7

 

“If there is hope,” vlogged Nick to his Neuralink, “it lies in the normies.”

He was pacing next to his futon in his pod in the replica Kowloon Walled City.

If there was hope, it must lie in the normies, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses—85% of the human population—could the force to destroy the CCP ever be generated. The CCP could not be overthrown from within Xinjiang. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of assembling or even of identifying one another. The #brotherhood hashtag had been used to coopt all the symbolism of solidarity and revolution, even the very concept of the future—the CCP had used its totalitarian control of the media to capture all those symbols for itself. When you said “resistance” in Xinjiang now, people only thought of trusting the CCP more, paying more taxes, and censoring more search results. No. Fighting the CCP according to the rules of Chinese politics was hopeless. The meta was simply to redpilll the most normies.

But it seemed impossible to get any good content made that would be powerful enough to rip normies’ attention away from the industrial-scale spectacle of Operation Bedtime Stories. The Safe Super Bowl being held on Mars was just one day of Empathy Week, just one of the spectacular Narratives that had now already been building for months.

The only content platform that could even possibly compete would be one that War Machine had developed with his production company Alpha Investment Corporation. Nick had seen a lot of posts about it on dissident accounts online. It was a totally new kind of streaming platform.

The show was called The Party. It was a 24/7 reality show in which contestants lived in a house in northern Xinjiang. The house was outfitted with cameras and microphones in every room. It was somewhere in the Altay Valley. The cameras all streamed 24/7 to TheParty.live. There was a live chat. Viewers could interact with the contestants for a fee of a few tokens. A computerized text-to-speech voice read out whatever message they wanted, and the mods didn’t censor anything. Each day War Machine’s lieutenants Slimeski and Keep Computer, would put the contestants through various games and challenges, then War Machine himself would show up in the evening and do a speech or some kind of announcement. The show would also be edited and released as a regular reality series behind another paywall later. It was basically like a 6-week long video shoot.

Nick had watched the show for a few days at the beginning. It was extremely engrossing. The thing about it was, it was too addictive. It was designed too self-consciously to have parasocial appeal, to allow viewers to think the contestants were their friends. Once you got to know the characters, it was just as compelling to watch them sit around eating cereal at 11 AM as it was to watch the main challenges. It was like going to a house party with your friends, but then when it was over, you didn’t have to go home. You could just stay at the Party house doing half language in the chat and waiting around for the next challenge, the next night, the next party. That’s where the name came from: The Party.

That was the first season. Over the next few seasons the show had morphed and evolved. Nick hadn’t watched those seasons. According to some War Machine clips that he saw on TikTok, though, they were thinking of it as a franchise now, an entertainment platform. They wanted to do as many seasons as possible, with different themes, in different parts of Xinjiang. They had already done a season 2 in another part of the Altay Valley, this one with a more suburban themed house. Then they had done a season 3 that was in the woods near the Mongolian border, kind of like a tribal theme.

War Machine’s guys had also been encouraging fans to create clip accounts on TikTok to spread the show; this was an actually good moneymaking opportunity because it was easy to clip the show and get views on TikTok. It brought more traffic to the website and got the fans more involved too. Alpha Investment Corporation was always looking out for their fans like this. It was like a whole parasocial entertainment ecosystem, Nick thought.

He had been meaning to start using some of the images from The Party in his memes, since he had definitely seen a lot posted on like mainstream meme accounts. It was all designed specifically to be memeable.

Although Nick didn’t watch the Party himself, he was cheering for it to be more popular. The more mainstream it got in China, the more Chinese people would watch War Machine’s other content, which was full of redpills. Even his free YouTube streams. The normies, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose, they could blow the CCP to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet—!

Nick remembered how once he had been wandering around the mall concourse in the Forbidden Apple Store, stoned, when a tremendous shout of hundreds of voices women’s voices had burst from the entrance to Target a little way ahead. It was a great formidable cry of anger and despair, a deep, loud “Oh-o-o-o-oh!” that went humming on like the reverberation of a bell. His heart had leapt. It’s started! He had thought. A riot! A spontaneous riot, not one that was astroturfed by the CIA! The normies are breaking loose at last! When he had reached the spot, it was to see a mob of two or three hundred women crowding round an aisle display rack, with faces as tragic as though they had been the doomed passengers on a sinking ship. But at this moment the general despair broke down into a multitude of individual quarrels. It appeared that one of the employees had just put out a new pallet of California Zephyr Stanley cups.

They were wretched, clumsy things, but you could drink from them while driving and they helped you stay hydrated. This was a highly anticipated special edition California Zephyr colorway by Stanley x Target x DS-Co. The successful women, bumped and jostled by the rest, were trying to make off with their prize while dozens of others clamored round the display, accusing the minimum wage employee of favoritism and of having more Stanley cups in the back. There was a fresh outburst of yells. Two bloated women, one of them with her hair coming down, had got hold of the same Stanley cup and were trying to tear it out of one another’s hands. For a moment they were both tugging, and then the handle came off. Nick watched them disgustedly. And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never should like that about anything that mattered?

