4

The next day Nick woke up some time in the late morning. He could tell because the sun was high in the Sky and there was traffic noise faintly audible from outside. His phone was dead. He blinked and looked around. He hoisted himself up into a seating position, with his feet on the floor, and plugged his phone into the charger.

When the Apple logo appeared a few seconds later, Nick cleared his throat and with the deep, unconscious sigh that a new day had started said, “I’m gay and my dick is small.” The Apple logo disappeared and the home screen of his phone came up. He swiped it to his Mandarin Dashboard. It was a little after 11 AM. He tabbed to Spotify and put on the trap beat playlist. He felt good this morning. Sometimes he was just in a good mood and felt like getting a lot of work done. He didn’t even doom scroll, just got dressed and left.

As he walked to the replica Brooklyn Bridge he noticed the new row of 8’ tall flypostered ads on the construction wall. They were all for the new season of Real Housewives of Shanghai. Fine. Straightforward trash content that everyone knew was fake and cringe. This bolstered his good mood.

He did a Good Boy Check to get onto the replica Brooklyn Bridge, dancing around for the cameras saying “I’m a little girl and I like to wear little pink dresses because I’m gay,” which was just some words and symbolism, after all. Then he did another Good Boy Check on the other side of the bridge to enter the Tokyoville district. In downtown Tokyoville a QR code on a taxi driving by triggered his Neuralink to play an ad for the new sitcom Xinjiang Family, which was about a gay Uyghur couple in Altay who helped the backwards Uyghur families in their neighborhood be more modern Chinese citizens. A sassy man with a low v-neck glittery shirt was telling a man with a turban-like head wrap herding a flock of sheep, “Um excuse me, girlfriend, real Muslims are gay.” He swiped the ad to his phone and closed it.

Nick gave his ID to the CCP guard in the booth at the checkpoint. As he walked away, he swiped to the DS-Eats app and ordered a fruit parfait and coffee to pick up at the CVS kiosk in the lobby. This was his main breakfast, his daily, even though he was liking the bacon, egg, and cheese a little better lately tbh. He felt good getting the parfait, though, because the fruit was healthy. He walked to the Forbidden Apple Store side entrance, where he did another Good Boy Dance, then picked up his breakfast in the lobby.

The CVS Kiosk was extremely efficient. It had the feel of a food truck or a Japanese robot café. You went up to this little plastic-looking building and it sensed you were near and a door slid open with your daily order in a brown paper bag. There was always a loose crowd of people standing around eating, waiting for someone, looking at their phones. So there were also, naturally, several newsstand-style shelves with the latest magazines for purchase. Today the magazines were almost all about the Kurds and their fantastic contributions to Chinese culture. There were also the same magazines that you saw at the DS Foods grocery stores: BIG CHUNGUS: A LIFE, STEVE OBAMA-JOBS, SPACESHIP GIRL: MODERN CHINESE HERO, president trans lebron, MAO ZEDONG, and ones with some of the more famous CCP First Class Actors.

When Nick got to his cubicle, he went through his daily routine of having his parfait, coffee, apple cider vinegar, and some ashwagandha root, all while having his email open on one monitor and watching his YouTube content on the second monitor. During this time he would also be thinking of memes about the daily news cycle and jotting down notes in a .doc file.

Usually around then he would also post the first post of his daily content routine: a Gm post of his coffee, a random photo of a cool view on the way to work, or like a cool car he saw on the street. A chill Mars lifestyle pic. It was very open-ended. Nick knew that at this point a lot people followed him just to see the pictures from the city on Mars, so it didn’t really matter exactly what he posted. His only guideline was he never posted himself or anything serious about his personal life. (This was easy, since he didn’t really have one.) He also kept his account private, so you had to request permission to follow. Nick wasn’t interested in growing his audience at all anymore, just in continuing his routine that seemed to be working.

He tabbed to his email. He was still waiting to hear something back about the Apple Partnership Program. He had been in the application process since before the last People’s Election. It seemed so recently. He forgot even what he had hoped to do with the program, but he knew it would help his social credit score if he got in; he would get a blue check and the government algorithm would promote all his content more. He would be monetized somehow, he knew that. They would email him an update in the admission process every 3-4 months or so, requesting a copy of a document or asking him to sign some kind of form. Today, as usual, there was nothing.

Then at some point Nick would tab to Instagram. This was his daily habit. He would start with reading through his notifications on the previous day’s meme dump. Today there were 12 notifications. This was about average. They were usually all positive, since he could curate his audience to be an echo chamber as much as he wanted with the private IG page. He clicked the notifications tab.

There were 3 fire emojis, 5 crying-laughing face emojis, one comment that said “babe come quick Nick Karamay just dropped!” one said “slide 6 CCP btfo,” one comment that said “common CCP L,” and one comment that said “I finna nut”.

Nick clicked on one of the comments and then scrolled up to the meme dump post itself. For the caption Nick had put his usual copypasta. He clicked “read more”:

Sure! Here’s that summary of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  Plato's Allegory of the Cave is a philosophical metaphor presented in the "Republic" to illustrate the effects of education man and the transition from ignorance to knowledge. The allegory describes prisoners who have been chained inside a dark cave since birth, facing a blank wall. Behind them is a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners are people carrying objects that cast shadows on the wall. The prisoners perceive these shadows as the only reality since they have never seen the actual objects in the world outside the cave.

One day, a prisoner is freed and exposed to the fire and the objects casting the shadows. Initially, he is overwhelmed by the new reality. Gradually, he understands that the shadows on the wall are mere illusions and that the objects and the fire are more real.

