tw: murder
Not everyone can stay home, is the thing, is a really scary thing. In America, during a pandemic the likes of which few living people have seen in their lifetime, we have a government that has failed, let alone outright refused, to offer adequate healthcare, containment or care procedures to its people. Large unsheltered populations in San Francisco are still having their property seized and remain unhoused despite the shelter-in-place order and swaths of empty housing. Food service workers, sex workers, those in the gig economy, that flashy new industry forced upon many by the very systems that have exploited working class people for decades, have all been put out of work without any path to obtaining unemployment checks. Mortgage relief has been provided for property owner in New York, but rent freezes have not been put in place. All of this signals loud, so loud you hear it ringing when you’re half-asleep, that we do not deserve inherently to be sheltered, to practice the care a cruel society has so callously suggested in place of actual healthcare. Prisons lack access to the very hand sanitizer they are forced to make, and cannot possibly implement social distancing in facilities built to dehumanize revoke privacy as an obscene punitive measure. All of these are murderous displacements on the part of capitalism. When a system that’s built on tying shelter to exploitative labor can no longer support that labor, what happens to that shelter? Where can we find a space that is not conditional on our exploitation?
Anyway, I’ve taken to watching videos of Disneyland.
The logical endpoint of monolithic consumerism, these meticulous, overwhelmingly designed pay-to-play labyrinths to the ruler of sanitized reactionary propaganda (for kids!), these ugly pristine visions of a boardroom-mandated decorum evoke a “magic” so cynical it makes me want to punch my laptop…and yet. Despite my disgust, I crave a space with the pretenses of catering to me, however contingent on draining money from devotees to a brand. I like the ones without narration, where it’s just the rides, or a walking tour. We all want spaces designed around our values, and when we can’t get that, we crave something, however parasitic (yes I will nod to last year’s upstairs-downstairs international blockbuster, fuck it), however inhuman, to try and cater to us.
I love architecture, have literal textbooks I bought in high school on building materials and theory and these glossy sexy tomes full brutalist and modernist buildings I will likely never visit. Brutalist buildings, especially, give so much room for life, for awe at one another’s work, so clearly built by human hands into something communal.
Paradoxically, my obsession with those Disney videos is sinfully isolated. The videos going around a little over a week ago of crowded streets in the days leading up to the parks’ temporarily closure were devastating and irritating in equal measure. Unlike those Brutalist buildings I longed to inhabit for real, I want to Disneyland to be fake, even more than it already is. My favorite subsection of this genre is the grainy footage of rides that have since been closed and demolished, these spectres of an outdated product. I don’t want these stupid rides and shops to exist, as much as I romanticize their thoroughness and immersion. I want to run through the shuttered streets of each park and vandalize and loot and burn it to the ground. I hate what they have built for us. You can’t live in Disneyland, Disneyland will kill you.
Forty or so minutes from where I live lies Holy Land USA, an abandoned Bible-themed amusement park popular in the 1960s. Closed in 1984 with plans for renovations that never came to fruition due to the owner’s death two years later. On July 15th, 2010, sixteen-year old Chloe Ottoman was murdered in Holy Land, her body left at the foot of the LED-cross that overlooked all 18-acres of the park. The site is still listed on Atlas Obscura.
The idea of going “exploring” the site of such a sadistic crime is unconscionable. Why claim it in photographs? Why prioritize the dilapidated Christian aesthetics over such tragedy? Why has this not been refurbished and turned into a site for healing? What do we do with land scarred by trauma? This is the story of the United States and imperialism. Holy Land USA is built on the land of the Wappinger tribe. I live on the land of the Quinnipiac tribe. We erect murder atop buildings atop murder.
But far away from all that, I’m home right now. I have the week off from work because the staffing is so minimal at my job they don’t need me. I wonder if they’ll lose enough money that they’ll be forced to close by the end of the week. Then I’ll be fully out of a job, and at home in that terrifying and boring “indefinitely” that pervades every action of my day. And I’m stuck in a bare, bizarrely lit room with no decorations, searching for something to ground me as being here, physically, right now. But instead of making myself comfortable, I just study the backgrounds of TikTok videos.
TikTok users produce content from our homes, presenting from an ornate digital space, in order to gain engagement from an algorithm that we must play by, that works counterintuitively to the robust set of video tools and sophisticated visual literacy of its mostly young creators. Eventually, once you gain, say, a couple hundred thousand followers, you might get verified, fly out to one of a Hype House with other creators for a week or so. The machinations behind how this all comes to be, or where the houses are, is kept pretty secret, as well as how much of these friendships is manufactured, or who owns these houses. But all of a sudden, that personal background has been taken away and now all these icons of the platform are in the same house together, this house that might as well be constructed in the Sims. These are content factories, and the content itself is guided by a programming philosophy that promotes endless scrolling and engagement and settling into a uniform informational output. What will happen if the EARN IT bill puts a stop to end-to-end encryption and further erases our privacy and the safety of organizers and sex workers? What will the internet look like as we flock more and more to the dozen or so heavily monitored websites that mine us for data in exchange for digital community? They will make our access to digital space contingent on our submission to fascist structures just as they have made land and housing.
We cannot forget that we deserve space, that we have the inherent right to exist and be sheltered. We are here. Right now. In our rooms, in our apartments, in our houses. We must fight for them, and we must give them to those incarcerated or detained by ICE or unsheltered or displaced.
we deserve to sleep safe, and wake up, all of us, now and then and future-tense and now. we deserve to dream up a house together.
love and solidarity,
sam
song for this post: "Sunshowers" - M.I.A.