Stop the Madness
I hate the fucking lines all over New York City.
If you live in New York, you know what I’m talking about, and don’t act like you don’t. I’m not talking about waiting a couple minutes for a local favorite, or a restaurant that gets a little slammed on weekends. I’m not even talking about lines to get into nightclubs or bars. You know what I’m talking about. Those stupid fucking lines that wrap all the way around a city block for some dumb treat or “viral” anything.
It’s so fitting, that word: viral. We chose it well, because I feel like the city I love has become ground zero for a zombie invasion. Mindless, tasteless people who will line up for anything their phone tells them to. It’s not just line-waiters though. They just represent the most obvious outgrowth of a social cancer that’s been metastasizing for a while now. A dark, evil turn in culture that is popping up almost everywhere now.
If you are someone who stands around in a line for hours, I want you to ask yourself why. I want you to ask yourself that, but I know you wont, because if you are standing around for hours in one of the best places for food in the entire world because a fucking algorithm told you to, then I already know you have no capacity for self reflection or original thought.
Line-waiters are the social base of fascism. They are beings whose sense of self and community alike has been totally obliterated by algorithmic systems, which is to say, the techno-capitalist class. It goes beyond them not having common sense or taste. The people who wait for hours in a line do not, in a real way, exist. They are an amalgamation of pre-determined choices made by a computer. It’s hard not to look upon them and dispair. They have proven, through their actions, that a good chunk of the population will simply do whatever people in power tell them to do, consume what they are told to consume, care about what an ad campaign on TikTok told them to care about. Of course AI is going to take over everything, of course Trump is going to live to be a thousand years old. Of course we’re gonna lock up and deport every immigrant. I mean, just look at these people! They would be at a Nuremberg rally tomorrow if it meant they got to try the new viral protein-matcha-Dubai-chocolate-cookie-pizza.
I can hear these boring freaks coming for me now. “It’s something to do.” YOU LIVE IN NEW YORK CITY. Did you already take your photos outside the Friends apartment? Did you get tired of paying $3k/a month in rent to bed-rot? Was The Smith not taking reservations? If you are bored in New York, it is ultimately your fault. New York is not a boring city, you are a boring person.
People throw around terms like “transplant” or gentrification, and yeah that’s part of it, but I don’t think those words alone do this insidious phenomenon justice. This all feels evil to me. I was not born in New York, I did not grow up here. I have lived here for about 16 years. No, I am not from here, but at this point I feel like I am of here. I know my neighbors, I attend church in my neighborhood, I spent years volunteering with local advocacy groups, I go to my friend’s shows and gigs, I buy from local shops and stores (not Whole Foods and Amazon), I attend community meetings, I throw and get invited to parties. There is a massive difference between moving into a community, and moving on top of a community. To the line-waiters, New York City is not a place of community, it is a place of consumption.
These are hollow people. These are people who mediate all of reality through a screen, who live fully commodified lives, who shop at the same stores in every city they travel to, who live in hermetically sealed chambers of content. Life, to them, is about scrolling, going to where the screen tells you to go, buying what the screen told you to buy, and documenting your consumption through a camera. New York City, to these zombies, is nothing but a backdrop, a filter. It is identical to any other place they could live, except for some viral, protein packed snack at a specific bakery, or some vague idea they heard once about New York signaling “cool,” “edgy,” or “artsy.”
That part. That fucking part. Within this same group of line-waiters are a group of what I call neighborhood-ruiners. These people have remote jobs that pay well. They could live many places in NYC or elsewhere, but they choose to live in a “cool” part of town because they have no personality or identity, and thus can only be defined based on what they consume. Then, they do just that: they consume neighborhoods. They shut down bars that have been around for years for being…bars. They call the cops on barbecues and birthday parties, especially if you are Black or brown, they refuse to buy from local businesses or grocery stores because they are “dirty” or make them uncomfortable, and thus make those businesses shut down. These are racist, classless, tasteless scumbags who have a purely vampiric relationship to the place they live. If you move to the most diverse city to maybe ever exist and get mad about encountering diversity, I fucking hate you.
I grew up in small town America. It sucks. My hometown has only two thousand people, and they all know each other’s business going back to elementary school. It creates a confining, claustrophobic atmosphere where mistakes or reinvention are almost impossible. Moving to New York City was a revelation to me. Not only does the large population size provide the space for experimentation and risk-taking, the general culture of minding your own business was and is such a liberating environment. You not only can make it in New York, you can remake yourself as many times as you want.
Well, not if the people dead-set on turning New York City into a dumb suburb have anything to say about it! Line-culture directly feeds the surveillance state and the anti-social, techno-fascist world these lame, hollow, boring people seem to want so badly. There is now a cottage industry of line-watching to help the line-waiting. A website called Damnlines monitors security cam footage from around New York City, and tracks the wait times for lines at the city’s most omg super cute viral sensations!
I cannot emphasize enough that no one is forcing anyone to go to these places, or wait in these lines. New York City is one of the best cities in the entire world, with world-class food on nearly every block. These restaurants, cafes, and “experiences” are not made for people. Them, and the surveillance economy growing up around them, are made for computers.
I get so sad when I think about all this. I get so scared about where this all leads. Sometimes I’m afraid this hollow-hunger fostered by digital capitalism will swallow the world whole. I love this city, and I love people. Part of why I love living here is all the different types of people you get to meet and befriend through chance and circumstance. There’s a spontaneity to New York City I find so beautiful, a diversity of personalities and chances to interact with them you just don’t get anywhere else, and coming right at all I love is a wall of beige.
Why? Our culture flows downstream of out economy, and we are running head first into an algorithmic, inhuman economy where the driving force isn’t even salacious greed or the displaces psychosexual hunger of the elites, its the icy cold logic of a computer. The lines of code become lines of people, and we all march into a flattened, boring, unfeeling future.
When will the madness stop? When will people stand up and say enough It’s not screaming into the void, it’s screaming at a block of people all dressed in blue jeans, black t-shirts, and a thrifted Coach bag all giving you the same, blank(street coffee) stare.
Enough! Stop this! Cut it out! Either move to a suburb where you clearly want to live and stop cosplaying as Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, or stay in New York and develop a personality and relationship to the city around you.
Go off! Thanks for articulating this particular flavor of rage!
this is hands down the most important text i’ve ever read on substack. totally on the point on everything — and it’s happening on every major city everywhere, also (são paulo etc)