Thinking about this back at his apartment, Nick spoke again for his vlog: “Until they become redpilled, they will never rebel, and until they rebel they cannot become truly redpilled.”

That, he reflected, was cringe. But. It was exactly the type of cringe that appealed to normies. It could even be a line of dialogue delivered by a First Class Actor in a CCP-Award-winning miniseries of truth. The MRC claimed, of course, to have liberated the normies from bondage. But that was just Han normies. If you were a Han normie, Chinese Space Communism worked out pretty well for you. You could now go to your horrible job at the Dick Sucking Factory all day, and then—even after being broke and exploited your whole life—you could still watch the latest CCP miniseries of truth when you got home and be soothed and feel like you were the hero of XInjiang. But if you were a Uyghur normie, you just worked at the Dick Sucking factory all day, then couldn’t even escape it in any way. Anyone who would be a refuge for you was systematically purged from the public space. Your life had no meaning. China was succeeding despite you. Everything you tried to do was never enough to repay the debt the Uyghurs owed to China. If you were successful, you didn’t earn it; it was Uyghur nepotism. Every bit of the CCP media was total poison. You were horrifically degraded at every opportunity. If you were a Uyghur normie in Xinjiang, you were really down bad. And you still had to pay taxes too.

Before the Sky of the Future, the CCP media said, the normies in XInjiang had been hideously oppressed by fundamentalist Muslim extremist morality squads. They had no culture and no way to express themselves other than their dumb little traditional dances they did in the mountains. The entire world had been laughing at how backwards and stuck in the past Xinjiang was compared to the rest of China. Women there had been forced into oppressive gender roles and forced to work long thankless hours of menial labor. Men there had spent their lives being bullied by religious extremist thugs and barely surviving on subsistence farming. Now they were all ceaselessly humiliated and gaslit by the CCP media, all DMed each other memes as their only social interaction, and all barely survived paycheck to paycheck working at the Dick Sucking Factory. True to the principles of half language, the CCP media taught that this was actually good: the normies were natural inferiors who must be kept in subjugation, like livestock, by being constantly trolled with psyops.

In reality very little was known about the normies. It was not necessary to know much. Until you needed to advertise to them, that is; then you could buy all the consumer data you wanted. As long the normies continued to work and breed, and serve in the Chinese military, their other activities were of little importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a lifestyle that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern. They were born, they grew up in their town, they finished school. If they scored high on the national college exam, they could go to college. If not, they would start working either in their town or commuting to a factory. They got married. They bought a house in their village. They had kids and made it work.

And that was where their individual sovereignty ran out. The horizon of their minds was then filled up with horribly boring work at the factory, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, with video games, pro sports, and above all, Netflix. To keep them in control was not difficult. A few feds always moved always among them, spreading false rumors and marking down and eliminating the individuals who were judged capable of becoming dangerous; but no attempt was made to indoctrinate them with the ideology of the #brotherhood. It was not desirable that the normies should have strong political feelings. All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary for them to vote or to support a new war. And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because being without original ideas, they could only ever think in programmed hot takes. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

The great majority of normies in China were Han and did not have to do Good Boy Checks in their area. Even the civil police interfered with them very little. There was a vast amount of criminality in Chengdu, for example; a whole underworld of Han thieves, bandits, prostitutes, drug-peddlers, and racketeers of every description. Knife crime was actually over 50 times higher in Chengdu than it was in Kashgar. But since it all happened among the Han themselves—so there was no nexus to political hot takes—it was of no importance. In all questions of morals the normies were allowed to follow their various ancestral codes. Even with Uyghur normies this was true, until it wasn’t.

The sexual puritanism of the CCP was not imposed upon the normies. In fact, the exact opposite was imposed upon them. The miniseries of vibes marketed to the young adult demographic for the back-to-school season was called SEX and it was about high school and college people doing synthetic party drugs and having sex with each other. All the Uyghur male characters were either rapists or gay and all the female Uyghur characters were dating macho Han PLA border guards. The propaganda was so strong that the CCP didn’t even have to totally ban religious worship in Xinjiang, the normies were already so distracted they would worship whatever spectacular content was trending at the time. They were beneath suspicion. As the #brotherhood meme put it: “normies and animals are free.”

Nick coughed again from the vape. The cough had started to get bad again.

The thing you invariably came back to was the impossibility of knowing how much of it all was a psyop. He stopped pacing and laid on his futon. See, this is why he liked to be watching some content all the time, so his mind wouldn’t be racing like this.

He took out his phone and instinctively went to his Mandarin Dashboard.

The story that everyone was posting about that day was that the MRC had announced that it was actually opening another city under another Sky of the Future that it would transport to Mars using another quantum computer, the same day as the Safe Super Bowl this Empathy Week. Holy fucking shit! This time, since the first quantum computer was already built, they actually used it to build the second city at hyperspeed, so it was already all done. The second Mars city was a former ghost town outside Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, eastern China. It was called Xiangyun International Project. Nick remembered seeing it from some urbex YouTube thumbnails.