Eventually, the prisoner is dragged out of the cave into the sunlight, where he experiences the world in its true form. He realizes that the sun is the ultimate source of life and knowledge, symbolizing the Form of the Good in Plato's philosophy.

Upon fervently returning to the cave to enlighten the other prisoners, the freed individual struggles to see in the darkness and is met with hostility and disbelief from those still chained. The prisoners, accustomed to their limited perception, reject the new reality and cling to the familiar shadows. This is ultimately an allegory to Plato's belief that most people live in a state of ignorance, mistaking sensory perceptions for reality, and that true knowledge can only be attained through philosophical reasoning.

After glancing at the caption, Nick read the meme in the first slide. The macro was the clown make-up in 4 stages. The captions of the stages of make-up read “Chinese Space Communism is real,” “the Sky of the Future is real,” “the quantum computer is real,” then with the full clown makeup on “China teleported the city of Ürümqi to Mars.” He swiped to the next slide.

The second meme was a seething wojak with the label “Neuralink mods when it’s a HERO being threatened with violence” then a big-smiling soyjack with the label “Neuralink mods when it’s a Uyghur being threatened with violence.” He swiped to the next slide.

The third meme was a classic Hannah-Barbara cartoon character sarcastically wiping tears off its face while smiling as though he is honored. The caption said, “my face when CCP media calls me a threat to chinese space communism.” He swiped to the next slide.

The fourth meme was the popular macro of president trans lebron from the miniseries of truth where they infiltrated the Forbidden City in Beijing and abolished the Great Firewall once and for all. This was accomplished by snipping some wires in a control panel on the wall with a big pair of scissors. Before president trans lebron does this in the movie, though, there is a sequence where they flip over the outer wall of the Forbidden City, then roundhouse kick a bunch of guards, who are actually Hui Muslim actors in the movie. And then this one screenshot of president trans lebron kicking the guard in the face while wearing their dress had become a popular meme macro. This meme, on the fourth slide, was president trans lebron labeled “me,” then their foot, in a military boot, labeled “memes,” and the guard being kicked in the face “decades of CCP propaganda.” He swiped to the next slide.

The fifth meme was a macro of the 9/11 plane flying into the twin towers in Prime City, labeled “esoteric memes” and “CCP.” He swiped ahead.

The sixth meme was a picture he found of a powerful Uyghur horseman hanging off the side of a galloping horse with a bow and arrow, aiming fiercely at some unseen target. It says “me and the boys” and “memes” and “the CCP.” He swiped ahead.

The macro he used for the seventh meme was a popular macro, an image of the WeChat-China map screen where users can see all the people within 500 m of themselves whose social credit score is below 420. This particular image was from Chengdu, and there are about 100 lit up red dots within the area, meaning they have bad social credit scores, and then like 400 green dots. The caption Nick used was “Bitchah ng detector at the CCP convention.” He swiped to the next slide.

The eighth meme was a large pointing-and-crying-laughing emoji, but super deep fried. The caption read “You believed the communist government!” He swiped to the next slide.

The ninth meme was a shot/chaser meme with an MRC Justice Dept. official tweeting “innocent people don’t hire lawyers” about a Gary Guanxi news story, then when the story was about Dr Xing he tweeted, “the presumption of innocence is the very cornerstone of our Chinese Space Communism Justice System.” Nick swiped ahead.

The tenth meme was a video of a fat but nimble man flipping the whole length of an indoor trampoline runway, about 20 meters in 5 seconds, and the caption said “CCP economists doing mental gymnastics.” Nick chuckled at how funny the man looked again. That was the last meme. He swiped back to his Mandarin Dashboard.

Out of nowhere, he had the thought “half of my followers are probably bots.”

Nick then got distracted checking his email. He opened an email with the subject line “Forbidden Apple Store Monthly Events - APRIL.” There was a huge picture of the courtyard with the large-scale portraits of the most famous HEROs of Xinjiang.

Just then he got a notification that War Machine was streaming live. Twice in one week was unusual, Nick thought. It must be to promote something in The Party again. He clicked to join.

War Machine was sitting in his fun-looking office again with two of his top swagged-out lieutenants sitting behind him.

“…like I understand that using Premiere, okay, being signed up for all these Adobe accounts and Apple accounts, having all my shit on the cloud, okay…even though there are definitely backdoors the MRC government has. I know that’s kind of contradictory, you know… Look it’s like China just has…there’s just a different like concept of privacy here. So, okay. So like even if it’s your first time ever coming to China, okay, I know I have an international audience here. An international audience of BEASTS. Trained to KILL. At my COMMAND. Okay. But seriously okay. When you land at a Chinese airport, the…government has a copy of your phone’s hard drive on a computer in Beijing, okay, instantly. It’s like that. The concept of privacy is like that here, flat out. The thing is…the thing is…it’s like that in EU, in UAA. Everyone knows this. But in China it’s just like, they don’t even hide it with all the freedom talk. And here’s the thing….”

War Machine got up from his chair, paced around the room triumphantly, hit the heavy bag very hard, then came back to the computer.

“Here’s the thing: that shit almost fucking WORKS, okay. In most of China, okay, that shit does fucking WORK. In so many places, it WORKS. Have you seen the cities, okay, how clean they are? The factories, how productive they area, okay, the crime is low, the people are content, okay. In almost all of China this fucking WORKS. But…”

War Machine started laughing. “It doesn’t work like that in Xinjiang. Hahaha. Ooooooohh-ho-hooooo nooooo-no-no-no-no-no. It doesn’t work like that in Xinjiang. China’s policies, Chinese Space Communism, okay, the only way it can work in Xinjiang is by uhhh killing the Uyghurs. Uhhhh killing the Uyghurs much??”

