by Jarett Kobek
The most recent Doctor, played by the actor Matt Smith, was going to regenerate at the end of 2013. People on Twitter speculated about which actor would take up the role of the Doctor, and whether or not this actor would be a woman or a Person of Color.
A wide range of people on Twitter found this casting decision to be a very important issue. They believed that having a woman or a Person of Color as the Doctor would be a step forward for the representation of the disenfranchised in media.
Almost everyone alive, members of disenfranchised groups or not, wanted to be legitimated by intellectual properties in which they had no vested interest. The human species was a bunch of assholes.
THIS VOCAL SEGMENT of Doctor Who fans had a sophisticated understanding of the process by which television shows were made.
They understood that actors were cast. They understood the function of a head writer and executive producer.
Yet whenever an episode of Doctor Who aired, these very same people would tweet as if the fictional events depicted were really happening.
The tweets would contain outrage about the Doctor’s choices and the implications of those choices, and all the privilege and microaggressions revealed in those choices.
It was impossible to tell whether or not the users of Twitter understood that Doctor Who was fictional. It was impossible to tell whether or not the users of Twitter understood that the Doctor wasn’t real.
THIS INABILITY TO DISTINGUISH FICTION from reality was also present in the world of comics.
Many comic book fans tweeted their complaints about the creators working for Marvel and DC. Some comic book fans tweeted their complaints about the editorial decisions made by Marvel and DC.
Almost none of these outraged tweets were about the ill-treatment of Jack Kirby or Steve Ditko or Joe Simon or Martin Nodell or Bill Finger or Jerry Robinson or Bill Mantlo or Alan Moore or Lew Schwartz.
Mostly, comic book fans were tweeting about Batwoman’s lesbian relationship with Maggie Sawyer or the death of Batman’s son Damian or the retcon of Superman’s marriage.
It was impossible to tell whether or not the users of Twitter understood that Batwoman and Maggie Sawyer and Batman and Damian and Superman were fictional characters.
HAVING WORKED in the comics industry, Adeline had experience with the interstitial space in which fictional characters were both real and not real. This was because Adeline had attended comic book conventions.
These events were, in theory, mass gatherings dedicated to the celebration of what the French termed le neuvième art.
In actuality, comic book conventions were an excuse for people to dress up like the intellectual properties of major corporations. Typically, the costumed would have encountered these intellectual properties in television, film, video games and comic books.
This pageantry was called cosplay. An example of cosplay would be when, for instance, a 45 year old man attends the annual San Diego Comic Con and dresses like Thor, a piece of intellectual property owned by Marvel/Disney and created by Jack Kirby.
This theoretical 45 year old man dressed as Thor will wander through the post-Brutalist architecture of the San Diego Convention Center. As he walks its white hallways, passing beneath its curved glass, people will approach the 45 year old man and speak with him as though he is Thor.
They will say, “Hi, Thor!” They will say, “Hey, Thor! How’s it going?” They will ask, “Yo, Thor, how’s the hammer hanging?”
They will pose for photographs with the 45 year old man. They will later post these photographs to Facebook and Twitter. They will ask for Thor’s opinions on matters large and small. The 45 year old man will answer these questions in character.
In the liminal zone of the comic book convention, trapped within the magick circle of cosplay, it will be impossible to determine whether this 45 year old man has any conception that he is not, in actuality, the intellectual property of a major corporation.
Whenever Adeline attended a comic book convention and encountered cosplay, she was sure that she was witnessing the ultimate state of late period capitalism.
People who spent their leisure time tweeting and creating intellectual property for Twitter were going out into the world and dressing themselves as the intellectual properties of major international conglomerates.
They had transformed their bodies into walking advertisements for entities in which they had no economic stake. These advertisements would later appear in photographs on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr and Pinterest and Flickr and be collated on advertising supported websites like Newsarama and io9 and The Mary Sue.
Brand identity was complete.
ANYWAY, THAT WAS TWITTER in 2013. A system designed to tell Adeline that she should feel like shit via short messages from people who believed Batman was real.
These lessons in ethics and morality were conveyed through computers and cellular phones built by slave labor in China.
BUT TWITTER was only the symptom. The Internet was the disease.
The Internet was an excellent way to distribute child pornography, stolen autopsy reports and pirated copies of 1970s Euro Horror. It was also the dominant method of recorded communication in the early Twenty-First Century.
Despite the Internet’s tyrannical reign over billions of people, very few of those billions understood how the technology worked. These billions were subject to a complex mechanism about which they knew nothing and over which they had no control.
Very few cared that they didn’t understand the complex mechanism. They had been inoculated against any such concerns through repeated exposure to another complex mechanism about which they knew nothing and over which they had no control.
This other complex mechanism was called governance, an organizing principle used by societies to determine which individuals were granted homes on higher ground and which individuals were forcibly executed.
Many of the pointless men who built the Internet had done so under the delusion that their complex system could exist as a check on governance.