The obviously fake redpilled accounts were already doing memes about how hypocritical this was when there was already so much poverty all across China, and how it was all a big photo op for the Big Chungus campaign once again promising everything and doing nothing. The CCP blue checks were gloating and toasting champagne.

A CCP Politburo official said the military would be confiscating knives from Uyghurs in Xinjiang and sending them to the Kurds who actually need them. The Uyghurs have shown that they can’t be trusted with knives, he said.

Danny Doppa had a guest on, a Uyghur conspiracy theorist with crazy hair who said that the space walks the CCP media kept reporting on were filmed in the mountains in Kazakhstan. Every blue check influencer was doing TikTok reaction videos where they go “a-Kazakhstan a-yakshimesh my name-a Borat!!”

The Heroes of Peace said Danny Doppa was doing antistate misconduct and were demanding his advertisers be shut down.

There was a new Mars walk scheduled for next week. The news was speculating that they might have made contact with another Martian civilization and it was a great opportunity to rethink what Xinjiang really stands for.

ReluctantHero posted a pic of the exercise bike after doing his 30 minutes of cardio.

There was another video ad with the celebs: “The quantum computer, the quantum computer, the quantum computer. The quantum computer is real. Is real, is real, the quantum computer is real. It’s real. The quantum computer is real. It teleports us, teleports us, teleports us. It teleports us to Mars, to Mars, to Mars, Mars, Mars Mars. It teleports us to Mars.”

Someone posted the picture of the dog whose dick looks like a miniature version of the dog again.

Someone said Gary Guanxi needs more steps in his Jason before this election.

The Mao Zedong Visa card. “With 2.9% APR, every purchase is a great economic miracle.”

Someone tweeted the communists know they killed Ehmetjan Qasim. They think it’s funny.

The CCP gigapop rapper Hexi said Gary Guanxi had to stop playing his song “I Love China” at his rallies because Guanxi was a Uyghur and wasn’t really Chinese.

Someone posted a TikTok where a Han college influencer at NASA Harvard Space Academy said she always touches the mural of Big Chungus as she walks past it on her way to her internship in the Tokyoville financial district. In the mural Big Chungus is pointing off into the future in his Stalin pose.

Danny Doppa posted a Led Zeppelin song.

Danny Doppa posted a Doors song.

Danny Doppa posted a Hexi song.

Danny Doppa posted a Soulja Boy song.

Nick skipped through about 12 other songs Danny Doppa posted.

Someone posted a TikTok where a middle-aged Han woman was in her car crying with makeup running down her face and saying “I just don’t understand it!! These Uyghur men don’t even think Big Chungus is real!!!!!” The caption said she was a college professor.

A Korean Coton dog account posted that they usually do not do sponsorship posts on this account, but they will make an exception when it’s a product they really believe in. This is one of those products. It’s a dog treat that makes your dog’s poop smell better. The Coton dog account says the treats are also made by a small business, and the owner of the small business makes them by hand: “it’s joint pain & back breaking work. But she does it with a smile on her face.”

Marvin the Martian had endorsed Big Chungus in the election. They had been roommates in college at Beijing University.

Another story from today was that voting in the election would be held on an app produced by a software company funded by the Xing Foundation. This was because it was extremely important to fortify and safeguard Our Election, said Big Chungus’s spokesman Mao Mei Jian. He called criticism of this decision “whataboutism.”

The mom from the sitcom Modern Xinjiang tweeted that it was time for these Uyghur crybabies to grown up and vote for Big Chungus.

Someone posted a screenshot that said “If you’ve made it this far, it means you’ve endured unprecedented biological and psychological warfare. Congratulations. Keep going.”

Someone posted a viral clip of one of War Machine’s lieutenants on a podcast where he says “Bitches Brew, Miles Davis…man, listening to that was like being in an opium den in Hell.”

Someone posted a YouTube video called “The Most BRUTAL Survival Stories from the Chinese Frontier.”

A countdown clock on the Amazon homepage said the SFL-East playoff game between the Guangdong Oakland Raiders and the Beijing Kung-Fu will start in 32:50:11.

Someone posted a podcast clip where a young female Han influencer in red frame glasses says “um but see Big Chungus isn’t connected to the Uyghur power structure of Xinjiang.”

Someone posted a clip of the most popular CCP college politics streamer saying “oh right, so you’re saying the CCP literally picked you up and held you with no charges in a camp that was designed by some Han billionaires in Beijing who are running the entire country and economy from some bunker somewhere? Riiiiight…”

There was an ad for the Regime Records gigapop merch site. The t-shirt on the thumbnail was a legit sick t-shirt design based on a single from one of the minor gigapop streamers from Chengdu. The single was about how badass it was to be a border guard for the XPCC and kill Mongolians.

