13

Song had been canceled. A morning came, and his Twitter account was gone: a few thoughtless people commented on his absence under the last YouTube video he appeared in. Nick read the comments without watching the video, which was posted by one of the CCP media brands. There were a half dozen wall-of-text posts calling him a shitlord and an antisemite. By the next week the video would be taken down. Nobody would mention him ever again. Song had ceased to exist online at all. He was surfaced, and then he was canceled.

It was now July. No longer Chinese History Month. Now it was Asian History Month, which celebrated the tremendous contributions that Asian peoples from further east had made to Xinjiang.

The weather was hot as balls. The pavements scorched one’s feet and the stench of the Water on Mars lazy rivers at rush hours was a horror. In the labyrinthine DS-Work, however, the air-conditioned glass cubicles were so cold you had to wear a sweatshirt. The preparations for Empathy Week were in full swing. Internet moderators were working overtime. The celebs had been activated to do their Big Chungus endorsement videos:

“Big Chungus, Chungus, Chungus, Chungus, Chungus is, Big Chungus is, Big Chungus, Big Chungus is our, Big Chungus is our hero. Hero. Hero. Hero. Hero. Big Chungus is our hero. He’s the hero Xinjiang Needs. This People’s Election, vote Big Chungus. Big Chungus. It’s our right to win.”

There were astroturfed riots, looting, military parades, speeches from Big Chungus, photo ops, lectures, Zoom interviews, wheatpaste posters, fundraising emails, effigies, meme slogans chanted, rumors circulated, protest organizers hired, deep fakes produced, opposition controlled. Everyone had the red square in their avi and if you didn’t you were a traitor. Egirlebooks had just published an op-ed in the Beijing Times about how not voting for Big Chungus was actually a worse atrocity against humanity, to some extent, than Hitler, so all Gary Guanxi voters should be sent to a study center. Nick, in addition to his regular Gm posting, spent long periods of each day doing memes on the story of the day. But each new story was so grossly psyopped that it was hard to stay focused on anything for more than a few minutes.

He was now in his cubicle watching podcasts. The new War Machine podcast with recurring guest BillabongKeith, to be exact. They were talking about the upcoming People’s Election.

BillabongKeith kept saying, with extreme metairony, to the point where he was now droning the whole sentence out totally robotically whenever the topic of politics came up: “You know I just don’t know who to vote for: on one hand Big Chungus is a cutting edge government deep fake technology that could revolutionize world government and make China the envy of all history and would also be a major achievement for women, but on the other hand Gary Guanxi is a good businessman which Xinjiang really needs right now.” He would manically shrug his shoulders to drive home how totally numb even normies were to the whole political narrative at this point.

Nick glanced at the chat. He covered it with another window. The chat was always so toxic no matter what that he finally learned to just avoid it.

War Machine and BillabongKeith had a friend of theirs on the podcast, a guy they’d worked with as an actor, but when they all got canceled he stopped acting and started a landscaping company. He was doing great now. This was up in Altay City. Nick thought about how it must still possible to have a Uyghur middle class there.

ReluctantHero had finished his bulk, in which he ate in a calorie surplus, and was now beginning his cut, in which he ate in a calorie deficit to lose fat. He said that bulking was like climbing up a mountain and then the cut is like when you stop to turn around and see the view of all the progress you’ve made.

Someone said voting is an essential right of Chinese Space Communism.

He got a suggested video with a thumbnail of one of the replica Disney castles in Disneyville, Doha City. The title was “Top Day Trip Hiking Destinations inside Mars Camp Bell, Xinjiang, iPhone49time! (CURRENT)”

A Uyghur documentary filmmaker who self-released a movie about the exploitation in the cotton industry was detained at the Pakistan border and it was clear she would be held until after the People’s Election. The Chairman of Empathy tweeted “what we not gon do is let this People’s Election be clouded with a slavery-in-the-cotton-fields moral panic.”

In a suggested video thumbnail he saw that a Uyghur journalist had been detained at the Pakistan border and it was clear she would be held until after the Peoples’ Election. In another thumbnail he saw that the Chinese Journalists Association said this was good because she was spreading misinformation. He saw another thumbnail where a well-known CCP blue check youth influencer was posting screenshots of her tweets. Nick blocked all of the channels and blocked the People’s Election out of his mind totally.

Everything was bad. Even War Machine and Alpha Investment Corporation, which could normally be a last-resort refuge for Nick, were watered-down beyond belief. The latest project, The Party season 3.5, was a new site called theparty.stream. It was an open-format streaming site like YouTube, except with only former Party cast members and characters. It was their competitor to YouTube. The ultimate plan.