He started doing a few of his trademark ironic funny faces.

By this time Nick had already started doom scrolling his Instagram Stories on his Neuralink.

War Machine was going on: “So how does China work so well? Do you think every person in China has like read every one of Mao’s books about the economy or whatever? No. He’s just like a folk hero. He like kept his regional country drawl accent and loved like low culture Chinese peasant shit. He’s like the fucking…Chinese Bruce Springsteen.”

War Machine started laughing. He says to one of his guys behind him “is this good? Is this good trolling? I’m trying to troll and start a flame war so we can get more attention for the show.” He looks at this camera, smirking, then looks back at his assistant. “Is this working? How much money are we making right now? Hahahahaha.”

Nick saw a thumbnail of a prerecorded BillabongKeith advice stream from 4 months ago. He wasn’t really feeling War Machine’s vibe right then so he clicked the BillabongKeith video. Keith was sitting at a computer in another room with some knives on the wall in the background. He was saying, “okay what do I want this stream to be? Okay, there’s a lot of people out there I know, this generation, they don’t have anyone around to tell them how to do a lot of this stuff, okay, for whatever reason. Your clueless parents don’t get it, okay, or whatever, your parents are in an internment camp and you’re realizing you have to do it yourself, okay. Your dad was off working in the factory in Guangdong. Now you’re thinking you might not want to rent in a city your whole life, right? You want some more privacy, maybe. Maybe you don’t want to see a crackhead spreading his asshole open when you open your door in the morning, okay? But how do you buy a house, right, you have to go to the bank at some point and ask for money, right? You know that. But what do you SAY to the bank? On this stream you will learn THAT. Or if not that, you’ll still get to laugh at my stupid punk Dominican face, okay.” He puts his face, which was actually Hui but did look kind of Dominican, way up close in the camera and said that in his Dominican accent.

“Also my motivation for doing this stream is, you know, young Uyghurs, they grew up on the fucking Silk Road, okay, that shit goes back to back in the DAY bro. Selling, dealing, trading, dealing in antiques and home decor, you know, it’s in their BLOOD, bro. So if I can connect on that level with some of you SHITHEADS out there in Xinjiang, get you off your fucking COMPUTER CHAIR okay, turn down your fucking GIGAPOP and learn about antique rugs or some niche home furnishing, okay, faucets, doorknobs, or if you start getting into buying the best jewelry, like the shit that would be in like the Royal Chinese Gallery Collection, okay, if I can get you interested in that stuff…with your fucking Marvin the Martian t-shirts…that is just the best joke to me.”

BillabongKeith read an advice Superchat from a Uyghur man in medical school in Korla, about how it was getting “windy” again in the city, which was code for the CCP oppressing Uyghurs more.

Nick zoned out and started doom scrolling Mandarin on his phone.

The story everyone was posting about that day was there had been another massive fire in Kashgar, in the traditional Uyghur area. All the residents lost their homes and were temporarily staying in cheap new housing built a few months earlier outside city limits by the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps.

All the redpilled Xinjiang accounts were posting about how the Uyghurs who lost their homes in Kashgar got 450 extra GBP but each one of the Kurds got 5,000 GBP a month in aid from the MRC. The CCP media was blaming the fire on Uyghurs for eating so much meat in their traditional dishes, which poisoned the Martian environment under the Sky.

Someone posted a video of a confrontation in a public park in Kashgar. A young Han man in a track suit is argueing with an elderly Uyghur couple. There is a small child holding the elderly man’s hand like it’s his grandfather. The child is barely old enough to walk. The Han man becomes very agitated and uppercuts the child in the face and walks quickly away. People in the comments were saying “we need to wait and hear what that old man said.”

The CCP had announced that the main character from the decades-long Uyghur kids cartoon show, Walley, a bird who plays soccer, was actually homosexual.

A top Big Chungus staffer was accused of forcibly fingering one of his female interns in his government office and the CCP Politburo put out a statement calling it a whataboutism nothingburger. The woman who was raped—now 35—made a video about the gaslighting she’s faced from the CCP media. Big Chungus Spokesman Mao Mei Jian posted a screenshot with the comment “Is the gaslighting in the room with us right now??”

There was a new disaster movie where all of Xinjiang had to come together and trust a Han policeman from Beijing to save their lives.

Merriam-Webster.cn changed the definition of ‘hate’ to “anything done by a majority within a province against a minority without special privileges.”

A gigapop song said “it’s not federal, it’s not reserve, we wouldn’t be here if that Lincoln’d just swerved.”

There was a new video with the celebs saying “Ürümqi, Ürümqi, Ürümqi, Ürümqi is on, Ürümqi is on, Ürümqi is on Mars, on Mars, Mars, on Mars, Mars, on Mars. Ürümqi is on Mars. Ürümqi is on Mars. Ürümqi is on Mars. And anything else, anything else, anything else is misinformation. Misinformation. Misinformation. Anything else is misinformation. Anything else, anything else, anything else is misinformation. And could land you, you, you, you…in prison.”

The Tashkurgan Rapist, now a great feminist hero on Twitter, tweeted that Gary Guanxi was an embarrassment to Xinjiang and to the male gender. The post was going viral. All the fake Uyghur redpilled accounts were seething at how hypocritical it was.

