Flat Earth Catalog

The most humiliating aspect of being alive today, I suppose, is feeling like one is living through a single, unending commercial break. As the human race disintegrates into increasingly atomized particles of recluses and rejects, one can only “stay in touch” through increasingly dystopian social media feeds that consist mostly of ads, whether traditional influencer trash and/or semi-real short-form video. People no longer have “drinks,” they have “bevvies” and, at the most crucial junctures in their lives, speak in a wooden language learned from TikTok self-help videos. Music, when not actual AI, is now mainly a vehicle for parasocial relationships with carefully curated celebrities whose music is prepared by the same songwriters and producers, with the choice of Taylor Swift or Lana Del Rey for idol a matter of identity work as opposed to taste. Increasingly, our choices are between two subsidiaries of the same conglomerate; within a few decades, perhaps there will be no real choice at all.