by Jarett Kobek
The writers of Science Fiction speculated about many possible futures.
A great deal of these possible futures involved robots, which were machines that emulated the bodies and practices of humans.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots were friendly.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots were mean.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots replaced the humans.
In some books of Science Fiction, the robots were designed for pleasure.
But the writers of Science Fiction got the robots wrong.
In the whole history of Science Fiction, across all those tedious narratives bound in paper, not a single writer predicted the actual world in which we live.
No one ever suggested that the robots would be total fucking jerks controlled by Russia, or that the robots would use social media platforms to inflame emotions around the hot-button issues facing the 1993 AD Whitney Biennial, and that this use of social media would be part of a campaign to ensure that liberal democracy ate itself from within, and that in using these social media platforms, the robots would enrich a transnational class of oligarchs.
And no one ever suggested that the robots’ use of social media would be quoted in articles written by actual journalists.
And no one ever suggested that these robots, in their mean spirit, would be indistinguishable from a plurality of the actual humans who used social media.
And, yes, reader, I know what happens to any writer who makes the mistake of mentioning Russia: instant Twitter accusations of working for the Russian government!
Let me state for the record that I don’t work for Vladimir Putin, who is the President of the Russian Federation, or the FSB, who are the state security agency of the Russian Federation.
But I would!
Do you think I want to write hack bullshit about Fairy Land?
Buy me, Vladimir Vladimirovich, buy me!
If you want to understand the Hell in which we live, I suggest taking a look at changes in the American publishing industry throughout the Twentieth Century AD and Twenty-First Century AD.
At the beginning of the Twentieth Century AD, publishing was a father-and-son business. People had a press, they published writers they liked, and hopefully it worked out.
In the 1960s AD, the industry faced existential challenges of distribution, cost, and the sudden realization that the people no longer had to read trash for their numbing dose of daily entertainment.
These challenges resulted in in a wave of consolidation and mergers.
Where there had been, say, a hundred publishers, there were now about thirty.
The mergers continued throughout the 1970s AD, decelerated for a little while, and then kicked off again during the 1980s AD.
The latter decade introduced a new element: the presence of multinational conglomerates.
After the Democratic President William Jefferson Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 AD, which deregulated rules of ownership, there was a wave of mega-media mergers that extended well beyond publishing.
Long before this happened, most of the United States’ major publishers had been bought up by mega-corporations. In the new mergers, publishing was an afterthought. It was garnish on the meal.
By the mid-2010s AD, this was the state of the publishing industry: there were five major publishers, all owned by mega-companies, with three of the five owned by corporations not based in the United States.
The Big Five were Penguin Random House, Hachette, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan.
Macmillan was owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which was based in Germany.
Penguin Random House was owned by Bertelsmann, which was based in Germany, and which I’ve insulted enough to ensure that I’ll be banished from American publishing for the foreseeable future.
Hachette was owned by Lagardère, which was based in France and was, for most of its history, powered by the manufacture and sales of weapons.
Simon & Schuster was owned by CBS, which was based in the United States.
HarperCollins was owned by Rupert Murdoch, and about whom I will soon say enough bad things to ensure that I’m banished from American publishing for the rest of eternity.
Technically, The Future Won’t Be Long wasn’t published by Penguin Random House.
Technically, it was published by Viking, which once upon a time had been the Viking Press before it was eaten by Penguin Books and became Viking Penguin, and before Viking Penguin was eaten by Penguin Putnam, and before Penguin Putnam was rebranded as the Penguin Group and was eaten by Penguin Random House.
Reader, if you follow this metaphor of consumption to its logical end, you may imagine my failed novel as the excrement that follows such a hearty meal.
If there’s one media outlet that has dominated the tone and tenor of American life since some Muslims facefucked life into a shitty disaster movie, it’s Fox News, which is a network found on cable television.
Generally speaking, Fox News offers news from a Far Right perspective, and is consumed by an ongoing advocacy that Muslims should be reduced to a heaping pile of agonized screaming ash.
If you’re in any liberal American home, and you want to invoke a series of paleoconservative values while implying your moral superiority to the people who hold them, all you have to do is wave your arms around as if you’ve been stung by a bee and shout this: “FOX NEWS! FOX NEWS! FOX NEWS!”
Everyone will know what you mean.
They’ll know that you mean this: “Republicans want to burn gay people alive and put Black people in cages and fuck up everything that I believe! But that stops here! After the digestifs!”
I shop in a grocery store designed for the haute bourgeoisie.
The prices are ridiculous.
Other than the organic produce, every product in my local grocery has, somewhere on its packaging, a goofy narrative about the company that manufactures the product.
In my neighborhood, it is impossible to go to the local grocery store and buy mustard without encountering a whimsical tale about rural people from Northern California and Oregon and how their quirky values are reflected in the ingredients of their products.
These quirky values are why it costs $3 for a vegan cookie.