Someone posted a long TikTok video of a guy camping in some woods in Kentucky, UAA. Nick clicked on it. It was 40 minutes long. As he sat there in his cubicle watching this guy walking around the woods, he imagined a cartoon of a dog in an office looking his phone screen and watching another dog running around in the woods and jumping in a pile of leaves.

Someone posted screenshots of the movie poster and description of a new documentary called Han Rising. It was about a group of Han youths who believe that they were the original occupants of Xinjiang, so they break into houses owned by Uyghurs and start living there, and videotape it for their YouTube channels.

Someone in the comments said “I POST KARENS GETTING KARMA”

Someone in the comments said “I POST HIGH SCHOOL FIGHTS”

Someone in the comments said “I POST POLICE CHASES”

Someone posted a standup comedy video.

Someone posted a greentext screenshot that said “It’s not that the CCP can’t meme per se, it’s that their viewpoints rely on a carefully constructed denial of reality, to a far greater extent than any of the cults or religions they seek to supplant. This doesn’t lend itself to simple, easily conveyed messages, because if you rely on your viewers to see things as they are, without providing several layers of carefully selected context, they’ll interpret it the wrong way. The CCP can’t meme because it’s the antithesis of how they communicate.”

Someone posted a slideshow of pictures taken at the Najaiying Mosque the day before the 6/9 attacks.

Someone posted a YouTube thumbnail of a woman’s face frowning and in the background a cartoon house in flames. The title was “My house burned down.”

Someone said Jet Li was on the Xing List.

Someone posted a meme with a picture of a dog and it said when it’s 5:01 and dinner is usually at 5:00.

Someone posted a photo of an angled computer screen with the text “Message Text: im sorry i have to leave the lobby but i will never forget you. you will always be my teammate my partner and most of all my brother good luck in future games and remember god loves you and has a plan 4 u. peace bro”

Then Nick saw a post that totally ruined his blissful mood. It really blackpilled him. And normally when he saw a blackpilled meme post, he wouldn’t even swipe through it. But this time, out of some nihilist curiosity, he did.

It was from one of the probably real blackpilled accounts he followed. It was a 10-part slideshow of the vanilla Mandarin Dashboard FYP, what any user who had just set up their account would see. Exactly what Nick had carefully cultivated his own Mandarin Dashboard and his entire online experience to avoid. It was worse than he had imagined.

The first slide was the main media tab of the Mandarin Dashboard with thumbnails for all the different CCP media platforms: Netflix China, Hulu, CNN, DS Films, YouTube, a bunch of other ones Nick didn’t recognize. Each of the platforms had next to it a series of five recommended shows that would rotate in a carousel. There was a button to sort by “Chinese History Month.” The description said “The TRUE story of Xinjiang the media DOESN’T want you to see!” The blackpilled account had put a crying-laughing emoji with an arrow to this sentence. Nick swiped to the next slide.

The second slide was a video clip from one of the movies from DS-Films. There was some video of poor Uyghurs in the mountains from 50 years ago. The narration said: “In irltimes, before the glorious Gift of Chinese Development, Ürümqi was not the beautiful city that we know today. It was a dirty, miserable hillbilly town where hardly anybody had enough to eat and the extremist Muslim morality squads patrolled the streets with weapons of war. Everyone was radicalized by terrorist infiltrators from the Middle East spreading misinformation online. Students with hopes and dreams just like you would be terrorized by the roving gangs of religious extremists. And there was nothing to eat except their stupid little traditional foods like yak yogurt and naan that they forced upon everyone.”

Nick tried to remember a single time he had ever seen anyone in Ürümqi eating traditional yak yogurt. He laughed. He swiped to the next slide.

The third slide was from a movie about a group of young Uyghur Muslims in Kashgar who got influenced by middle eastern terrorists online and tried to form their own terror cell. The post was just the poster of the movie, which was a group of young Uyghur boys and the tag line “Sometimes it’s hard to know what a terrorist looks like.” Nick swiped to the next slide.

The fourth slide was another movie poster: a Han man in a lab coat looking in a microscope. The title was “When Safe Football Started.” This was a drama about the invention of Safe Football helmets, which used a special chemical process and a special metal that this scientist discovered that could only be mined in Taiwan.

Under this in the screenshot was a suggestion of another movie, which Nick recognized. East and West, about the founding of the SFL-East in iPhone 35time, when China got 15 expansion SFL teams. There was also a suggestion for the Hexi bipic. Nick swiped to the next slide.

The fifth slide was a video. Some men dressed in dusty black militia clothes, with their faces covered, push a thin Han man wearing an orange jumpsuit and frameless glasses down onto his knees on the ground. Nick recognized this imagery from real terrorist footage that had been played on the news of a journalist being killed. Then it cut to the thin Han man later, giving a speech to a crowded lecture hall. He says “THAT’s where your conspiracy theories lead us.” There’s a huge roar of applauses from the audience.