The main story line they were using to drum up views for the site was one of the former contestants, Zeno, was running for town council in his hometown of Hami, eastern Xinjiang. He was a lovable autistic that the audience related to a lot, but was often kind of a jerk. His nickname was Zeno because it always seemed like he was about to get in trouble, but he never really did. Nobody would say it in the Alpha Investment Corporation operation, but he was a lolcow.

Zeno was streaming every day about running for city council in Hami. But with no help or direction to make it good, theparty.stream sucked. War Machine was streaming a lot too, but it was all high-concept performance art troll stunts like auctioning off all the props from The Party on stream--everybody’s clothes, the posters and pictures from the walls, the paper towels left over in the garage. It was a pure grift. When things got too dramatic, War Machine would repeat the mantra “you can’t think of the contestants as people, you can’t think of the contestants as people if you want the show to be good.” On the stream now KeepComputer was telling the story of how War Machine gave him his name when they first started working together, when he was modding one of the rooms in the War Machine Discord when the subreddit got banned.

Nick clicked back to the beginning of the podcast.

They weren’t talking about the auction stream yet. War Machine was saying “oh did you see the Danny Doppa interview about the virtual iPhone factory website? Ohhhhh my God. Ha!” and he let out 4 more shrieky ‘ha’s of laughter at the very idea of the interview. “Danny is… Danny is… Danny is….right there! He’s right there on his podcast! And aren’t we all the better for that. Ha!” and he let out another shriek of laughter.

Then suddenly he was poised again, and asked one of his lieutenants, Slimeski, who was sitting next to him on stream, “Slime, have you ever done the cold plunge thing? Do you do the cold plunge?”

Slimeski said “yeah.”

“Me too!” said War Machine, almost in spite of himself. “I do it because I saw it on Danny Doppa hahaha. I just started doing it at the gym, and I think it really helps me. Hahahaha.”

“The influencer influenced you,” said Slimeski.

War Machine said “I want to talk about the cold plunge, though. Because it’s the perfect case study in how Danny Doppa works. He starts doing some esoteric health thing like this, he finds out about it because he’s saturated in conversations with these experts all day, he hears about all the new stuff. He starts getting interested in cold plunges. He brings on all these experts to talk about cold plunges with him. Maybe he heard about cold plunges from one of his experts, okay. Then it starts to be a trend with his audience, people are taking cold showers, talking about the health effects of taking cold showers. People are saying they tried it and it works. Then with the cold plunge, there’s also a product involved, the cold plunge bath thing. So now there are all these cold plunge bath companies. There are a few brands that Danny Doppa probably talks about and posts about. There are some other shittier, sketchier brands. Danny’s got a cold plunge thing at his house, he posts himself doing it on his socials, people start buying these cold plunge things. Rich people, okay. But also like gyms and stuff, now every gym wants to have one, people are trying them at the gym, at the spa, now they’re like looking up videos on home cold plunges.”

KeepComputer said, “I don’t use the cold plunge tub thing, I just take a cold shower.”

Slimeski said, “me too. It’s like microdosing hypothermia.”

“Yeah it is,” said War Machine. “And that’s good. It’s good.” He looked at them and nobody said anything for a moment. “I just wanted to say that. I’ve been watching a lot of Danny Doppa lately.”

Eventually they got to the auction. War Machine said “okay now, all my big strong brave soldiers out there, go get your mommy’s credit card, okay, because the auction is about to start.”

Nick almost admired the scale of the grift, the absolute completeness of the whole thing.

He clicked on a really old BillbongKeith stream. From iPhone43time. During the purges. This was when he was underground and could only stream on Twitch. The channel that uploaded it to YouTube was called something generic like Uploader2 and had 115 subscribers. This era, iPhone43time, this was back when Nick would never have watched any of Alpha Investment Corporation’s stuff because the government said they were terrorists doing misinformation. BillabongKeith was on his webcam in his computer chair, either in the dark or with a filter effect to make it seem dark. There were animated graphics in the corners of the screen: the Alpha Investment Corporation logo, a chyron that said the title and artist of the song that was playing (which was all glitch-gigapop made by War Machine fans), an on-screen area that displayed Superchats, and a video clip of a campfire in the bottom right corner.