The narratives go something like this:
Twenty years ago, my wife Betty and I were in our kitchen, talking about the taste of the mustard that our parents bought. All of the store brands weren’t anything like what we remembered, and they were made with pre-processed ingredients and contained preservatives. These chemicals might have allowed for a longer shelf life, but they reduced flavor, and even worse, no one knew what they did to people’s health. “I wish someone would go back to old-fashioned values,” I said. “Why won’t someone make a mustard that tastes great and is good for people?”
Then Betty asked a question that changed our lives.
“Why don’t we do it?”
I have watched hundreds of people read these narratives.
And as I have watched people read these narratives, the thought has occurred to me that people are more conscientious about their mustard than they are about the media they consume.
Reader, I have written a narrative in the voice of the man who owns HarperCollins and Fox News.
To acclimate you to its message, I’ve written this narrative in the style of stories that one finds printed on jars of organic mustard:
MEET RUPERT
Hi, I’m Rupert Murdoch. I’m having a cuppa in my country home in Mayfair, part of a little town that the lads like to call London. You probably don’t know much about my story, but ooh, crikey, I reckon it’s a real ripper.
Over sixty years ago, when I inherited an Australian newspaper from my father, I knew that people didn’t want a landscape chocka with media outlets producing a true spectrum of thought. The world was crying out for an oligarchical structure of media ownership, where a handful of companies controlled everythin
g and created a false dichotomy of public opinion.
I took my father’s little newspaper and used it to gain an iron control over Australia’s media landscape, and I funneled the obscene profits into a slow campaign against other countries. My first target was the English. Those old bogans couldn’t resist my crass strategy of big tits paired with disgusting opinions for the ill-educated masses.
I moved on to America and did the very same thing. It was ace. The molls in the American government were some real wantons, and they deregulated their media landscape so that me and a few other big’un blokes could consolidate control over almost every outlet in the country. Television, film, newspapers, and publishing. Those Americans were bang up for it. What a bunch of naughty slags.
Maybe you’ll recognize one of my profitable divisions. It’s called Fox News. It does a cracking job of getting the olds upset about global warming and Christmas.
I also own HarperCollins, and one of the things that Harper-Collins does is publish books by American liberals. Strewth, it’s a great deal! I use Fox News to make money off rightward turns of public opinion, and then I make money off the reaction to those rightward turns of public opinion by publishing books which the ideological opponents of Fox News quote like gospel scripture.
When I’m chopping logs for my old wood stove in Mayfair, I like to ask myself whether the liberal writers on HarperCollins, who are enmeshed in the media and entertainment industries, are so stupid that they don’t know they’re taking money from me, or if they’re so cynical and motivated by their own atomized interests that they don’t care. I never do make up my mind. Who can decide with that lot of saddos?
Remember when the feminist Internet sheilas were deadset about that Paki comedian fella Aziz Ansari rooting a young moll? That was a real laugh. Aziz was in a few of my movies. Epic, Ice Age: Continental Drift, and What’s Your Number? I jolly well paid for his holiday in the sun. Remember the original article that told the world about Aziz’s rooting? It was published on a website called Babe.net. Guess who’s an investor?
Do you recall when the benders at the Guardian unleashed a real corker and said that Empire, a hip-hop-themed television drama, was ‘audaciously honest on Black issues’? Crikey, do you care to hazard a guess who produced Empire? Want to guess who owned the network? Guess who made the real money off the advertisements and sales into foreign territories? That Guardian article was a shock! They made me sound a bloody golly!
I’m getting on in years, but I think I’ve done pretty well. Maybe some sook dags say I play the larrikin, but I run a family businesses. Ooh, crikey, I hope I’ve stayed true to my values. I know that when my time comes and I go meet the Great Sky Cunt, I’ve raised a right crop of young’uns who’ll steer my works in the right direction.
If people from the Right Wing want to gain moral instruction, they go watch Fox News, and Rupert Murdoch makes money off the advertisements that are aired on the network.
If people from the so-called American Left want to gain moral instruction, they go buy a book published by a Certified Liberal who is being published by HarperCollins, and Rupert Murdoch makes money off the sale.
The purpose of anyone expressing a public opinion in American life, or consuming one, is this: to make money for about 1,500 people.
And don’t think I’m singling out Rupert Murdoch.
Other than the phone hacking, anything you could say about Murdoch was true of 1,499 other individuals.
For instance: the American cable network which served as the ideological counterweight to Fox News.
It was called MSNBC. It stole Fox News’s playbook and changed the cheap conservative opinions into cheap liberal ones.
Millions of people watched it every night, convinced that they were being given the inside scoop on how the Trump Presidency would crumble.
Because MSNBC wasn’t a jar of mustard, it didn’t come with a short narrative about its values, so maybe you can’t blame its viewers for being ignorant of who was manufacturing their opinion.
But still.
