Folding Laundry

Lazo wakes up at 6:45 and skips his morning routine. 

He was watching the interview of a Japanese animator describing a scene. ‘Droplets lift off the character’s skin and glisten to form a silver ring of scorching hot aura’. His attention span cut right there because the surgical precision of dream-borne detail brought him a sense of defeat. So he went on Instagram to hear a reels creator reaffirm him and was grateful for the app’s big ears. The US wants my data, China wants my data, everyone wins. He asked: 

Give me wide fish-eye vision, give me tinted glasses to handle the brightness and a VPN to hide my location. Give me the strength for spring allergies. Give me a flame to make a day out of a night in the desert and can you give me a woman? The cookies tracked away and he received an ad to sign up for transcendental meditation, but, he thought, Joe Rogan already made that cool for UFC dudes so what else can you give me? All the messages are mixed bags. All the free trials need a payment method and all the women want other men. 

Lazo draws connections at the bar.

– Porsche hit record sales last year. Brand names are everything. Porsche tells you its cars are as fast as saying its syllable. Toyota is trustworthy. The sound of it can’t be confused with another carmaker. Brands aside, you also have to name new products. Seltzer comes from German, Selterser (Wasser)(water) of Selters. ‘I want to kill the vibe of your party’, in other words. TikTok is the sound of wasted hours. At night, the brain erases all input to make space – which reminds me I need to buy more cloud storage.  

He glanced over his short friend’s head. She stood by the bathroom door, waiting for a customer to come out so she could refill the towel dispenser. The customer walked out with his wet palms facing the ceiling, as if he’d done something terrible. She walked in and Lazo brought his focus back to the conversation. Apparently, if you struggle with listening to the person in front of you, you have to exhale slowly. 4, 3, 2, 1 and there she stood again.

– Electric cars, yeah, I’m not convinced. Miners and mineral processors, ETFs and China in secure attachment style. Then of course you have the debate about the chemicals in the solvent process of lithium ion batteries versus combustion emissions. This is for the Reddit user to respond to. ‘I don’t respond to gaslighting’. China has released the breaks of subsidies, and so has America. The EU is trying to catch up and you have to understand that green protectionism is aggressive. 

– Aggressive? China?

– The US mainly.

– Towards the EU?

– China. Are you listening?

Lazo walks home and sticks to his evening routine.

Shower, teeth, serum, pill. Buttered toast, teeth again. Sometimes he shuffles the order. If companies follow the habits of consumers, they can never err, Bauman said. So long as the algorithm works, no suggested content is wrong. This is good news, a promise of staying in business, for the sellers, but for the buyers an assurance of staying in agony. 

It’s exhausting. I have to curate my posts, the posts I see and the ads I see. God, give me the creative power to make the algorithm err. Give me content to hide as ‘not relevant’. I’ll then search for that same content to neutralise the algorithm. ‘The Afterparty is a virtual space for users with no engagement compass, immune to metrics, under the radar, who echo nothing and like anything’. This was no wheat-paste poster, he saw an Instagram post after googling ‘my Discover Weekly gets it all wrong lately’ and ‘can anyone build on Decentraland?’

ASMR became popular because our olfactory and tactile senses plummeted. Sight is well-trained. Listening to ASMR videos is a desperate attempt to increase our sensitivity. There’s a similar basis for watching podcasts, when audio podcasts can be streamed anywhere and when most podcast studios have horrid furniture. ‘I almost became a pseudonymous crypto founder. I realised I wasn’t very good at founding. That was when I cut caffeine.’