This stream, like all the streams of the time, was an advice stream where he interacted a lot with the chat:

“Stay on your family’s house in the country. Work with your family. That’s what immigrants do. Don’t move to cities. Ride coattails. Find a mentor. Learn how to do something marketable. Use nepotism. Do NOT drink alcohol, do NOT smoke weed, do NOT smoke opium, okay. You canNOT be a serious person and doing those things.”

Nick clicked ahead in the video.

“You have to understand. The cops do not protect you. The cops are not there to protect you. The cops are there to fill out paperwork for the insurance company.”

Nick clicked ahead in the video.

“Do you have those streams archived, Moononite? The ones from last month? Ohhhhh those were some good ones. Those were some good ones. Talking about movies. You don’t even NEED to watch movies, you don’t even NEED to watch anything, just like find a few good movies, or even like a play recorded on YouTube. Watch an Irish play recorded live that someone posted to YouTube. Watch it over and over, memorizing it and thinking about it. That’s all you need to do, Moononite. Or you know, collect your Good Boy Points and play Minecraft all day your entire life. That’s a perfectly fine life right there, huh? Think of all the stuff you could build!”

Nick was still on the later schedule. He would leave the DS-Work at like 10:30. Late at night, when crowds of rowdy normies roamed the streets, the town had a curiously febrile air. There were more tweakers in the streets than ever before, and sometimes there would be what sounded like fireworks going off in the city that seemed alarmingly close, but there was no mention of it on social media at all.

The new tune which was to be the theme-song of Empathy Week (the Humiliation Song, it was called) had already been announced: “Take a Shit” by Fuck Bitch. The chorus went “Fuck Bitch, take a shit, suck a dick, Ranger Rick.” Roared out by thousands of voices at an outdoor festival DJ set, it was terrifying. The normies had taken a fancy to it during the summer, and in the midnight groups of drunk women were always stumbling around singing it. It was in like every single TikTok. You could just hear the faintest trace of the beat in the distance and you’d hear Fuck Bitch’s voice screaming the chorus in your head. The People’s Representative from Shanghai wanted to pass a national resolution honoring it.

Nick’s Mandarin Dashboard was more poppin than ever, especially apps like Nextdoor and DS-Work that were normally quiet. Squads of volunteers, organized in an RG Towers Nextdoor group by Kashgari, were preparing Americatown for Empathy Week: putting up Big Chungus posters, painting graphic murals of Uyghurs being stabbed in the head, organizing legal campaigns to silence Uyghur rape and terrorism victims, and sending out at least 10 CCP fundraising emails a day highlighting new Uyghur-perpetrated hate crimes. On Instagram, people were faving and sharing Nick’s redpilled memes like never before.

Kashgari was in his native element and happy as a lark. He boasted that RG Towers alone would display four hundred rainbow flags and that would show those hateful Uyghurs once and for all what empathy was all about. Every day he was #littlebrother posting, where he posted something great a Han HERO from the east had done for Xinjiang, and then said how proud he was to be a little brother to such a brilliant and glorious Big Brothers from the east. He had plenty of time to post his putrid Twitter threads while the CCP Family Friend was giving his wife Mandarin lessons four nights a week now. The heat and manual work had even given him a pretext for posting lots of outdoor work photos with a hammer and barbeque grill, which he loved because he was just an average blue-collar Uyghur Regular Joe in XInjiang.

He had also apparently begun a crusade on Reddit about how the hiking scene can’t just stand by and allow the violent terrorist Uyghur menace to have a safe space in our community. This was no joking matter; the Uyghur separatist terrorists were threatening to take over China and turn it into some kind of authoritarian ethnostate. Kashgari was everywhere at once, posting hot takes on Facebook, pumping his email list, engaging with comments on his Youtube and Instagram, jollying everyone with comradely exhortations, and giving out from every smooth centimeter of his gigantically large brain what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of gaslighting.

On social media one main viral story was there was a new video discovered, a new angle of the 6/9 attacks, that strongly suggested it was staged with explosive charges in the walls. Only the obviously fake redpilled accounts were covering it, and they were completely melting down while the mainstream CCP media conspicuously ignored it.

The Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, after 14 months of construction, had discovered some new caves on Mars out by Doha City! You could visit them for 55 GBP for a ½ day pass which included a free keychain.

The SFL-East Safe Football Playoffs were happening, and the Guangdong Oakland Raiders had surprised everyone with how good they were doing. Their quarterback was a hometown hero from right there in Guangdong, whose parents worked at one of the Samsung factories there. His wife was a well-known TikTok influencer from Hong Kong who violently hated Uyghurs and posted at least once a day about how they are all terrorist trash. She was in the new ad for the Mao Visa Card. “With new roll-over points, the economic miracles never stop.”