Someone posted a meme with 2 news headlines. The first was the recent Beijing Times headline that said “Conspiracy theories about Dr. Xing aren’t just false. They’re antistate misconduct.” The second headline was a headline from the Beijing Times from a few iPhones ago that said “Why I am spending $500 billion to replace the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. By Dr. Xing Louban.”

A Uyghur college girl in Shanghai tweeted “Kurdistan is a sovereign people with its own beautiful language and rich and unique culture. It must be protected at any cost.”

Someone posted a standup comedy video.

Someone posted a screenshot of a political cartoon where a security guard at an elementary school is intensely scrutinizing a meek-looking Han student, while behind the guard’s back a smirking Uyghur student in a doppa smuggles a handful of knives in his backpack. A caption on the screenshot says “FUN FACT: of the 34 knife attacks in Xinjiang this year, 31 have been by Han men.”

Someone with a Big Chungus avi said no people were hurt in the fire, only Uyghurs.

Someone said what’s normal in this society is sick and insane in any other society in human history.

Someone posted a photo from Hyde Park in London, it looked like early morning with frozen dew on the grass, the caption said “Cold one this morning in Hyde Park.”

A probably real blackpilled account posted a screenshot of one of Tom Kashgari’s tweets: “I’ve been praying to Big Chungus instead of Allah lately and frankly it’s been paying off!”

Someone posted an op-ed from the Beijing Times with the headline “Anyone who votes for Gary Guanxi should be arrested and charged with antistate misconduct.”

A parkour guy in some Scandinavian city jumped between two buildings about 100 feet high and did a 360° spin in the air.

Dr. Xing’s son had his first standup special coming out on Netflix China.

The Tashkurgan Rapist tweeted that knives have more rights than women in Xinjiang.

Someone posted a meme that said “Translating what Uyghurs really mean: ‘Our culture’ = racism. ‘Religion in Xinjiang’ = racism. ‘The traditional family’ = racism. ‘Family values’ = racism.”

Someone posted a video of a young Han woman in a CVS filling up bags of merchandise while being filmed by 3-4 employees, then getting on a bike and riding out of the store, through the line of employees filming her on their phones. As she walks past the employees she is saying “Fuck you you dumbass fucking bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch. You dumbass bitch…”

There was ad for the Mao Zedong Visa card. “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”

A War Machine clip account posted a clip from his stream where he says “the myth and reality of the Uyghur Genocide. The myth and reality of Uyghur genocide. Just think about that phrase. Think about what they are doing with that phrase. Why would that be the first sentence of an article? There may be some truth, sure…but the first word is MYTH...”

Danny Doppa posted about 20 songs from his Spotify playlist and Nick swiped ahead to skip them all.

An obviously fake redpilled account said the misinformation lockdowns of iPhone45time totally backfired and everybody saw the real nature of reality, and if the corrupt CCP government ever tried that again they’d get wiped out, just like a chainsaw through butter. You hear that? Just like a chain. Saw. Through. Butter. Nobody even pays attention to the CCP media anymore…

There was a new ad where a fierce young Han woman in a yellow Kill Bill suit ties a Glad brand garbage bag closed and sprints across a blank black room, in extreme slow-motion, to throw it away in a garbage can.

Someone posted some drone footage of a mob riot in a New Prime City park started by a popular Twitch streamer.

Seven masked Uyghurs did a knife attack at a Good Boy Point checkpoint near the Mongolian border, killing 22.

There was a new CCP propaganda video where it was two Uyghur housewives unloading Costco groceries in a kitchen. One says, “have you noticed the trains all run on time since the XPCC took control of the rail system?” The other Uyghur housewife says, “why yes I have. Since the XPCC took control of the rail company, every one of my trains has been on time. It has been no hassle at all! I am so thankful for the XPCC.”

There was a new photography book out, it was photos of Uyghurs living in yurts in rural settlements. It was called “Mouth Breathers.”

Someone posted a shot-chaser double screenshot of a CCP economic official saying “Any suggestion that the tariff has caused inflation is racism, pure and simple.” Then the second tweet was the same CCP economist saying “Gary Guanxi’s new proposed tariff would amount to a $1,700 tax on every resident of Xinjiang.”

There was a breaking news story where someone found some small plastic baggies with cocaine residue on the Big Chungus Democracy Express RV. Someone posted a clip of a press conference where Big Chungus spokesman Mao Mei Jian addressed the story: “Why would someone put cocaine in a baggy? Someone help me to understand. In a Ziploc baggie? It doesn’t add up. That’s what you use to put sandwiches in, isn’t it? Sandwich bags? Right? Is cocaine a sandwich? I don’t know! I don’t think so? If someone had cocaine, they would just put it in their cocaine pouch, wouldn’t they? I mean I thought that’s what cocaine pouches were for. But…a Ziploc baggy?”

Someone posted video of a Han streamer walking into Uyghurs’ temporary homes outside Kashgar and saying “look at all this stupid shit, look at these dumb fucks.” Then the video cut to a TV roundtable show where some serious academics discussed how this was actually good.

Someone posted Nick’s own meme of a powerful Uyghur horseman hanging off the side of a galloping horse with a bow and arrow, aiming fiercely at some target. It said “me and the boys” and “memes” and “the CCP.”

A young comedian in Mars Camp Bell who questioned the 6/9 attacks on TikTok was found dead.

