Issue №3 The Man in the White Castle

Imagine Huxley’s Brave New World brutally mashed up with Orwell’s 1984 by a really coked-up DJ slash novelist… wait you don’t have to imagine it! We are living this reality show now. And the unfortunate thing for those who understand the situation we are in are now going to be targeted. Does that mean the gulag? Firing squads? Random disappearances? Maybe, but perhaps more unsettling is that much of the oppression is likely to be virtual. Violence — as our this magazine’s patron saint Michel Foucault — would say is not cost effective. Paraphrasing, but I am pretty sure he did say something LIKE that I’m just too lazy to Google the exact quote.

So imagine this scenario: you innocently retweet a retweet of a journalist or wannabe who is critical of the administration. Next thing you know your Twitter account is put on permanent hiatus. Then your cellphone stops working. Let’s say you then make a big stink about it — maybe with flyers or something. The newly militarized police pay a visit in full S/M-SWAT gear and puts you in a padded cell for what seems like weeks. You have no phone or any other device that has a clock on it. To keep you from going completely out of your mind and to track your mental state and thoughts you are given a device that let’s you communicate with other prisoners throughout the penitentiary system. Certain messages and posts are flagged of course. And you get the occasional video chat with your family and friends contingent on your behavior index. You make new friends and enemies there until you are released on bail, with a device that looks like a Fitbit but is actually a tracker. And it’s red and glows, so everyone knows you are a virtual inmate and degenerate.

The judge says you need to wear that for a year, pending behavior. You have been given a geofence of 25 miles. Unlike Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Tumblr you belong to a social chain gang. And the kind of work you are allowed to do — making mortgage ad click bait — is proscribed by the state.

You decide that you are sick of this kind of living and contemplate suicide but that kind of biometric activity is tracked too as is sleeping and sex. Not to mention your suicide would be a win for them, not you.

You watch Shawshank Redemption for the 20th time yet now it seems particularly relevant, Morgan Freeman’s voice even more godly this time around. Like the characters in that movie you start digging a digital hole out of the prison that you are in — one day at a time for what seems like years using a makeshift soldering iron and some code sent to you embedded in an e-gift card that the guards failed to catch. Likely you join a group on your social chain gang and conspire to crowdsource the breakout. You and your new ‘friends’ come up with your own unique form of cryptography.

And after much persistence and lack of anything better to do you manage to get off the grid somewhere and start a new life. Your old identity is gone and you have to start over again, this time dwelling in the subterranean web using a homemade computer and renting apartments using cryptocurrency.

Perhaps I’m being overly dystopian, but as Andy Grove the founder of a Intel famously said “only the paranoid survive.” I think he’s right, actually I know he’s right.

Oh and the Prozac just kicked in and I’m feeling much better now. Luckily the new healthcare act if you can call it that distributes these meds quite liberally. Okay that was really depressing. So silver linings: maybe Trump is not Mussolini but more Berlusconi. Harmless, corrupt yes — but also inept. Maybe we’ll stop taking freedom of speech for granted. Although at the time of this writing government agencies have been banned from Twitter (ignore that says the Prozac). Scientists fear speaking with the press.

You know Nazis have their views which I personally think are awful and really the worst thing you can call someone is a nazi but I also think that nazism or alt-rightism is a bit like the US’s Tyler Durden and Marla has been replacing Sebastian aka the narrator’s drugs so he can emerge and wreak havoc. I highly recommend Fight Club 2 by the way from which this analogy derives. Okay disclaimer I’m smoking a blunt at this moment. So these thoughts may seem a bit disjointed but bare with me — there is a point here somewhere. The main problem we have to contend with is that any ideology that thinks it’s acceptable to trample on the rights of others because they are of a different race, creed sexuality etc for any reason whatsoever is not okay. As Howard Zinn once said “you cannot be neutral on a moving train.” Friends, we are on a bullet train to God knows where. Probably the gulag, which by the way have been legalized once again to the joy of private prison wardens everywhere.

Trump has opened up a Pandora’s box and authorized discrimination and once that box is open it’s difficult to close it. But back to silver linings — causality. Every action has an equal or greater reaction supposedly says science so it is safe to say that humanity needs this challenge to up it’s game. That makes this a good time to be alive, I think. Not easy, but interesting and potentially fulfilling.

Here at bipolar.express we use comedy as a weapon. Now granted many of our readers think our humor is dark or wonder why we make fun of things like mood disorders (because we have them!). And that’s why we are probably more paranoid than the average citizen — historically pornographers and comedians particularly satirists were the first to go when fascist regimes took power. What is the nuclear equivalent of comedy? Internet plus comedy can be deadly! In ancient times satire was considered to be the deadliest weapon of all as it affected your enemy posthumously. It was a curse. Do I think a lot of leftist comedians and cartoonists secretly voted for Trump? Yes I do. Shine a light on that stuff, get it out in the open. We’ve got some housecleaning to do. And to paraphrase Zizek, in times like these you need to write and read big fat books. And we’d just add to those wise words smoke ’em if you got them. Oh and 1984 just sold out on Amazon. Just saying.

Peace out,

The Editorial Staff at BPX