Right about then, a new ad campaign for a new show went up around Camp Bell. It was this new Netflix China miniseries of truth called DZUNGAR, about the brave and fearsome Dzungar horsemen who ruled the Xinjinag plateau 1200 years ago. Before the Han arrived. The campaign took up massive prime ad real estate all over the city. In downtown Tokyoville, the whole row of tall residential buildings along the main traffic thoroughfare were draped with banners 200 feet tall of Dzungar warriors, all decked out in traditional dress and looking badass as hell. Nick’s very ancestors. Even the People’s Great Hall in the replica Tiananmen Square, when he arrived one day, was completely draped in graphic DZUNGAR advertising. All the blue checks were coping and seething in op-eds about how it’s irresponsible to encourage and glorify Uyghur separatism at a time like this, during Asian History Month no less.

The crazy thing was that from whatever angle you happened to look at the poster, the warrior seemed to be looking straight down at you. They were posted on every blank space on every wall, every bus, every taxi ad screen, even outnumbering the portraits of Big Chungus. The posters that showed up after the initial ones, they had the same image of the Mongol-looking swordsman on horseback, then the title, DZUNGAR, and the tag line: “We’re so back.” From what got through Nick’s CCP propaganda filters about the show, the Dzungar had battled the Han for control of the Xinjiang region and actually owned them many times. The normies, usually apathetic about history, were being lashed into one of their periodical frenzies of what it really means to be Chinese.

There were angry demonstrations in front of media companies and boycotts, astroturfed openly by the Chinese Intelligence Agencies, protesting DZUNGAR. Now it was Netflix China who was doing the antistate misconduct, the CCP operatives insisted, by emboldening these Uyghur extremists with their irresponsible content. The Uyghur-controlled media was absolutely out of control. To drive home this fact, more effigies of Gary Guanxi and War Machine were burned, and hundreds of the DZUNGAR posters were torn down and added to the flames.

In the room over Mr. Tao’s shop, when they could get there, Nick and egirlebooks lay side by side on a stripped bed under the ceiling fan in the recording studio, naked for the sake of coolness. The rat had never come back, but the bugs had multiplied hideously in the heat. It did not seem to matter. Dirty or clean, the Faraday Cage was paradise. They could avoid seeing CCP ads on their Neuralinks for as long as 4 hours at a time. As soon as they arrived they would tear off their clothes and make love with sweating bodies, then fall asleep and wake to find that the bugs were crawling all over the floor again.

Four, five, six – seven times they met during the month of July. Nick had stopped vaping. He just randomly stopped one day. He had grown fatter, his fits of coughing had stopped, and he was sleeping better. The process of life had ceased to be intolerable; he no longer had any impulse to smash every politician’s face in with a baseball bat, or scream curse words at the top of his lungs. Now that they had a secure trap house, almost like a home, it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room over the antique shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

Mr. Tao was another extinct animal. Nick usually stopped to talk with the antique store keeper for a few minutes on his way upstairs. The old man seemed seldom or never to go outside, and on the other hand to have almost no customers. He led a ghostlike existence between the tiny, dark shop, and an even tinier back kitchen where he prepared his meals and which contained, among other things, a large monitor on the wall where he watched podcasts. He seemed glad of Nick’s visits for this opportunity to talk with someone irl. Wandering about among his overpriced stock, with his long nose and thick spectacles and his bowed shoulders in the velvet jacket, he always had a vague air of being a collector rather than a dealer. With a sort of faded enthusiasm he would handle this creaky old antique or that – an English bottle-stopper, a broken snuffbox, a punchbeck locket containing a strand of some long-dead baby’s hair – never asking that Nick should buy it, merely that he should admire it.

To talk to him was like listening to the tinkling of a worn-out music box. He had dragged out from the corners of his memory some more fragments of forgotten gems from the esoteric Patrice O’Neal playlists on YouTube. There was one from a standup special where Patrice said his girlfriend’s stories were so boring, he would be eating a sandwich and listening to her talk about her day, and he was so bored that he was commiserating with the tiny ant crawling on his sandwich, with the and saying ‘damn this bitch cannot stay focused on this story!!’

“Oh yeah, I just remembered a radio bit I used to love,” he would say. “You might be interested,” and then a deprecating little laugh whenever he would retell the funny bit. But he could never recall which video compilations included the bits, or what show they were on, or what year they were from. He could just remember the funny parts.