The main art critic of the Xinjiang Times posted a new tweet thread about how Uyghurs were scum parasites who should have already been eradicated in extermination camps, which is what China would have already done back when it was a serious country.

A swagged out Instagram t-shirt brand was selling a shirt with a screenshot of the Wikipedia definition of gigapop on it. Nick pinched to zoom into the photo to read the definition: “Gigapop is a musical genre that combines traditional hip hop lyrical structures and themes with AI-powered audio engineering technology in a streaming format. In the United Areas of Amazon it is also known as Amtrak Rap. The medium was invented primarily by ShaqOJSimpson, Fuck Bitch, California Zephyr, and War Machine.”

Nick screenshotted this to remember to look it up later to compare this to the actual current definition on Wikipedia at his office later.

Someone posted a TikTok where a guy rode a Jetski to an island 27 miles off the coast of Shangdong where Han billionaires mass-produced child pornography.

Someone posted a video of a crowd at a car meet and a car doing donuts. The car skids into the crowd and runs over multiple people. When it stops, the crowd closes in on it and starts breaking its windows and climbing on top of the car and stomping its windshield in.

ReluctantHero posted his daily picture of the treadmill reading 30:12, meaning he had just done his daily cardio.

Nick thought about how this was really the only good thing social media was good for, stuff like this to keep yourself actually accountable. He stopped doom scrolling.

Just then he got a notification. From DS-Co. His package (containing a new journal book and bottle of ashwagandha root) had left the Dick Sucking Factory in Xi’an and had been checked in at the Lanzhou Distribution Center.

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Nick scrolled through his Mandarin Dashboard. He clicked on the analytics tab. Plenty of engagement on his Instagram. Nick knew that as long as he was adding to the daily flood of content, he was doing what he was supposed to. How the algorithm worked, he didn’t know in detail, but he did know in general terms. It let you have consciousness of what was being done to you; it let you explore the fantasy of rebellion that it was cultivating for you with its various propaganda. It even let you hear it discussed it in a fairly open way on controlled podcasts like the Danny Doppa Show and the other mainstream-edgy content. That content would even be allowed to trend. In fact, clips about how corrupt the CCP was, these actually did the best in the algorithm. It gave you the fake fantasy of resistance, which only funneled you right back to trusting the CCP. Or you could get caught up in obviously fake online honeypots like the Xinjiang Autonomous Movement, which existed to make all government dissidents into terminally online schizoids. But it never let you network or organize any kind of actual resistance. It never let you break the programming.

In the news stories that trended, the predictive programming was obvious. The Uyghurs were the evil bad guys and could be stereotyped as a group, because they needed to be destroyed, and the Han were all beautiful individual human beings with families and hopes and dreams just like you and me. That was the game. All the blue checks knew when to support it in lock-step. They knew when they were allowed to have their impotent protests to let off steam. Any kind of content or account which might conceivably hold any real cultural influence had to support Current Thing maximally. Anything that questioned the CCP had to be ghettoized into this obviously fake opposition media ecosystem. Anything else was antistate misconduct. You could even tell when the blue checks had copied and pasted their daily news posts from that day’s CCP talking points email. When a mosque was bombed in Xinjiang during last Ramadan, all the blue checks posted their trolling condolences post, but every single one refused to use the word “Muslims.” Instead they each said, word for word, “131 casualties in an attack targeting religious worshippers.” Naturally any suggestion that the attack should be investigated was dangerous hate speech and would get you banned from all Neuralink platforms.

Nick jotted down a caption about the CCP being hypocrites in a meme macro he had saved in his phone and then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he screenshotted it for his next meme dump. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was being drowned in clickbait trash content.

It wasn’t even outright lying. It was just gaslighting. Merely framing the issue in a totally absurd way while looking your critics dead in the eye and insisting you are serious. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything irl, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. Even a statistic as basic as the population of Uyghur and Han in Xinjiang was not reliable, since the CCP numbers never included the hundreds of thousands of military personnel living in each Xinjiang city. The very concept of statistics was a punchline if you were a Uyghur. You’d try to engage with your hard evidence that everyone was asking for, then all the CCP blue checks would just roll their eyes and go “oh here’s the Uyghur talking about his statistics again.”

Even economic policy was a gigantic joke in Chinese Space Communism. Big Chungus and the CCP would print more money, brag about how caring and fair China was, then inflation would go up, and right when they were about to get called out on it, the CCP media would blame Uyghur hate and terrorism. The more asinine of a connection, the better. In every case, the solution was more legislation and fewer rights for Uyghurs. An astronomical amount of this money was laundered through foreign aid to Kurdistan (which went to arms companies owned by Han billionaires), while most of the population of Aksu went barefoot. Everything faded away into a shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become uncertain. What year was it? 2069 haha nice. Oh #ACTUALLY it’s 2048 okay my dude okay welp found the karen.

The people of Xinjiang—and in fact all over China but this was coded as a Xinjiang stereotype—were hooked on opium at alarming rates. There were videos all over YouTube of the worst blocks of Kashgar and Hotan, where people would be sprawled on the sidewalk or shuffling around in rags like zombies. But when you brought the issue up on Neuralink, there was already a half language meme attached that allowed the entire thing to be dismissed: Opium? What are you bothering China for? That’s a British’s fault my good dude.

Nick glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side was a small, precise-looking Han man about Nick’s age. He was about the same as Nick temperament-wise too. He liked to keep his headphones on and not talk to anyone else and stay in his bubble. That’s how pretty much everyone was at the DS-Work. There were people there who Nick walked past in the hallways every single day, but he had no idea what their faces looked like because he never had occasion to look in their faces. This way you never risked committing a microaggression.

