must prevail in order for the leviathan and the pale horse and the seventh seal, for all of the apocalypse promised them to come to pass.

Some of them believe the earth is flat.

Now round up all of those middle schoolers with their mishmash of beliefs fed to them by their families and warped by social media, by advertising and the endless scroll. Rewind reality back to the golden escalator and shove those kids into whichever episode of black mirror keeps you awake the longest at night and make them live inside it.

Then fast forward ten years and put guns in their hands and open your eyes.

The newspapers mattered. The journalists had a code.

The copy desk in the ‘90s was the last wild west for story, we still had razor blades and red pencils in one hand and we were jumping from quark to photoshop to pagemaker to windows and back along the final front line in the every day battle for control of the real, for control of the narrative and for the language. If you need to speed run why any of this matters put on all the presidents men or the X-files for fuck sake. The style guides matter.

The last days of analog were halcyon, they flew out of our grasp like a spiral of blackbirds against a Louisiana sky.

I’m glad I had a glimpse and yes I know the papers were used for propaganda and ransom notes, for false flags and pavlovian advertising but the papers protected the bill of rights too. Remember the trail of tears. Trust that the matriarchy is real. If you don't understand Americans, how or why we’re like this, if you don’t grasp what we’ve done to ourselves, revisit Cool Hand Luke, remember Blue Velvet and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Remember the grapes of wrath.

If you have not read Sapiens it boils to this. The one thing that separates human society from a troop of chimps, how and why we can hold it together and not destroy ourselves beyond a group more than a hundred strong is our ability to tell stories that soothe, stories that teach lessons, and stories that spin up a dream the other chimps can believe in. What allowed us to prevail over the neanderthals was our ability to describe our dreams, to paint images of events that had not yet happened.

Likewise our talent for making lists of abstract rules of conduct and our grasp of the life or death need to keep track of which berries were poison and who owed us money.

How else do you reckon the Romans got a bunch of savages to build roads that disappeared into the horizon.

By telling them stories.

The stories and shared dreams are all we have and we are losing control of reality.

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/fade.

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now go read Katherine Dee at default.blog if you want to understand the bowels of the internet and learn how truly fucked we are, just read Katherine Dee and don’t fuck with her.

Pay attention and connect the dots and just get it.

peace.