Mr. Tao talked about living in Taiwan, officially still the Republic of China and not Macintosh Republic of China, and how the history of Safe Football and the SFL-East was like how the colonial Japanese government introduced sports like baseball, basketball, and tennis to Taiwan via state-owned tobacco and liquor corporations to develop the Taiwanese people into being good Japanese subjects.

Nick and egirlebooks, both of them knew – in a way, it was never out of their minds – that what was now happening could not last long. There were times when the fact of their impending cancellation seemed as palpable as the sofa bed they lay on, and they would cling together with the sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking. But there were also times when they had the illusion not only of safety but of permanence. So long as they were actually in this room, they both felt, no harm could come to them. Getting there was difficult and dangerous, but the room itself was sanctuary. It was like when Nick gazed into the heart of the jade boat, with the feeling that it would be possible to get inside that ancient world, and that once inside it time could be arrested.

Often they gave themselves up to daydreams of escape. What if their luck could just hold indefinitely? Maybe they could even go to America and start a podcast together. Or, more plausibly, they would carry on their sneaky links, just like this, for the remainder of their natural lives. It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

Sometimes, too, they talked of engaging in active rebellion against the CCP, like actual resistance, not the CCP #brotherhood, but with no notion of how to take the first step. Even if the fabulous Alpha Investment Corporation was a reality, there still remained the difficulty of finding one’s way into it without getting entrapped by a fed honeypot. He told her of how he used to know Basedschizofed from way back in the day (they weren’t really friends, they were more like mutuals), and of the impulse Nick sometimes felt, simply to walk up to him sometime in public, not in DM, announce that he is an enemy of the CCP, like unironically, no meme. Then he would say “dude just tell me, is there any real organized resistance anywhere I can join? I want to kill the government.” Curiously enough, this did not strike her as an impossibly rash thing to do. She was an expert on vibes, and it seemed natural to her that Nick should believe Basedschizofed to be trustworthy on the strength of a single flash of the eyes. Moreover, she took it for granted that everyone, or nearly everyone, secretly hated the CCP and would break the rules if he thought it safe to do so. But she refused to believe that widespread, organized opposition existed or could exist. All the rumors about War Machine and his underground content cult, she said, were simply controlled op which you just had to pretend to be outraged or overjoyed about.

Times beyond number, at Big Chungus rallies and when live tweeting the “debates” where the candidates pretend to debate but it’s really all a photo op to prop up Big Chungus. and both online and at irl demonstrations, egirlebooks had shouted at the top of her voice for the execution of people whose names she had never heard and in whose supposed crimes she had not the faintest belief. She shared viral GoFundMes with info that she didn’t even think about checking out. It was just fodder for the clickbait outrage mill that week. It was just Current Thing. When the public trials of Gary Guanxi were happening she had followed right along, retweeting all the good Heroes of Peace accounts from morning to night, interspersed with hate-tweets about “Death to the traitors!” On Facebook she always excelled all others in posting long screeds about how evil War Machine was. “I know Uyghurs just like War Machine. He is guilty.” Yet she had only the dimmest idea of War Machine’s back story and what his metairony schtick was really all about. She had grown up since the Neuralink and was too young to remember the ideological battles of the iPhone30- and early -40times. Such a thing as an independent political movement was outside her imagination; and in any case the CCP was invincible. It would always exist, and it would always be the same. You could only rebel against it by secret disobedience or, at most, by isolated acts of violence such as killing somebody important or blowing something up.

In some ways she was far more redpilled than Nick, and far less susceptible to CCP gaslighting. Once when he happened to mention the new DZUNGAR series that all the CCP loyalists were protesting, she startled him by saying casually that it was a psyop to control all the dissident right-wing Uyghurs. Let them feel like they got a win for once. Let them have some good meme macros. It was true. All the Uyghur support for the show online seemed pretty meme-heavy and astroturfed. She also said all the tweakers ODing, or the statistics that is, were probably rigged by the Chinese Intelligence Agency just like a plot would be doled out in a TV show, “to keep people frightened and on edge.” This was an idea that had literally never occurred to him. She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that when she was doing all those cable news hits about Current Thing, her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the CCP when they in some way touched upon her own life.

Often egirlebooks was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. She believed, for instance, having learnt it on a Netflix documentary, that the CCP had invented podcasting. (In his own days of doing Current Thing, Nick remembered, it was only electricity that the CCP claimed to invent.) And when he told her that podcasting had been in existence, as radio shows, since irltimes, the fact struck her as totally uninteresting. After all, those people didn’t exactly invent podcasting either. She started deconstructing the idea of inventing something instead of engaging with what he was saying. “They learned it from someone else, and it was kind of different in that form anyways. And besides, the CCP had been the ones to popularize it, so blah blah blah.”