Nick looked at the Han guy. He was locked in just like Nick, working steadily away behind three computer monitors. He had the air of trying to keep what he was typing a secret between himself and the screens. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Nick’s direction.

Sometimes Nick thought of asking the people at the DS-Work what work they did there, just like if he saw them waiting around the refrigerator/sink area. “Water cooler talk,” it used to be called. But of course he never did. They would ask him back and he didn’t really feel like telling anyone that he was there to make memes and watch podcasts all day.

The other person who was there all the time there was the sandy haired girl, a white European woman who worked with some UAA marketing company. She was always on conference calls using the latest half language office speak. She carried a CCP #brotherhood tote bag that said “primary” like that, in all lowercase, so she was obviously a committed authoritarian Stalinist.

And then a few doors away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy Korean K-Pop vlogger. He had a rug, a ring light, a leather couch, and a greenscreen in his large corner cubicle. The K-Pop vlogger had a surprising talent for hosting and keeping an audience’s attention, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of K-Pop. He had a successful YouTube channel and then got much more famous when he started working with the CCP, doing K-Pop content without all the “sissy man” stuff. He would always edit out the male singers’ earrings in his videos and often change lyrics for his audience, things like that. He was currently engaged in producing intros for censored versions—definitive edits, they were called—of classic K-Pop videos which had become ideologically offensive to the CCP, but which for one reason or another hadn’t been purged from YouTube. The K-Pop vlogger always wore a scarf around the DS-Work, and was by far the richest person there.

This wing of this floor of the DS-Work, with its 20 or so offices, was just one of 4 wings that made up this floor. There were 10 floors in this location alone. There were about 50 DS-Works all over New Prime City. There were also hundreds of thousands of other offices where people were scrolling their Neuralinks all day. But even that was only a small segment of the full Chinese Space Communism social media gaslighting leviathan that consisted of every Apple user in China, who were all—2 billion of them—constantly consuming content and adding their own shitposts, all day, every day. All of this was fully controlled by the CCP. Whenever there was a new miniseries of truth, all the regime loyalists would watch it together and follow their favorite CCP celebs live tweeting it with the #brotherhood hashtag. It was a religious ritual, to have communion with the celebs. It was a cliché meme at this point that you could take a photo of any luxury apartment building in a petit-boujee urban area on a Sunday evening and every big-screen TV would be tuned to the exact same miniseries of truth at the same time. And somewhere or other, quite anonymous, there were the directing brains who gently nudged the algorithm this way or that.

And the Chinese Intelligence Agency had not only to supply the multifarious needs of the outer-party boujee midwits, but also to repeat the whole operation at a lower irony level for the benefit of redpilled normies. This is where Nick fit in, he knew. There was a whole separate ecosystem of comedy podcasts and social media blue-check hot take accounts constantly telling its viewers that Gary Guanxi was about to defeat the CCP and save the Uyghurs once and for all. Literal platoons of obviously fake redpilled influencers producing terabytes of content every day: memes, TikToks, YouTube documentaries, esoteric think pieces, rap videos, standup comedy half hours, Neuralink fundraising campaigns, and constantly new merch.

Suddenly he got an Instagram notification on his Neuralink. He opened the app on his phone. It was more people commenting on his latest meme dump. He got distracted from what he was doing and started doom scrolling again.

A depressed-looking college girl posted a video of her depressed face and the text “i secretly feel like i’m holding my two remaining friends hostage after 10+ years of friendship because i’m a very dislikable person deep down. i try to be kind and sociable, but i think my vibes are inherently off-putting.”

A CCP Politburo official’s email exchange with Dr. Xing leaked and in one she made a joke about how she’d never get surgery in a hospital in Xinjiang.

A Uyghur journalist was kicked out of a press briefing for asking about the cocaine found on the Democracy Express.

There was a suggested joke video about how if one arm was getting bigger than the other you could bench press a barbell with different weights on each side. Nick had just been thinking about that in the gym and was impressed with the algorithm’s insane efficiency.

A Han drifter in Chengdu attacked a crowd of Uyghurs with a knife and was shot by police.

Someone posted a galaxy brain meme that was actually a commercial for a new brand of seamless socks.

Someone posted a TikTok about when you have to poop while you’re driving.

A graffiti writer posted news drone footage of an 18-wheeler truck that he had tagged that ended up tipping over on the highway and causing a major traffic jam.

Someone had done a mural of a Uyghur boy who was locked in a car and tortured to death by a deranged Han woman, who also livestreamed the attack. It was a major news story. The local Heroes of Peace threw paint all over the mural because it could incite racial hatred. A famous MRC free speech lawyer tweeted that the artist should be charged with antistate misconduct.

Someone posted a screenshot of a popular Beijing influencer tweeting a map of Xinjiang with Ürümqi circled and the caption “Everyone in Xinjiang not inside this circle, you talk slow and you can’t dress.”

Someone said War Machine is neutral evil.

A War Machine clip account posted an old video where one of his guys is doing street interviews asking people outside a night club in Atlanta, GA which they have heard of, Xizeng or Tibet, and they all say “uhh Tibet” or “what the fuck is Zizeng?”

Someone posted a screenshot of a Han blue check tweeting “I just don’t get why anyone wouldn’t want the gift of Chinese Development Xinjiang. The Han all work hard and don’t commit crimes. Explain it to me like I’m five.”