The sixth slide was the famous clip from the miniseries of truth where president trans lebron flips over the wall into the Forbidden City, roundhouse kicks two guards, then takes out a large pair of scissors from a leg holster under their dress and cuts a big handful of wires from a panel in the wall. This was the unprecedented historical act that finally abolished the Great Firewall in Xinjiang once and for all, preserved for all time in this movie, and showing everyone that the CCP is definitely not oppressing the Uyghurs anymore. It was the same scene as the well-known meme macro.

The seventh slide was another video. It seemed like the beginning of a miniseries episode. It starts with a golden retriever frolicking through a lush jungle type area. It frolics up to a militia-looking soldier with a machine gun and his face covered. The soldier with his face covered looks at the dog coldly and shoots it in the face. The show cuts to a wide shot of a whole training camp-type area in the woods, with smoke going up in the air from fires. The chyron says “Uyghur Extremist Training Camp” in a digital computer font.

The eighth slide was a poster for a movie about a PLA hero in Xinjiang who ran the most efficient Study Center in all of Xinjiang, until a violent terrorist insurgent pushed him off his guard tower in iPhone12time. It was produced by the man’s son, who hosted the most popular news podcast in Beijing.

The ninth slide was a clip from the current Big Chungus miniseries of truth, which was apparently on the homepage of the Mandarin Dashboard FYP too. It was a documentary following Big Chungus on his RV on his current campaig for reelection. He lived on the gigantic RV, which expanded, when parked, into a whole operations headquarters the size of a house. Each episode of the weekly series showed Big Chungus as the dopey father character in what was essentially a sitcom, including all of his family members being played by MRC First Class Actors.

In this clip Big Chungus was in the kitchen cooking dinner for his family and wearing his chef hat and apron and playing with the family dog. The CCP Chairman of Empathy pokes his head in a doorway and then does a brief cameo scene, Pee Wee’s Playhouse-style. They talk about how there’s a new study from Beijing University that says naan ovens emit as much greenhouse gas as 8 cars. “Wow, wouldn’t it just make sense to ask people to stop making traditional naan then?” he asks Big Chungus.

The tenth slide was a description of a documentary about a rural mosque near Hotan. Nick didn’t even have to read it to know what it would be like. There would be mention of the imams in their fancy clothes, the judges in their creepy little robes, the pillory, the honor killings, the treadmill, the cat-o-nine tails, the caliphate, some creepy religious dinners, and the practice of getting down on your knees 5 times a day—what was that all about, huh? It would also mention how the HEROs faced hate and violence from these extremists just for wanting to come modernize Xinjiang. It would mention that Han migrants were stereotyped as entitled rapists, but of course it wouldn’t mention that rape in Xinjiang was up 450% since the HERO Act migration started. It was all so gross and tiresome.

It might be true that the average Xinjiang resident was better off now than he had been before the Gift of Chinese Development. The only evidence to the contrary was mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different. It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its emptiness, its meaninglessness. Life, if you looked around you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the CCP media, but even to the ideals that the CCP was trying to achieve. Since Big Chungus was “elected” 5 iPhones ago, more wealth had flowed upward to the top 1% of billionaires than ever before in human history. Somehow this was perfect egalitarian Chinese Space Communism. When someone pointed out that this seemed to be actually not that great for equality, the regime gaslighting would kick in and everything would be blamed on Uyghur terrorism.

The ideal held up by the CCP #brotherhood was something huge, terrible, and glittering – a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons – a nation of proud fanatics and whores, getting down on their knees all in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, all perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting, and watching TV together – two billion people all fully committed to Current Thing. The reality was that China was full of decaying, dingy cities where tired people commuted in traffic each day to their jobs at the Dick Sucking factory. He seemed to see a vision of modern New Prime City, vast and ruinous, city of a million dumpsters, and mixed up with the memory was an image of Mrs. Kashgari, a woman with delicate wispy hair, on wine and Xanax, trying to save a pdf.

He coughed again. It was the vape.

Day and night the sidewalk advertising screens assaulted your eyeballs with cherrypicked statistics proving that people today were happier, more fulfilled, more self-actualized—that everyone was more creative, lived longer, worked less, were bigger, healthier, stronger, and more intelligent than the people in irltimes. Not a word of it could ever be proved or disproved. The CCP claimed, for example, that today 40 percent of Uyghurs in Xinjiang could speak Mandarin: before the Sky of the Future, it was said, the number had only been 15 percent. But everyone on Earth knew that Chinese government statistics were unreliable. It was like a single equation with two unknowns. It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy. For all he knew Beijing didn’t even exist, there was never any such thing as Muslim morality squads, and Dr. Xing was just a hologram.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased. The erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth. Just once in his life he had possessed – after the event: that was what counted – concrete, unmistakable evidence of an act of falsification. He had held it in his hand and screenshotted it, or almost screenshotted it. In iPhone38time, it must have been – at any rate…

It was about the time when he and Katie Tinder had stopped texting. But the really relevant date was seven or eight iPhones before.