These pointless men believed that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were necessary to the functioning of a society and thus designed the Internet to prevent governance from impeding the free flow of discourse.
This wonderful fantasy disappeared around the time that another, more powerful fantasy took hold in the minds of the useless men who worked in technology. The second fantasy was money.
The men who championed money recognized that a platform where any old asshole could say any old bullshit was a zone without any rules of discourse. A lie was as powerful as the truth.
This made the Internet a wonderful place to advertise.
The champions of money understood that the best advertisements were those that involved a degree of interactivity with an audience. Here, too, the Internet, with its emphasis on freedom of expression and freedom of speech, proved its worth.
A POPULAR DELUSION in the Twenty-First Century was the belief that new technologies, which appeared every day, were neutral arrivals.
The thinginess of each thing was wrested from the field of Forms and brought into the world through nerdy Parthenogenesis.
But all technology was the product of its creators’ spoken and unspoken ideologies. The Internet was not a neutral environment dedicated to freedom of speech.
It was something else, the result of paranoid Cold War thinking mixed with hazy San Francisco Bay Area notions like the idea that enlightenment could be achieved through sustainable polar fleece and organically grown fruits.
The Internet was bad ideology created by thoughtless men.
Consider, in contrast, the camera, another supposedly neutral technology which also become an arbiter of truth. If something was captured by the camera’s lens, then it was true, then it had happened. Everything else was lies.
The camera was invented by middle class French men during a period of extensive Colonial expansion. Thus the camera operated, in perpetuity, on the s
poken and unspoken ideologies of Nineteenth Century France.
The camera was very good at capturing sexualized images of women and even better at capturing dehumanizing images of poor people and people with eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.
THE INTERNET was a heaping mass of ideologies, spoken and unspoken, that reflected the social values of its many creators. Some of these men believed in freedom of expression. Some of these men were afraid of the Russians. Some of these men believed in nothing but money.
The system was designed with the sole purpose of maximizing the amount of bullshit that people typed into their computers and telephones. The greater the interconnectivity, the greater the profits. It was feudalism in the service of brands, and it rested on inducing human beings to indulge their worst behavior.
This was the world into which Adeline had wandered.
A place where complex systems gave the mentally ill the same platforms of expression as sane members of society, with no regard to the damage they caused to themselves or others. A place where complex systems induced the destruction of human beings like Ellen Flitcraft with no purpose other than making money for Google and Facebook.
Alas for the men who had designed the Internet whilst enthralled by Ayn Rand and shitty Science Fiction, it turned out that an open forum of ideas was impossible when the vast majority of vocal users were no more than babbling shit-asses.
WHAT COULD ADELINE DO? How do you reason with people who believe that Thor is real? How do you reason with people who make arguments about human dignity on machines built by slaves in China? How do you reason with people whose primary expression comes pre-branded by Twitter?
SO SHE PLAYED THE GAME. She was tweeting. Her first week went well. Kids were asking her for advice.
Then the most important kid reached out.
Emil called her.
chapter twenty
Emil was Adeline’s son. He was nineteen years old. Emil was estranged from Adeline. Emil lived in Los Angeles with Suzanne, Adeline’s alcoholic mother who had been an extra on the television show Gidget.
Emil was attending CalArts, an arts university founded by Walt Disney. Emil was working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
EMIL WAS NOT an expected pregnancy.
Adeline got knocked up back in 1993, while she lived with Jeremy and Minerva on Steiner in the Lower Haight. Her bed was a couch in the living room.
The man who impregnated Adeline was born Nasir Mahmoud but called himself Nash Mac. He had a moderate amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
Adeline did not get pregnant on the couch in Jeremy and Minerva’s living room. Adeline knew that good houseguests don’t have sex on the premises.
No one who has opened their home has any desire to wake up at 11 in the morning and discover the nude entangled forms of their guest and another person or persons. No one who has opened their home wants to wake up at 11 in the morning only to find the blurry, drooping visages of the freshly fucked.
Adeline screwed out Nash Mac’s brains in Nash Mac’s apartment out in the Sunset District near the Pacific Ocean.
NASH MAC’S PARENTS were a pair of Iranian doctors who flew a little too close to the Sun and had to flee their native country during its Revolution.
Iran had vexed America for decades. It had been ruled by the Shah, a despotic King propped up by the CIA. The CIA was the same American organization that had funded the development of literary fiction and the good novel.
Anyway, in 1979, a bunch of Shi’a Muslims led the country into Revolution. The Shah was deposed and died in exile. The Revolution ended up installing a repressive Shi’ite Theocracy, which was a rather different outcome than the general American narrative of revolutions.
In 2009, a full thirty years later, the American and European users of Twitter and YouTube convinced themselves that they understood the political protests occurring in Iran and that the apparent use of Twitter by the protesters heralded the dawn of a new democratic era.
