by Mark Doten
In the state of mind I was in, which I understood to be paranoid, I thought the signal was:
The boundaries are gone.
Or the boundaries are not, have never been, what you thought they were.
I can dress cheap, I can parade around in what’s cheap, and I can take something off someone’s face that costs this much.
I can do anything I want.
No written record.
From the airport, I rode in a jeep with my minder and two uniformed army infantrymen a certain number of miles to a building whose exterior I am also not to describe, so I will begin in the cage.
“The bear cage,” my minder called it, between the reinforced front door and the facility. Between the reinforced front door and the facility we stood in a cube of bulletproof polycarbonate encased in iron rods lit with blue spotlights. Outside us there was a low diffused glow that hung like a mist in the vast room whose ceiling arced over us in a cascade of dark mesh and brushed steel. The grand entryway, my minder said. Bullshit for the clients, back in the day. They needed the big entrance. The security theater. Something cool. Something like a movie. These bulbs last forever.
More bullshit, here, he said, as we made our way down hallways, ceilings fifty or sixty feet high, huge cages on either side of us run through with wires, with black and silver and off-white boxes, in some cases the cages stuffed with wires and boxes, in others mostly empty, some boxes the size of a pizza box, some the size of a vending machine.
We turned down a narrow passage between black grating, the ambient lighting, blue and white on grating and brushed steel, progressively weaker, and soon there was almost no light but blue LED track lighting. The minder took a flashlight out of his pocket and led us through several more turns in what seemed a maze, though they were all right angles, all equally spaced, and I thought to myself, repeatedly: It’s a grid, not a maze. We’re not lost, we can’t get lost here.
But of course that depends on the size of the grid, and the obstacles you meet.
I noted that he was no longer saying anything. His pace quickened as though the vastness of the space was getting to him, a slight tic toward panic. Then I saw him check himself, a sort of hiccup in his step, as he rolled on his left heel, and he was back to a smooth impersonal stride.
I didn’t look at the soldiers behind me, but I heard them, I heard the adjustment in their steps that cascaded hollowly through the space, a rubberized slap and squeak that seemed too loud, too strange, as though they were doing it on purpose, their four feet in a game—a child’s game—to make the loudest possible sounds above the tidal hum of all the servers and cooling fans.
As he led me down a narrow dark passage, his flashlight played on the mesh and the blue LEDs. The two soldiers stopped behind us, and I felt a shiver on the back of my neck like a hand was reaching for me, but I didn’t turn around.
He took a key from an envelope in his pocket and opened a door in a new wall, a real wall.
He flipped a switch.
We were out of the mesh hallway in what appeared to be a narrow, poorly lit storage room with a conference table and chairs, all but one of the chairs piled with boxes and cables, the table itself—water-stained particle board—overrun with what had the look of towering fungal growths, dense twists of vertical cables cut through and interworked with yellow and blue and black lines, red and green LEDs unevenly blinking, then settling into a pattern, then diffusing again, and at the end of the table a small cleared area, the open chair and what seemed to be an old entry-level Dell laptop.
My minder leaned over the chair, opened the laptop, and entered a password. He motioned me forward and—though he didn’t once touch me—he sat me down. The movements of his hands ushered me forward, then turned me and lowered me, and squared me in my seat, a swift continuous arc of gestures that placed me at the screen and keyboard, and when I was really there the hands paused a second above my shoulders, on either side of my neck, I felt them falling down on me, his hands opening an endless falling, endless coming down, suspended between threat and a kind of comfort. The soldiers weren’t in here with us. I imagined them posted outside the door—imagined that they would hear me if I screamed—but I couldn’t know this.
And then he stepped back.
There was a new smile as he stepped back and to the side. I turned and saw it. Almost a leer. Enjoy yourself, he said. The sunglasses were gone, and this realization put me on edge, made me feel that somehow I was being had.
Of course they must have been in the pocket of his blazer.
Of course I was being had.
I placed my fingers on the keyboard.
He stood behind me, my screen visible to him, but not my face. I turned and looked at him again. He didn’t smile or nod or acknowledge my gaze this time, he just watched what I was doing with huge gold eyes that picked up the blue and red blinkings of LED lights.
I began a search into what had been saved here, the portion of what was left that I was permitted to see.
On 1/28, the first commercial telephone exchange is established in New Haven, Connecticut, and a locomotive passing through Panamanian jungle links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
On 1/28, a fifteen-inch snowflake falls on Fort Keogh, Montana.
On 1/28, Charlemagne, King of the Franks and Holy Roman Emperor, curses the known and unknown worlds he’s left unconquered, and his dumb ass croaks and becomes a ghost.
wow, so scare.
Trump to Ivanka: Let’s just do it and be legends.
On 1/28, Canuplin is born.
howdy. i’m the sheriff of we gom die. We gom die.
The jokes at the end of the world do not have time to coalesce, to gain the full imprimatur of the internet, of the parts of the internet to which and through which such jokes would normally be spoken.
Ratio alert.