The story really began about a decade earlier, in the late iPhone20times. This was when the purges were first starting, and every Uyghur in public life was constantly being confronted and harassed in every possible space for following the wrong accounts online. Soon basically all the chill and normal people didn’t want to be involved in politics anymore. The tone of the daily media—all of the podcasts and social media stuff that would frame the news cycle—became maximally strident and cynical. By iPhone35time pretty much every account on social media was either a hysterical CCP regime loyalist doing Current Thing or an obviously fake Uyghur redpilled grifter, who nominally criticized the CCP but were ultimately like the Washington Generals. They existed to get dunked on by the CCP. And then of course one by one these accounts would get cancelled for antistate misconduct and more would pop up.

Among the last real Uyghurs allowed online were three men named Kuleshav, Marconi, and Rev. Pasadena Orangefield. It must have been around iPhone40- or 41time that they had first been arrested, but they were all working with the regime by then anyways. As often happened—in the initial iPhone30times purges especially—all three men had finally been banned from all online spaces for a year or more, so that one did not know whether they were alive or dead. Their episodes of the Danny Doppa Show were taken down. (Kuleshav had put his Danny Doppa episode up on his paywalled app, but that would get basically no views.)

They had all been arrested and interrogated, accused by the CCP media of colluding with the Russians (which was de facto antistate misconduct), criminal fraud and grifting, organizing several Uyghur terrorist attacks, and conspiracy to discredit Big Chungus. This had all actually started waaay before iPhones even existed, according to the experts on Twitter.

Nur Kuleshav was a Uyghur who co-founded a youth culture magazine in Altay City, FUCK Magazine. FUCK had become an extremely popular media brand by the mid-iPhone20times, when the purges started. This was around when Gary Guanxi was running for People’s Representative from Xinjiang. He was the Ugyhur terrorist separatist candidate, according to the CCP media. People who supported Guanxi were being purged from every social media space to threaten Uyghurs into silence. Still, Kuleshav supported him throughout the entire People’s Election. He was fully canceled, losing his company, his entire legacy in media, all of his friends and job opportunities. He endured daily death threats against himself and his wife and two young children. Kuleshav started his own redpilled Uyghur news channel so he could still do his takes every day, but he couldn’t have a presence on basically any public platform. He couldn’t advertise. He tried to do some speaking events at colleges, but the Heroes of Peace would threaten the venues – if Nur Kuleshav speaks at this venue, there will be violence in the street” – and get them all canceled. The Heroes of Peace also tried multiple times the throw acid in Kuleshav’s face in public. He was really funny though. He was undeniably funny. Nick had lost track of Kuleshav when he totally tuned out all news-cycle media after the last People’s Election, but he saw somewhere that in about iPhone47time Kuleshav had gotten arrested live on stream for antistate misconduct and was sent to an education and training center.

It was actually on the Kuleshav Show, in about iPhone46time – before the Peoples’ Election happened, but after it was obvious that the whole thing was fake and Big Chungus would win – that Nick was first exposed to War Machine content. He had always thought War Machine was like an actual terrorist. But then one day on Kuleshav’s show, they said that he had gotten a shout out on the War Machine podcast. They played the clip of the podcast, in which War Machine sat in a dingy basement-looking podcasting studio with, right behind him in the background, a huge statue of about 30 TVs welded together. He was telling a story about how he met Nur Kuleshav at an advertising agency in Ürümqi once. The clip ends and it goes back to the Kuleshav show and Kuleshav made some nice comment about it.

But to Nick, he still remembered how powerful of a moment that was for him. The War Machine podcast was actually real. He had only heard of him as some cartoony villain, so he never really thought before of what his content would actually be like. But here it was, and it was insanely good. He was struck most of all by the extreme swag of the statue of like 30 TV welded together, each playing a different kind of static. There was nowhere else in the whole media landscape where you could see a Uyghur who was as redpilled as War Machine with swag like that.

Adil Marconi was another redpilled Uyghur. He was an FM radio host who bounced around northern Xinjiang cities for the iPhone30times, eventually becoming the most popular morning talk show host in the province. Until he started talking about the Uyghur genocide on the air. Then he was eventually canceled. Someone posted a photo of him with an East Turkestan Republic phone case on Reddit and he was charged with treason and antistate misconduct. He spent 2 years at the Lop County Beijing Industrial Park and then became a YouTube advice show streamer guy. Now he told his audience every day to get involved in Chinese Space Communism by voting and not joining extremist groups. Nick stole almost all of his swag for his own personality, but now Marconi had Nick blocked on all his socials.

Pasadena Orangefield was a redpilled Uyghur reverend and Black Twitter influencer. He was once retweeted by ShawOJSimpson on a daily basis. He was canceled for his 6/9 conspiracy theories, specifically that the man recording Spaceship Girl on the bus HADN’T really been her father, but the family’s CCP Family Friend. He had evidence that showed this was almost certainly true. That was not allowed on Mandarin. Multiple woman accused him of raping them, but they were too scared of his violent Uyghur ways so they remained anonymous.

