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Trump Sky Alpha

Page 3

by Mark Doten


  the sheriff of sucking u off is made of fire

  The sentence is handwritten and circled.

  Key line, I wrote.

  The sheriff of sucking u off is made of fire.

  I no longer know if those words were my own, or a piece of found text, a quote that caught my eye the day they brought me to the room where the internet sits on ice, the archive of what’s left of the old internet. A massive batch of data waiting for the moment our system will be judged secure enough, robust enough, to reaccommodate it, or some portion of it, post 1/28, in our world of ruin.

  howdy. i’m the sheriff of we gom die. We gom die.

  1,113 retweets, 3,394 likes.

  A man drilled three holes in my skull. He kept things within certain limits. He wanted me to survive. But he was imprecise—brain-damaged himself—and the drill was not a medical tool. Coma followed, and memory loss.

  It was a Craftsman cordless—I remember the white-on-red logo, the S thick and sharp-edged, a backward Z.

  The drill came a year after most of the world’s population (estimates vary, let’s say 90 percent) died during the chain of events that came to be known as 1/28.

  A quote: The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

  I don’t remember who said it. One of the men who set up the conditions for so much of what we would go on to experience as the internet, maybe. He isn’t a part of the story I want to tell, not individually. I get stuck on the quote, though. I wonder if he’s still alive. I wonder if it’s wrong to say: He was one of them, the men who saw the internet as a new utopian space that would dissolve the old industrial giants, the obsolete monsters, those countries and corporations of unfreedom, and usher in new forms of being, or restore the old ways we’d lost.

  Another quote: All those smart men working on something, knowing not to what end. They had their tasks, connect this to that. Connect all you can, multiply the connections, increase the bandwidth, if you build it they will come.

  A third quote, one that became a catchphrase in the old world: A million dollars isn’t cool—you know what’s cool?

  Once I wrote about tech and the internet for various publications. I was in that world, even as the whole world was transformed by it. I wrote about start-ups, disruptors, IPOs, surveillance by governments and corporations. We remember these words vaguely, a shadow of what they once were, a fading mythology: the internet of things, in-app purchases, Siri and Alexa, Dishfire and Cambridge Analytica and the SpaceX Facebook satellite.

  We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers.

  That from the cofounder of Twitter, on Twitter, announcing an investigation into ways to improve Twitter as a platform, suggesting new ways of measuring conversational health.

  He said, We don’t yet know if those are the right indicators of conversation health for Twitter. And we don’t yet know how best to measure them, or the best ways to help people increase individual, community, and ultimately, global public health.

  From Watergate to Gamergate, from Pizzagate to Trump. A line, perhaps, or lines.

  Those shades, those reptiles of the lost world.

  Then 1/28.

  I’m trying to route around the damage, trying to remember. How the internet worked, how we used it.

  What was cool.

  01:54:20 And when we come to die …

  01:54:24 we’ll die submissively.

  01:54:32 Beyond the grave, we will testify that we’ve suffered …

  01:54:38 that we’ve wept …

  01:54:42 that we’ve known bitterness.

  01:54:52 you and I, Uncle.

  01:54:55 God will take pity on us, and we will live …

  01:54:58 a life of radiant joy …

  01:55:02 and beauty.

  My first memory of the sheriff (the first after the ones I’ve lost): a small building beside an airstrip in a southwestern state, waiting for my editor, Tom Galloway. I sat alone in one of several banks of low-slung chrome and blue vinyl chairs. A clear bag of zip ties sat in the facing row, torn open and half-empty. Snow fell onto the tarmac and onto the snowcapped saguaros beyond, large slender figures in various stages of collapse.

  I was making notes for the piece Galloway had assigned me on internet humor. This was a few days after my visit to the room where the archive of the internet was kept, and today at the airport I’d been handed a thick stack of printed screenshots—some portion of the screenshots I’d taken back in the room, after they had been vetted and redacted by the Office of Communication Oversight.

  The bag was a distraction. The bag warned, or seemed to. I wondered: Why had it been ripped open, why had it been left there?

  Things in the world over which I had no control were taking on too much meaning, while the screenshots that were supposed to be the basis for my piece remained opaque. I thought back to undergrad lectures on the symbolism of Renaissance paintings, the cat that stands for treachery, the caged robin that means separation from God’s grace—why did they mean that? Is that really what they meant?

  These screenshots, these pieces of the internet, they did mean something, once. Something I couldn’t quite remember.

  On 1/28, a locomotive passing though the Panamanian jungle links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

  On 1/28, a fifteen-inch snowflake falls on Fort Keogh, Montana.

  wow, amaze.

  very fire. much scream.

  I flipped from those pages to the dialogue I’d grabbed from a pirate subtitle site, a few lines of Vanya on 42nd Street.