GIF: [Terrible Girl hits Bathroom Bug with shovel] [T2 clip of blasted skeleton clinging to chain link fence]
[whispering to date during the apocalypse when the apocalypse first appears] That’s the apocalypse
Trump’s taco bowl pic, except the taco bowl is a globe dotted with mushroom clouds.
Video of Ivanka throwing up on herself, screaming No no no! captioned Nothing but respect for MY president.
#Resist #TheResistance #NotMyPresident
What is binch? What is corncob? but with human extinction.
#Blimpghazi
Trump’s airship, Trump Sky Alpha, the obvious jokes about the palace in the sky, sprouting nukes, bags of money as ballast, the truth of it outstripping the jokes, as had always been the case with Trump, lame old cartoons of Trump Sky Alpha crashing into Lady Liberty, crashing into Mount Rushmore, etc., recirculating, Der Spiegel’s cover from November 2016, Das Ende Der Welt (wie wir sie kennen), Trump’s head as a huge meteor hurtling toward Earth, people live-tweeting his livestreamed address, widespread disbelief at the fact of the flight, of the president alone up there, and his monologue—the idiocy of it, the lies and the bragging, this terminal stupidity at the end of the world—the president cut off from what was happening on the ground, apart from whatever he saw on his video screens, his isolation from the real-world events unfolding during the flight, he is Justine Sacco, except Justine Sacco with nukes, it doesn’t quite make sense, but people go for the joke anyhow.
#HasTrumpLandedYet
Feels good man.
The internet is dying, blinking out.
The internet’s record of its own destruction—and that of the greater part of human life and civilization—is given in part through jokes, many of them familiar, though often modified, mutating. People are making apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow, for instance, is an old joke already available in multiple image macros, the “lame pun coon” in blue color wheel, the “bad joke eel” jutting from the ocean floor, jaw tensed, vacant pushpin eye clocking your reaction, standard bold Impact font, white letters in black outline.
That joke is one of many that proliferate
on 1/28, long-dormant memes alive again for one last night, faces of Keanu and Xzibit, woke af at the buffalo wild wings, flowing into other memes, the available prefab containers, Trollface, Nyan Cat, Crying Jordan, countless iterations of Pepe. People were bringing back the old things, the old dead memes, it became a kind of contest, a curtain call, a last chance at everything that had passed us by, an activation of knowledge of all internet traditions (the “all internet traditions” meme itself dated back to a comment on a 2008 post on the left political blog Lawyers, Guns & Money, about the apocryphal Michelle Obama “whitey” tape).
#CurtainCall, #AllInternetTraditions.
Or it was, others said, a glitch in the Matrix, everything released all at once, a collapse of history, of chronology: the system vomiting itself forth before it expired. In any case, passing on bad jokes, ringing the last best changes on a bad joke, is how many spend their final hours. And there is a gentleness to so much of it, even amid horror: familiar, comforting, buffering the experience, slotting it into the known.
Or perhaps it was that in the four days that the internet had been down, people had pent up so much, all they had wanted to say on the internet and couldn’t, and then it was all unleashed.
The internet came back on 1/27, and the world was ending a day later, and in between, there was the highest volume of social media posts ever, or so it was reported in some corners, in a way I am no longer able to verify.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles can’t melt steel beams.
Where’s the Kaboom?
20 minutes into Netflix and chill and he gives you this look [GIF: flaming skull]
ima wait this one out, woke af at the buffalo wild wings.
An image of a woman in a pussy hat stopping a pair of nukes with her outstretched hands.
A woman, a white woman, in fact, in a pussy hat, in the exact pose of the black woman from Baton Rouge in the iconic photo, one of the iconic Black Lives Matter images, the two riot-gear cops seeming to fall back from her, as though struck by a power, the woman in the original, Ieshia Evans, made into a white woman—of course she was, black Twitter noted, wypipo appropriating to the very end, to the grave, appropriating with the dying breath of whiteness.
This is white supremacy.
There is the struggle with finesse, recycling the old jokes, finding those slight variations, the call back to a call back to a call back, perhaps no one likes it now, but wait and maybe it will come around.
Just wait.
Just wait may be a tough proposition in a world that’s ending, but, as people also note, on Twitter, on 4chan, on Reddit, what are the options?
Are we gon sit here on this site or we gon commune with trees?
Go out and commune with the treeeeeees????
Some jokes come around.
5,332 notes for a Tumblr post with a video of Muppet Crazy Harry detonating explosives.
11,328 likes and 132 comments on a post of a cartoon Solange in an elevator kicking an apocalypse zombie’s head off.
Play us off, Keyboard Cat.
Resist, #Resist, people are saying, but it is unclear what that means in the face of nuclear annihilation.
Images of animal connection are widely shared, horses touching heads, cheetah cub and baby chimp “best friends,” a two-legged Chihuahua in a wheeled mobility harness paired with a Silkie, a fluffy, plush-looking breed of chicken, and still less likely combos, snakes and ducks, an alligator and an aardvark, best friends, always best friends.
Images that originated on 4chan, on Reddit, were being sucked up into Twitter and Instagram and Tumblr, and making the rounds at a frenetic pace.
Thank god for friends.
I want to send love to my friends, my community.