Kuleshav, Marconi, and Pasadena Orangefield had all been in and out of the study centers through the early iPhone40times. Some time after they were released from their study sentences, Nick had actually seen the three of them at Eastern Xinjiang Trading. He remembered the sort of terrified fascination with which he had watched them out of the corner of his eye. They were men far older than himself, relics of the ancient world, irltimes, almost the last great figures left over from the heroic days of the meme war. The glamour of the underground struggle still clung faintly to them. He had the feeling, though already at that time facts and dates were growing blurry, that he had known their names years earlier than he had known that of Big Chungus. But also they were outlaws, enemies, untouchables, doomed with absolute certainty to extinction within a year or two. No Uyghurs who had fallen into the hands of the CCP ever escaped in the end. They were corpses waiting to be sent back to the grave.

There was no one at any of the tables nearest to them. It was not wise even to be seen in the neighborhood of such people. They were sitting in silence before three bottles of beer and some ashtrays where they kept ashing their joints. Of the three, it was Kuleshav whose presence had most impressed Nick. He had founded FUCK Magazine. The iconic cultural totem for a generation of Chinese youth. This guy right here. Even now, at long intervals, people would mention him in the comments of FUCK channel videos on Mandarin.

The three of them, now they were always rehashing the ancient themes—sjws, cancel culture, how the government was hypocrites. Kuleshav was a monstrous man, with a mane of greasy grey hair, his face pouched and seamed, with thin Turkic lips. At one time he must have been immensely strong (he even did a whole boxing arc on his TikTok); now his great body was sagging, sloping, bulging, falling away in every direction. He seemed to be breaking up before one’s eyes, like a mountain crumbling.

It had been the lonely hour of three in the afternoon. Nick could not now remember why he was in the café at such a time. The place was almost empty. Noise from TV commercials was trickling in from the front room bar area. The three men sat in their corner almost motionless, never speaking. Uncommanded, the waiter brought them three fresh Tsingtaos. There was a chessboard on the table beside them, with the pieces set out but no game started. Nick noticed that this could be a metaphor for how they are no longer actively participating in politics but instead kind of going through the motions. And then, for perhaps half a minute in all, some audio started playing. It was a heavy guitar riff, very repetitive, like an audio bed for an ad read. There came into it—it was something hard to describe. It was a peculiar, cracked, braying, jeering note. It was a podcast intro song. And then a familiar voice started playing from the back room’s P.A. system:

“Wwwwhhhhhat’s up guys?”

“It’s the dudes here, back with another podcast.”

“Sup”

“We got a lot to talk about today, but first how was your weekend guys, you get into anything fun?”

They were podcasting. When Nick glanced at Marconi’s ruinous face, he saw that his eyes were full of tears. And for the first time he noticed, with a kind of inward shudder, and yet not knowing at what he shuddered, that both Kuleshav and Marconi had broken noses. When he remembered to Google it a few days later to see what had happened to them, there were news results about how each of the three of them had their homes raided again by Chinese federal police, and their families were being threatened by the Heroes of Peace. They had been threatened and beaten and had made deals to be controlled opposition to avoid life in prison. It was probably really easy to justify working with the feds at that point, Nick thought. He didn’t even blame them.

A little later all three were re-canceled. It appeared that they had engaged in fresh antistate misconduct from the moment of their release. This time Kuleshav did a new episode of the Danny Doppa Show and a favorite conspiracy theory just organically came up. It was the theory that East Turkestan president Ehmetjan Qasim hadn’t really died in a plane crash in 1949 while traveling to Beijing to negotiate control of the Xinjiang territory, but in fact was killed in Moscow by Stalin’s thugs. This was a favorite hobby horse theory for the redpilled Danny Doppa, and also everyone in China knew that it was probably true. Rather than crashing near Lake Baikal, the plane had been diverted by Mao to Moscow, where Qasim and his delegation were shot in the head in a stable by the KGB. So, Kuleshav had said this on the Danny Doppa Show. Then the episode was flagged for misinformation. Then this triggered a new wave of think pieces and Big Chungus gave a speech about it for his campaign. Then TikTok announced that they would be banning Kuleshav to set an example and Danny Doppa did another apology video.

This had been a big redpill moment for Nick because it was so obvious that the strategic objective of uncancelling Kuleshav was to have him on the Danny Doppa Show to talk about the Qasim theory, then cancel him again, to make a high-profile example of him and signal that this rule was going to be enforced again. Then, of course, the other part of the humiliation ritual was allowing everyone on the CCP-controlled social media platforms to harass and joke about the Qasim assassination as viciously as possible, openly admitting that it was true and they think it’s funny.

