by Thomas Pynchon
Thursday, May. 15, 2014 at 2:06 PM
"She's got the world locked inside a plastic box."
-Jim Morrison
On the full moon of May, 14, 2014, during an unusual heat spell, a Counterforce group threw paint at the entrance of the Google offices in Venice, CA. It was amusing to see Google employees emerge from the front doors of the building and see paint exploding all around them. When they looked up at the sky, all they found was the yellow moon staring back at them. It is highly likely that the cretins at Google have erased this street art, so it is important that you learn a few things about Google before going to visit the new artistic expressions of The Counterforce.
The Google compound near Venice Beach is just that: a compound. Dry-erase boards covered in equations and diagrams are visible from the street, dogs and Google employees take breaks together in small cages next to the sidewalk, and the external parking lots are surrounded by fences covered in the geometric designs Google is so fond of incorporating into their aesthetic. Worst of all are the giant metal binoculars that hang over the entrance, symbolizing something profound that us little people cannot comprehend.
The Counterforce announced they are at the front steps of Google's Venice offices by smearing the front steps of Google Venice with paint. The beach is only a few blocks from this grotesque complex, allowing the employees to work productively in their tiny boxes and return to their 2,000 a month apartments and pretend that the world is not burning and that their employers at Google are not funding ALEC, the climate change-denying, conservative lobbying group.
While they code away inside the Venice offices, the rest of the metropolis bakes away under the overbearing sunshine. If May is this hot, the summer is going to be dangerous. Climate change is not happening apparently, especially inside the cool employee cafes and food troughs on the Venice offices, where a beautiful and rewarding capitalist life with AC proceeds apace. At night, the streets surrounding this tech compound are filled with homeless people in tents or covered in sleeping bags, waiting for the next precarious day of hustling and avoiding the police and hopefully finding free food that will not slowly kill them. But inside the compound, climate change is not happening. Everything is just perfect!
But this is Los Angeles, isn't it? The place where a person can slowly rot without knowing it. It has always had more than its fair share of insulated rich people living an absolutely unjustified and decadent lifestyle similar to the residents of the Capitol in the Hunger Games stories. For those of you who have no idea what is being referred to, let the word Hollywood suffice to explain a world of excess, greed, and illusion.
For nearly one hundred years, Hollywood has perfected the art of the glowing screen and learned the art of manipulating people with images, seducing them with spectacles, and encouraging them to consume through repetition and trickery. But now the reign of Hollywood is at an end. Netflix won an Academy Award at the most recent ceremony, and soon the big studios will be owned by totalitarian entities like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. The little plastic box, decreasing in size from the projection screen, the television, and now finally into your pockets where it can snuggle with your junk, is now going to override and outmode its creators. Hollywood merely primed the way for Google, and Google is grabbing the psychic reigns that have controlled the vast population of the Los Angeles metropolitan area with a firm hand, peppering it with advertisements for Google Play.
As the world overheats and burns from human induced climate change, millions of people bow to their smart phone screens. The cell phone companies and service providers frantically try to buy off their competitors customers as an ice sheet detaches from the Antarctic continent, a forewarning of the flood plain Venice will become. The America Dream, encapsulated and crystalized perfectly in the metropolis of Los Angeles, is barely chugging along, surviving only off the stolen water brought through the aqueducts. Three days without this water will bring back the coyote and desert.
All the employees at the Venice Google offices must leave the compound at midday and walk the entirety of Venice Boulevard. If they find a fresh water stream or artesian well, they may drink the water, but otherwise they must walk all of Venice Boulevard without a drop.
Los Angeles, Bablyon the Great, mother of abominations, center of the American Nightmare, there is no way to save you. Those who persist in their delusions will perish by them, unfortunately.
Anarchism is the only way out of this desert. Find out what it is, follow the path that lights up, and help in the centuries long struggle against capitalism. It would seem that the Counterforce is just writing on the wall, so read their worlds, reactivate the Venice counterculture, and make a stand against the robots in the compound and their world of luxury.
Thank you for your time,
-Thomas R. Pynchon