Stay safe, my friends.
The rush to make fun of the email blasts about impending missile strikes and other civil emergencies, or the absence of such alerts.
Waiting for my blast alert like [Vizzini “I’m waiting” GIF, scowling, arms flung out in impatience].
The hay made online about all these decentralized warning systems: they would be used only once, this was their moment in the sun, there was a ranking of them, the sharp messages that began Inbound Threat or Take Shelter and had relevant information, the one from Idaho that said Alert Template. Information here, the one from Pennsylvania that said: cOrb Pulice.
There are tweets asking for, demanding interactions.
I just need to know yr out here.
Fave if your safe.
There are tweets for the missing, photos, names and ages, locations, the missing flood the timeline, then there are too many, people stop sharing the missing.
The increasing bad joke of Facebook’s “mark yourself safe” as the night progressed, flipped on worldwide, death toll skyrocketing by unknowable millions every hour.
A raw and increasingly frantic need at the end for validation, for retweets and likes, for—and this became a new joke—the LAST retweets and likes.
Hoovering up all the last likes like
Stacking last likes
Fave if your safe, retweet if your [GIF: screaming, flaming skull].
Baby pumping fist: Just got world’s last like.
Things are being tested, workshopped, and all would soon be dead, performer and audience, or most all.
Trump Sky Alpha orbiting a blasted chunk of coal, Trump still monologuing about how well it’s all going, in spite of FAKE NEWS.
Conservatives blasting Obama, blasting Hillary.
Thank God Obama spent all his time on global warming.
But let’s figure out global warming, right guys?
That’s a good hot take.
The hottest take.
Get the oven mitts for this hot take.
Get in the bunker and shield yourself from the hotness of these takes.
Since we have nothing but hot takes.
Since the world’s a hot take.
People demanding we do it their way: don’t make it political, make it political, but do so the right way, along certain precise vectors that reinforce certain notions.
Your mileage may vary.
And the rage at Trump, and the defenders of Trump, and Trump’s last speech, the pieces of it flying around the internet, protesters overpowering the checkpoints and pushing into Trump Tower, breaking down the doors.
Long Live Resistance Auntie!
Your mileage may vary.
And a flood of racist memes, Trollface with turban and beard, Nyan Cat with turban and beard, worries about MS-13 rampages and looting, the “illegals” who are waiting to murder your family as civil society cracks.
Josh Marshall changes his Twitter avatar back to Kermit, and signs off to spend the night with his family. We’ll know more tomorrow. Or we won’t.
Mark Zuckerberg posts as Trump nears New York City. We hope that our users—and the whole world—will stay safe today. We will be back tomorrow to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
And Zuckerberg’s responders:
Bro.
Bro.
Dude.
My man.
My bro, what?
* Zuck posting this shit forever in Hell.*
Among the most-circulated jokes is one that begins with an AP shot of the man in a red polo shirt and white pants in the aisle of a Taipei supermarket howling grief over three small incinerated bodies. And a caption: Actually it’s about ethics in gaming journalism.
And then hours later, the same image and caption, cropped, reframed, reworked by a larger caption: IS THIS A GOOD JOKE?
This call back to a joke that had died out years earlier is spreading with a kind of desperate ferocity: as the day goes on, there is more and more to see, videos of a mushroom cloud over Taiwan, of a highway on fire in the south of France, Abuja burning, Harare burning, riots in São Palo, in Natchez, waves of death everywhere, flurries of gun suicides, a mass shooting in West Virginia, then five more mass shootings withi
n the hour, California, Arizona, New Hampshire, two in Florida, then a group suicide in Iowa, another in Belize, corpses around the world with jaws clenched, with jaws snapped wide open, with no discernable jaw, piles of the dead, screaming and fleeing humans, some actually burning as they run, dead or dying human heads screencapped and pegged to the same text:
Actually it’s about ethics in gaming journalism.
And:
IS THIS A GOOD JOKE?
Ethics in gaming journalism was such an old joke, it seemed to come from another civilization, and yet it was as though that joke, those times, all of that rage, were somehow the ground we were still standing on, were all that were left, were in the end somehow really all that mattered to the system, actually it’s about ethics in gaming journalism, that was somehow the moment, the inflection point, to which the internet had led us, we lived somehow in the wake of that, the SJWs and snowflakes, no safe space this time, and that AP shot of the man in the red polo, and his incinerated children, it was eventually tagged with names of women targeted in Gamergate, and the text LOOK AT WHAT YOU’VE DONE, SHAME.
It did not seem to be a joke, or it was a very dark one, but the account was not one that did jokes, or that was good at them.
Somehow there were people who seemed to be blaming the end of the world on the women from Gamergate, and in some places it seemed the most deadpan troll, but in others the posters seemed so upset, so sad, so furious, that they had to be for real, they really did blame them.
If SJWs need a safe space, it will be pretty safe as a roasted corpse under an atomic shroud.
A quote from Elliot Rodger that went around, Men shouldn’t have to look and act like big, animalistic beasts to get women. The fact that women still prioritize brute strength just shows that their minds haven’t fully evolved.