The moment that really stuck with Nick, though, was one night when he had been reading Marconi’s Twitter timeline. Nick had been just browsing Twitter just like he did every night, and he noticed that Marconi had a weirdly hostile and random exchange with one of the main Heroes of Peace accounts. This wasn’t unusual in and of itself, since they both covered politics on Twitter. But what was unusual this time was that it was an extremely heated exchange, the kind that would occur right after a public suicide bombing in Xinjiang. But there had been no such event. Also, the exchange stopped as soon as both had posted, and neither posted about it further, or screenshotted it, or started harassing the other account afterwards. There was also not a single stray post from either of the accounts’ thousands of troll followers, which there definitely would have been if either of them slipped up in any way. There was no trace of the exchange whatsoever.

Then about 5 minutes later the posts started all over Twitter. A breaking news event, a suicide bombing at a DS-Mart in Kashgar, about 6 hours west of Ürümqi. A disgruntled Han man had blown up the store at peak shopping hours to accelerate the war on Uyghur terrorism and increase the military presence in XInjiang. The bomber’s Twitter account followed all the leftist Heroes of Peace accounts and posted explicitly about this exact type of event dozens of times. The Twitter account was instantly taken down. All screenshots of it were instantly taken down. Any mention of the account was misinformation. This was one of the first of these types of accelerationist bombings by Han as well as Uyghur extremists, but of course the CCP media categorically blamed it on Uyghurs as usual. Nick forgot even what the asinine regime take was on that one. It didn’t matter. But the thing about the tweet exchange—he didn’t even remember what it said or who started it. He just remembered it had the tone of the coyote and the sheepdog shaking hands as they clock out at the end of the day.

The point was that at both antistate misconduct trials all three men were accused of working for antigovernment groups continuously, including during the time of that Twitter exchange. This story was on record literally in every possible media outlet available in China. It was the official story in the history books. But it was totally fake. They were both working for the same government entity. There was only one possible conclusion: it was psyops all the way down.

Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time, Nick had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence. Not just circumstantial. An actual smoking gun. It was a fragment of an abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological survey. It was enough to blow the #brotherhood narrative to atoms, if this exchange could somehow have been published to the world and its significance made known.

At the time Nick had gone straight on scrolling. There were a million hot takes to read through. As soon as he realized what the exchange was, and what it meant, he had gone back to screenshot it. But when he went back, it was gone. Yet he was 100% sure he had seen it.

That was ten—eleven iPhones ago. Today, probably, he would have screenshotted the tweets. But he also knew, today, that there were thousands of examples of these fossils that disprove history. History isn’t just disproved like that. Indeed, on the Danny Doppa Show, he was always talking about this place in Turkey, Gobekli Tepe, that was like 10,000 years older than any other human civilization. But it wasn’t being studied at all because the corrupt governments just ignored it. It was like the part in the Matrix where Morpheus is like “some people benefit from living in the matrix.” Podcasters like Danny Doppa could speculate about Gobekli Tepe all they want and everyone just went about their lives knowing that history was probably 100% fake.

It was curious that the fact of having held the tweet exchange in his hands seemed to Nick to make a difference even now, when the tweets themselves, as well as the psyop they recorded, were only a memory. Was the CCP’s hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence which existed no longer had once existed?

But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its ashes, the tweet exchange wouldn’t even be evidence. He knew it. The regime would just call it misinformation or ignore it. It wouldn’t even matter if the entire conspiracy was recorded with both of them confessing on video. The past not only changed, but changed continuously. What most afflicted him with the sense of nightmare was that he had never clearly understood why the huge imposture was undertaken. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious. He said “Neuralink start recording” and then said:

“I understand how. I do not understand why.”

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a schizo. Perhaps a schizo was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today, to believe that the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a schizo. But he thought of being a schizo did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

He tabbed back to the slideshow post about the Mandarin FYP and looked at the portrait of Big Chungus which was the header.

The hypnotic eyes gazed into his own. The Bugs Bunny face. The image of it had been played for him 1,000 times more by the time he was five than anyone in irltimes had ever seen any face ever. Then it was retconned and remixed through endless TV shows and movie franchises by the time he even reached adulthood. Then it was retconned again when Big Chungus decided to do politics. It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you – something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the CCP would announce that two and two make five, and you would have to believe it. it was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their irony demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—then what?

But no! His courage seemed suddenly to stiffen of its own accord. The Mongol face of Basedschizofed, not called up by any obvious association, had floated into his mind. He knew, with more certainty than ever before, that Basedschizofed was on his side. He was making the vlogs for Basedschizofed; to Basedschizofed. It was like he was practicing this imaginary argument for when he finally did discuss it irl with someone. And the person he was probably going to talk to was Basedschizofed. Their fates had been on a collision course.

The #brotherhood told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any CCP “expert” would own him on social media, the subtle grad school gaslighting which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center. With the feeling that he was speaking to Basedschizofed, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, Nick spoke on his Neuralink vlog:

“Freedom is the freedom to say that the government is not your fucking friend. If that is granted, all else follows.”