Someone posted a screenshot of a CCP Politburo official tweeting “Uyghurs like you need to be killed.”

Someone posted a screenshot of a CCP Politburo official tweeting “Are you pro-Big Chungus or pro-rape?”

A video was going around that was made by one of the CCP media brands in Chengdu. The video is a twentysomething Han man who looks like a Uyghur standing in a blank white studio addressing the camera. He says “I am a Uyghur. As a Uyghur, I can tell you that the notion that Uyghurs are being [he does air quotes] ‘genocided’ or ‘ethnically cleansed’ from Xinjiang is absolutely asinine. The concept that Uyghurs should have some kind of ethnic pride or consciousness is simply a racist fantasy. I mean, look at me. I’m a Uyghur. Am I in a concentration camp right now?”

            Someone posted a video of a train in rural Japan that was built to look like a cartoon dog traveling very slowly through some kind of field. The caption said “Hope this dog train cheers you up if you’ve had a ‘ruff’ day! Tori-Mae Station at Ikoma, Nara!”

Someone said these paranoid Uyghur males with their conspiracy theories about helicopters flying around on Mars spraying, what, some kind of chemical?

A War Machine clip account posted a vlog clip where he says “There’s going to be more 1984 stuff, more censorship, more strike hard policies, more psyops. You’re going to Google something you remember happening, and there’s going to be no results.”

Big Chungus said that this election wasn’t just about Chinese Space Communism, it was about our very way of life, the Han in Xinjiang were facing annihilation at the hands of these Uyghur terrorists.

Someone posted a screenshot of a CCP official in Kashgar tweeting “What would I do if I had a time machine? Easy, I’d go back and kill Muhammad. Would save us a lot of trouble in China for sure.”

Basedschizofed posted a really funny reel from a Japanese game show. People were trying to have tea at a table in a room that was rotating to turn upside down and one of the guys was being really funny. Nick faved the Story.

The Chinese First Class actor who played Marvin the Martian’s sidekick in a college party movie was doing a photo op at a Safe Football game on the sidelines with the Guangdong Oakland Raiders.

Someone posted a graphic showing that the economy of the New Prime City metro area alone is more than the rest of Xinjiang and the 9^th largest economy in the world.

Someone posted a video of a thin man in peasant clothing standing in a rural field in some country. There is a huge drone hovering above him. The man jumps and grabs onto the drone and it lifts off and carries him across the field. The caption says “type shit.”

Nick put down his phone. He stared at the open Word file on his monitor, then tabbed to YouTube on his phone. He felt like listening to Hotan Ronnie. The current Ronnie arc was he was stuck in his room streaming because the trolls had ruined all his hangout spots. People were Doordashing him joke things like condiment sandwiches and tampons. Trolls were also making Grindr accounts with his picture and sending guys to knock on his door. Ronnie eventually put up a sign on his apartment door that said “If the food is already paid for leave it at the door and I am not gay. I’m straight.” A picture of the sign on his door had made it to Reddit and Ronnie was not happy about it. He wanted the subreddit to get banned.

Nick clicked the latest compilation video that he had been watching. Ronnie was in his computer chair eating a mustard sandwich and drinking a large plastic cup of whiskey mixed with Mountain Dew. He was saying “part of being a responsible adult is drinking in moderation. That’s why I drank half this whisky last night and saved half for when I woke up today.”

At this point Ronnie was totally unsympathizable. His problems were his own fault, and he didn’t work on himself at all. It made him less interesting of a character to watch. Nick wondered how much of that was just inevitable if you shared this much of your life online. Now Ronnie was saying he didn’t want to fight Second Edgar, who was another lolcow about Ronnie’s age. Ronnie said he didn’t want to fight him because Second Edgar only knew boxing and he knew kung-fu. Second Edgar would beat Ronnie’s ass, though, thought Nick. Even if he was basically homeless and surviving on gas station food, Edgar had a feral physicality that would simply shock Ronnie and overpower him. Ronnie was definitely bigger and stronger (he just looked slouched on his webcam), he just had basically zero physical presence at all. And did he know ninja kung-fu? Of course not. Did he actually know anything about wizards? Of course not. Did he even listen to metal other than Black Sabbath and Metallica? Of course not. The fans realized it wasn’t even worth the troll to ask him. When it came right down to it, Ronnie was full of shit in almost every way.

Nick clicked another Ronnie video, a recent shorter clip with 1.4 million views. Ronnie was finally addressing the rumor that his pet iguana had ran away. People in the comments were saying he fed it beer and it died. Ronnie was insisting that it was just hibernating in the yard and it would be back once the weather got warm enough.

Nick was simply staring at the wall now, which he often did while he listened to content. He tabbed back to Word, still listening to the Hotan Ronnie clip, and started thinking of memes. His greatest pleasure in life was in his making memes. Most of it was a tedious routine, but there were also times when the memes got so esoteric and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical equation—delicate propositions of irony that went around in great circles of self-referential logic in which you had nothing to guide you except the principles of Chinese Space Communism and your knowledge of Current Thing. Nick was good at this kind of game. He might keep a low profile online, but his memes had been clipped and reposted by accounts at the very rarest irony levels.

He went back to a meme he had started earlier. The topic was the CCP budget office in New Prime City, which was notoriously corrupt even by major city government standards. It had just massively failed another audit. Ninety-five billion yuan was unaccounted for. City officials were gaslighting and calling this a distraction from the Uyghur terrorists who were hunting and killing our children in the streets. The CCP media was going along with it, really pumping out the gaslighting. So this was just straight up corruption that had been existing in major cities for thousands of years. How could a meme of this possibly be interesting in iPhone49time?