But this was wrong. Barely any Iranians were tweeting.
Almost all of the tweets were coming from Americans and Europeans taking a break from freaking out about the Doctor’s next regeneration to tweet about democracy in the Middle East.
These tweets by Americans and Europeans against the Theocratic regime in Iran contained all the power, force and velocity of a banana-cream pie three feet in diameter when dropped from a stepladder five-feet high.
Nothing changed.
NASH MAC’S PARENTS moved to Virginia and became Americans. They brought their ten year old son.
Nash Mac did his undergraduate degree in computer science and then moved to the Bay Area, where he ended up working at LucasArts, a division of LucasFilm, the company owned by George Lucas.
George Lucas was the director and writer of the film Star Wars. He didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
STAR WARS WAS A TOTAL PIECE OF SHIT that had spawned billions of dollars in merchandise and sequels and books and games and pajama bottoms. It was an infinite reservoir, it was an endless void. It was responsible for a cornucopia of made up words like Jedi, the Force and lightsaber.
A lightsaber was a sword made of light. A sword was a weapon used to murder people.
A Jedi was a knight who believed in an idea of relative good and performed supernatural feats using the Force. A Jedi used supernatural feats and his lightsaber to murder people with opposing ideas of relative good.
The Force was an ill-explained mystical energy which ran throughout the fictional universe of Star Wars. It was a device which allowed characters to perform supernatural feats whenever a lull was created by poor writing in the screenplay.
As might be imagined, the Force was used with great frequency.
IN 2012, Star Wars and LucasFilm were sold to Disney.
George Lucas was different than Ub Iwerks, who created Mickey Mouse, or Jack Kirby, who created the comic book industry. George Lucas had worked in a Hollywood where there was a Director’s Guild and agents and managers and lawyers who negotiated every deal. He had worked in an industry where labor had made some efforts towards organization.
When Disney bought Star Wars, they bought it from George Lucas because George Lucas owned Star Wars.
He made $4,000,000,000 on the deal.
TWO DECADES BEFORE the sale of Star Wars to Disney, George Lucas was paying the salary of Nash Mac.
George Lucas was paying Jeremy Winterbloss’s salary. Jeremy Winterbloss was also working for LucasArts. Which is how Winterbloss met Nash Mac.
It was Jeremy who introduced Nash Mac to Adeline.
During the months when Adeline was screwing out Nash Mac’s brains, Jeremy proposed the idea of Trill. It’s entirely possible that Adeline became pregnant with Emil on the very same day that she started drawing her comic book.
BOTH JEREMY WINTERBLOSS and Nash Mac joined LucasArts about a year after a guy named Ron Gilbert had left the company. Ron Gilbert was the only genius who’d worked in video games.
He was responsible for Maniac Mansion. He was also responsible for The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge. These were the three greatest games ever made.
Ron Gilbert didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. All of the intellectual property that he created at LucasArts was owned by George Lucas until it was owned by Disney.
ADELINE’S RELATIONSHIP with Nash Mac was never good. It was a thing that Adeline did because she was in San Francisco and bored.
1993 was a confusing time. She wasn’t talking to Baby. She was estranged from Suzanne.
Adeline never understood much about Nash Mac. She never cared to understand much about Nash Mac.
Her lack of understanding became a problem after she flew home to New York City and discovered that she was pregnant.
THE + SIGN on the pregnancy test, bought in a Korean deli on Avenue A, reminded Adeline of being a teenager. Sh
e remembered being 14 years old.
The first year of high school. Her father was dead. She lived with Suzanne in Pasadena.
Adeline was deep in her deathrock phase, listening to beautiful and terrible bands like 45 Grave, Monitor, Flap, T.S.O.L and Christian Death. She hung around the Atomic Cafe. She saw The Castration Squad, the greatest band of all time, play Halloween gigs at Lazaro’s Latin Lounge. Her hair was dyed black with blue highlights. She wore an unbelievable amount of kohl around her eyes.
She was dating this preppie guy named George Whitney. George Whitney attended the Buckley School. A deathrocker dating a preppie was one of those teenaged relationships that no one understands and no one can explain. Being young is terrible.
Suzanne was a realist who’d lived through her own adolescence and the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s. She knew that whenever George Whitney visited, he and Adeline were getting up to funny business in Adeline’s bedroom.
Suzanne couldn’t remember the mixture of terror, bluffing and desire that characterizes early sexual interactions. She couldn’t remember a time when every sexual encounter didn’t end with a male ejaculating into, or on, a woman.
She presumed that Adeline and George Whitney were having full-on penetrative sex. This wasn’t true.
Adeline was only giving George Whitney handjobs and wondering about the quality of sex-ed classes at Buckley, as George Whitney had some difficulty identifying the clitoris.
Suzanne was worried about Adeline becoming pregnant. She resolved to deal with the issue.
“Adelllliiiiiiiiiinnnnnnne!” she screeched from the living room.