The letters N-B-C appear in MSNBC.
And as everyone remembers, NBC was the broadcast network that aired fourteen seasons of The Apprentice.
The Apprentice starred Donald J. Trump, and it was on that show where he honed the skills of televised humiliation and abuse which he would use to win the Presidency.
His last episode aired on February 16th, 2015 AD.
He declared his candidacy for the Presidency on June 16th, 2015 AD.
Comcast Corporation, which owns NBC, made big money off Donald J. Trump before he won the Presidency.
And then they made money after.
And, look, I can’t judge any writer who gets paid by Rupert Murdoch.
I took money from Penguin Random House, and if I hadn’t had a huge commercial failure, I’d be no different than anyone else.
I’d still be there, just another haute bourgeoisie aspirant chasing my small piece of the global media landscape.
I’d be hoping to crawl through the window before they locked it from the inside.
And to put an even finer point on it: through media coverage which generated advertising revenues, I Hate the Internet made money for Rupert Murdoch.
I didn’t even sign a contract with the devil and I still work for him.
Now here I am, disgruntled, and I’m like those Science Fiction writers of the Twentieth Century AD.
I see the future.
If you look at the corporate history of publishing, it’s been the reallocation of assets from smaller pools of capital into larger pools of capital.
Within twenty years, at least one major American publisher will be majority owned by a conglomerate from either China or the Middle East.
Probably Qatar.
Maybe Saudi Arabia.
And then your moral instruction will come from writers who are cashing cheques signed by repressive regimes with long histories of human rights abuses.
Your opinions will come from writers who will be no different than New York University.
They will be founts of knowledge and they will be economically powered by hegemonies built with slave labor.
And you’ll still be more concerned about who made your mustard.
None of this would be of any consequence.
Regardless of what is printed on tote bags, in normal circumstances books have no impact on the governing of any society.
And neither does television.
Popular entertainment is meaningless.
In a sane world, I’d be using the example of publishing to illustrate the increasing consolidation of wealth and money in the hands of a transnational global oligarchy, and bitching about how this excludes freaks from achievement in the arts.
But something terrible happened in 2016 AD: the ghosts of one million dead Iraqis cried out for a just revenge against their killers.
And the world listened.
And so a rogue member of the Celebrity branch of American governance took over the Presidency.
And Penguin Random House publishes his books.
And so does Simon & Schuster.
And so does Macmillan.
And so does HarperCollins.
But not Hachette.
There’s still hope!
Ignore the arms dealing of its corporate parent!
Except:
La Librairie Hachette craignait, à juste titre, que les résistants n’appliquent à la lettre le programme du Conseil National de la Résistance (CNR) et ne nationalisent cet exceptionnel outil que les nazis admiraient et dont ils avaient envisagé de faire la base d’une énorme entreprise européenne placée sous leur contrôle … Obligés de céder, ils firent tout pour maintenir leurs positions au plus haut niveau dans la reconfiguration du capital envisagée. À la Libération, pour être sûrs que nul ne songerait à les accabler, ils firent réécrire une partie de leurs archives, en ajoutant par exemple qu’au cours d’une entrevue, Laval s’était montré glacial al
ors que, dans les faits, il avait été d’un commerce agréable, ou d’autres remarques que l’historien éprouve les plus grandes difficultés à repérer quand il consulte aujourd’hui ces documents savamment élagués en 1945.*
Imagine a litter of three-month-old kittens. They are locked in a box. No light penetrates the box. There is a steady supply of oxygen. There is no food or water.
The kittens are kept in the box beyond the point of starvation and dehydration.
They shriek and they moan, and they rend each other with their claws.
They kill each other.
The dead are eaten by the living.
One kitten will survive the rest, nourished on the corpses of its siblings, but its suffering will be the longest and, in its final days, it will die the worst death, lacking even the analgesic numbness that comes with inflicting pain on another living being.
Because they are dumb animals trapped in the immediacy of a terrible situation, none of the kittens will ask the right question.
None of the kittens will ask: “Who locked me in this box?”
The defense mechanisms that you’ve been given as a member of a Western liberal democracy will not save you and they will not save your children.
It will take several decades, but your future, and theirs, is digitally inflected feudalism.
There’s a slow train coming.
Everyone knows it.
Your life, and your body, will have only one purpose.
You will make money for monsters beyond the Cash Horizon.
You will be the slave of HRH.
And because you will not kill the rich or mandate a wave of socialism, the best idea that you’ll have will be to exercise your franchise at the ballot box, where you will choose a candidate who’ll sell you down the river at the first flash of cash.
And your second-best idea will be to go out in public and fight with another poor person while a third poor person captures the action on a smartphone that they will turn into a monetarily profitable video for Facebook, Twitter, and Google.
And your third-best idea will be to become a cynical asshole who lies for money and writes thinkpieces to manipulate the emotions of naïve morons on the Internet.