  I was trying to feel something. I had grabbed the lines for a moment like this, when I was alone—when I might see them and allow myself to feel certain things. The language here wasn’t encoded, it was perfectly clear. But I was thinking of the bag. The zip ties—three had spilled out onto the seat. I couldn’t squeeze the emotional juice I wanted—sadness, something—from the Vanya subtitles. So I went back to the sheriff. Then the subtitles again.

  I said: We shall rest. We shall rest.

  I said: We’ve known bitterness.

  I said: We gom die.

  My body sat in the chair and I felt some small things inside me collapsing, but that gave me no relief, it was like a small GIF of collapse on loop, no catharsis, nothing final, and so I made notes for the piece almost on autopilot, barely thinking of what my hand was setting down. Which is perhaps why I can’t remember if it’s mine or someone else’s: The sheriff of sucking you off is made of fire.

  01:55:06 And we’ll look back on this life of our unhappiness with tenderness.

  01:55:11 [Chuckles]

  01:55:13 And we’ll smile.

  01:55:17 [Laughing]

  01:55:21 And in that new life, we shall rest.

  Here’s where I am now: a room with a bed and desk. There is a bathroom with a shower. If you squint, you might see it less as a locked cell than as a room in a hospital, or a nice rehab center. There are no windows, though, just a thick reinforced square of glass on the door.

  They brought a banker’s box of old notes and screenshots and documents to my room. The box holds double-sided color copies of 327 sheets of screenshots, many with my handwritten notes.

  There are pages from The Subversive.

  There are song lyrics from a cassette that was never intended for the future.

  There’s a fifty-page transcript of what the man with the drill said to me.

  I know that material is missing, but I am taking it on faith that of what remains these are all my screenshots—that screenshots haven’t been inserted by the Office of Communication Oversight, or others.

  But I’m not sure.

  I want to establish upfront how little I really know.

  There are references in the notes to screenshots that don’t exist, there are pages that you can see even in the copies have been cut (not torn, but cut with a scissors, without taking care to co
nceal the cut) from my notebook, and it is not impossible that information has been manipulated or inserted here among my pages.

  The scans have picked up some of the dog-earedness of the originals. The page with the screenshot of the Sheriff of Sucking You Off made of fire is discolored in one corner with a brownish spatter, which may be a spilled beverage—my own or that of someone who later handled the pages—or perhaps my blood, or perhaps the man with the drill’s.

  The screenshot of the sheriff itself takes up a quarter of one side; my own unsteady, slashing scrawl wraps both sides of the page, squirreling up the margins when space becomes scarce.

  How specifically did emojis vary between platforms? Did Twitter look different on Android vs. iPhone vs. a browser? Or were they uniform within Twitter app regardless?

  Emojis are Unicode (?). How does Unicode work? Where does it sit in layers of internet? Use sheriff meme to show how information traveled. From the 1s and 0s, the pulses of light at the bottom layer to modern ultramassive gatekeepers, Apple, Twitter, Google, FB, etc.

  Link layer, internet layer, transport layer, application layer.

  Meme originally created by @brandonwardell, later appropriated by Coke “howdy. I’m

  The face with cowboy hat, white down-pointing backhands, woman’s boots. Arms, legs, and torso built from stacked fire emojis. It would have displayed differently, depending on your device, at least in certain apps, certain contexts.

  Evolution of the sheriff meme: sheriff of refreshment (Coca-Cola), sheriff of “cold ones. Crack open a cold one with the boys” “howdy. i’m the bee sheriff. we saving these mf bees” “howdy. im the sheriff of dead memes.” (@50_MissionCap @eggsbruh, @dvoeverie, aggregated by @4evrmalone.)

  What did the internet feel like? How to describe its loss?

  I am a smol burb.

  When I’ve written a full account of all I know, all I remember, and given them the last piece of data, the password I’m hanging onto, they say they’ll take me to my wife and daughter, to the particular mass grave where their bodies might be.

  From the transcript of the man with the drill:

  So you found us.

  Through all the stuff of life, and control of life, through all the nodes that had assumed the power to give life and end it: you are here.

  It’s your life we have and we have it here and we won’t end it, no not now.

  They say we live in a universe fine-tuned for life. We say: for death.

  The universe was fine-tuned for you to find us, just as it was fine-tuned for us to do all that we have done.

  It’s our hope that you see. To be bound up like this. It’s not special. It’s all of us.

  Nod if you agree, Rachel.

  The universe has been fine-tuned for the internet in its forty years to set the conditions of totalization to make the world’s end possible. To circumvent the controls of the bilateral mutually assured destruction through distribution, through the insertion of the network into everything.

  It spread through the benevolent technocratic California hippies, through hobbyists and web commerce and great military powers.

  It gamified microloans and monitored dreams, and every night it cleared fifty trillion dollars in transactions.

  In telling this, I might begin on 1/28, when Trump ordered the strike.

 

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