It was rather more of a shock to Nick when he discovered from some chance remark that she had never heard that, after 6/9, China was actually at war with the American terrorists who did the attack, and pandering to Uyghurs to be super patriotic so China would be united like never before, to help fight the Americans. Now the government was openly siding with the foreign enemy who had done 6/9, who were the actual real freedom-loving patriots, and against the citizens of its own country, who were now the violent terrorists. It was true that she regarded the whole info war as a sham: but apparently she had not even noticed that the name of the enemy had changed. “I thought we’d always been at war with domestic terrorism. Didn’t those Uyghurs do 6/9? Or no, they provoked it and they allowed it to happen…” she said vaguely. It frightened him a little. The invention of podcasting dated from long before her birth, but the switchover in the 6/9 narrative had happened only four iPhones ago, after she was in her twenties. He argued with her about it for perhaps a quarter of an hour. In the end he succeeded in forcing her memory back until she did dimly recall that at one time American terrorism and not domestic terrorism had been the enemy. But the issue still struck her as unimportant. “Who cares?” she said impatiently. “It’s always one fucking war after another, and everyone knows the news is all lies anyways.”

Sometimes he talked to her about the Mandarin Dashboard and all the insane gaslighting that occurred there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. Her take was to go ‘oh kids and their Neuralinks’ glibly like that, as though it was perfectly normal to inject a chip into every child’s brain. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Kuleshav, Marconi, and Pasadena Orangefield and the momentous tweet he had once held on his phone in his very hand. It did not make much of an impression on her. At first, indeed, she failed to grasp the point of the story.

“Were they friends of yours?”

“No, I never knew them. They were podcaster/comedians. Besides, they were way older than me. They were some old heads, from back in the day…before the Sky of the Future. I barely knew them by sight.”

“Then who fucking cares? The government is doing psyops all the time, aren’t they?”

He tried to make her understand. “This was an exceptional case. It wasn’t just a question of tweeting something and deleting it. This was a smoking gun. There was no reason for it to exist. There was no reason for these people who were sworn enemies to be posting like this. Yet none of their trolls even screenshotted it. Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has actually been abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in…like…whatever printed encyclopedia was current before the internet was invented. It's in stuff like this jade boat. Already we know almost literally nothing about the 90s and the years before the iPhone. Every Google result has been changed. Every story on Netflix has been retconned. Every dissident account is controlled or banned and every hysterically insane government bootlicking account is promoted maximally. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History stopped when the iPhone was invented. Maybe when the internet was invented, or the camera, or the printing press. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the CCP is always right. I know, of course, that the past is all gaslighting, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even where I did the gaslighting myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. Only clickable content. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories. Just in that one instance, in my whole life, did I possess actual concrete evidence after the event.”

“And what good was it?”

“It was no good because I didn’t get a screenshot. But if the same thing happened today I’d definitely screenshot it.”

“Well I wouldn’t!” said egirlebooks. “I’m quite ready to take risks, but only for something worthwhile, not for some gay screenshot. They would have just said it was fake anyways. It wouldn’t even matter if you had the entire thing on video and both of them openly confessing.”

“Well maybe you’re right. But it was evidence. It might have redpilled a few normies here and there, supposing I could post it anywhere. I don’t imagine that we can alter anything in our own lifetimes. But one can imagine little knots of resistance springing up here and there—like actual resistance, not the hashtag resistance—small groups of people banding themselves together, and gradually growing, and even leaving a few records behind, so that the next generations can carry on where we leave off. Continuity. Eventually, someone will be able to invent a competitor to YouTube…”

“I’m not interested in the next generation, dear. I’m only interested in this big Uyghur dick.” She started grabbing his dick.

“You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards,” he told her.

She thought this brilliantly witty and flung her arms around him in delight.

In the ramifications of the fake Big Chungus government she had not the faintest interest. Whenever he began to talk of the principles of Chinese Space Communism, half language, memes, and international child rape and blackmail rings, she became bored and confused and said that she never paid any attention to that kind of thing. One knew that it was all rubbish, so why let oneself be worried by it? She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed. If he persisted in talking of such subjects, she had a disconcerting habit of falling asleep. She was one of those people who can go to sleep at any hour and in any position.

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatsoever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the worldview of the CCP imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.