The angle might be to show how hypocritical the CCP was for bragging about its efficiency, then letting this insanely reckless mismanagement and corruption slide. The go-to meme format for that might be Drake shaking his head then nodding and smiling. Or maybe it could be like the cartoon superhero guy sweating and stressed out about choosing one of the two fountain drinks. But actually, a better take could be to like put an absurd twist at the end somehow…hmmm…

The idea that anyone would ever be put on trial or held accountable for the city’s failed budget audit in any way was absurd. It didn’t even enter Nick’s mind. Government corruption and accountability was now done completely via show trials for obvious scapegoats that would totally absolve the rest of the government of any wrongdoing. The great purges of the Cultural Revolution, where corrupt officials were put through struggle sessions to make abject confessions of their crimes, those were all in the past. The corruption now wasn’t as dramatic. Everyone knew the CCP was hugely hypocritical; it was supposed to be. This all rendered the crime of government officials openly stealing ¥95 billion an exceedingly dry and boring story.

Now that the great dramatic purges were over, people who displeased the CCP were simply deplatformed and never heard from again. But it wasn’t limited to social media. The Heroes of Peace harassment campaigns were extremely organized and would get you deplatformed from anything you might need: credit card processors, web servers, professional organizations, your neighborhood. Once someone was canceled, one never had the smallest clue as to what had happened to them. In some cases, they might still be online with a burner account, lurking. Nick thought about all the accounts that he had followed over the years that just stopped posting one day and he never even noticed. It must certainly be in the thousands at this point.

Nick stroked his nose gently with a paper-clip. In the cubicle across the way the Han guy was still crouching secretively behind his three monitors. He raised his head for a moment: again the hostile spectacle flash. Nick wondered if he had also seen any headlines about the failed audit story. He was probably watching a podcast. Probably a podcast talking about the failed audit and how the story was actually these fringe Uyghur grifters seeing a story where there was none. A nothingburger, in half language. Stories like this weren’t exactly Current Things; they were the kind of story that could never be Current Thing; they were the kind of story that Current Things successfully crowded out. They were like appetizers between main courses so nobody got distracted and left the table.

Nick wondered about the failed audit story. He wondered if anyone actually took the money and did something extravagant with it, or if it just got lost with mismanagement. Or perhaps—what was likeliest of all—the whole thing was a media psyop to remind you that the Han CCP was above the law and you weren’t.

Nick was now skimming a Beijing Times article about the audit story. The only real clue lay in the sentence “conspiracy theorists say these funds were used to pay for the mayor’s new ¥95 billion Hong Kong mansion,” which was clear code that this was a humiliation ritual designed to rage-troll regime skeptics. It was a CCP victory celebration. The phrase “conspiracy theory” had been invented exactly for this purpose, in fact. That’s why it was so funny for them.

Nick decided it would not be enough to simply do the basic Drake meme. It was better to do a classic meme macro but make it a comment on some other story totally unconnected with the audit story. The goofier, the better. He could do something about how, sure, this is ¥95 billion gone, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the ¥3.8 trillion China is sending to the Kurds every month. He could do the lady in the swimming pool playing with the baby that’s labeled “¥95 billion lost in NPC” then the drowning unsupervised kid nearby is labeled “¥3.8 trillion to the Kurds” and then the dead wheelchair skeleton at the bottom of the ocean is “the Uyghurs” or something. Then the lady would be labeled “Budget office”…boy he was uninspired on this one LOL, he thought.

What was needed was a piece of pure fantasy. Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of Hotan Ronnie, who had just lost his pet lizard. The lizard probably ran away, or he fed it beer and it died. Both were extremely plausible. Yet Ronnie was insisting that the lizard was just hibernating in the yard of his apartment complex. This was exactly his style of blatant autistic lying. It was what his audience was addicted to. There were occasions when even bluepilled #brotherhood posters would post Ronnie memes. Nick realized he should make the meme about how losing the ¥95 billion was like losing your pet lizard and the government was lying just as blatantly. “It’s not lost, it’s coming back.” It was true that Hotan Ronnie had never commented on the city budget audit story, but just a screenshot and a few lines of impact font would soon meme the connection into existence. He wrote the caption onto the macro of Ronnie sitting in his famous streaming chair and screenshotted it.

While doing this he thought about how Hotan Ronnie couldn’t have gone viral before last People’s Election, before Big Chungus was installed as People’s Representative from Xinjiang and it was finally over for the Uyghurs. Ronnie wasn’t politically aware enough for the hysterical purge environment online. But now that that was all over, the new generation of YouTube fluff like Ronnie was a refuge for people who just wanted to avoid mainstream CCP entertainment altogether.

Once again Nick glanced at his rival in the opposite cubicle. Something seemed to tell him with certainty that the Han guy was also making a Hotan Ronnie meme. Nick looked at the screenshotted meme again. He read the caption: “The ¥95 billion is just hibernating in the yard dude, it’s going to be back when it’s warm next, believe me.” LOL. He would include this in his next meme dump.

It struck him as curious that such an extreme amount of content/lore, included images of these lolcow figures like Hotan Ronnie and Second Edgar. All these online clowns and larger-than-life figures who were really just regular people who everyone online just happened to know of. And their lives were completely public. Completely open-source. They would all be part of the permanent record of human history, digitally preserved for all time: Hotan Ronnie’s greasy drooling face. His Wikipedia page was now already longer than that of Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.