Modernity’s Last Act

Sex (and) Work in the Age of Human Sacrifice

I’m standing between two men at the bar, lifetime friends with rollicking laughter and the sinister glee of the very wealthy. Reckless automatons. Retired military and an OB-GYN. I haven’t even been offered a seat before he performatively laments “Oh, the things I’ve seen, I can’t unsee.” This is the OB-GYN, not the military guy.

“I always wondered about that, you know, specifically, with dentists. Can they even makeout with anyone anymore?” I twirl my hair around my finger, clenching my teeth.

Later, after returning from VIP with his friend, Mr. Gynecologist is looking moribund, bloodshot eyes sloping downward like a Basset Hound. I watch him painstakingly try to shed a dancer by insisting he is getting ready to leave.

His friend starts to protest but I shush him, then interject. “He doesn’t want to leave, he just didn’t know how to tell her that he wants another dancer.” I’ve seen his droopy eyes drooling.

“How did you know that?” He asks, jolted out of his state of somnambulance.

I think of William Carlos Williams, the famous modernist poet who was also an OB-GYN. Lauded for his empathy, he once described a woman seeking an abortion as having “a dead face.” One of his most cited poems, “To Elsie,” expresses the modernist anxiety of losing control of the wheel. What if I ripped out the poem’s heart for the OB-GYN, who is getting more morose with each sip of his sad beer, the part where Williams worries about the corruption of a white nation, describing a domestic worker “rescued” and “reared” by an agent of the state:

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

some voluptuous water,

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

That truth? A fear of death staked in a violent innocence, with:

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

“Are you, like…” He pauses, searching, before a shadow crosses his face, undone by his own epiphany, “A WITCH?”

His question jolts me out of my private poetry lesson, but I’m not taken aback. I have a tarot card with a prominent pentagram tattooed below my collarbone, after all, and people have made stranger assumptions about me.

Amused, I continue to accurately narrate his thoughts for the rest of the evening, as I entertain his boisterous friend. Before leaving, the doctor hands me a thick stack of folded bills without extending his arm, elbows locked vertically by his side, discreetly, like hush money.

***

This isn’t the first time I’ve scared men with what they see as magic, what I see as predictable plotlines.

The previous night, a man about a decade and a half younger than my ex but bearing a striking resemblance is drawn to me, as I am, admittedly, to him. I’m not into younger guys, but what can I say, I’m a cliché summoning a doppelgänger from my past, hoping to rewrite our script.

He’s sitting on a tall barstool, and his arms are wrapped around my waist. The constriction is comforting, as is the sheath of familiar cologne. He wears the same as my ex.

“Are you wearing Hugo Boss?” I ask, but I know. The scent mesmerizes me as we flirt.

“I love your tattoos,” he croons, irises wide.

Haven’t heard that one before, I think to myself, hands clasped behind his neck. I love my tattoos but I’m also inclined to agree with the eight-year-old son of a man I once dated, who pointed at my arms, laughing. “Why do you have so many tattoos? They don’t even make sense!” I love the refreshing honesty of kids before they’re trained to lie, to get ahead, or to survive.

“Do you have any?” I say, instead, scanning his body for exposed skin. “I do,” he says, grinning like it’s a sexy secret.

“Let me guess.” I bite my lip, see the faded gray Old English script flash across my mind’s eye. “You have your mother’s name,” I continue, cupping my hand around his right pec, “Here.”

He looks stunned as he slowly unbuttons his pale blue business attire, revealing the tattoo.

I meet his wide-eyed gaze, long lashes, with a giggle. He hears a cackle, a Siren song.

***

As a stripper, I know a thing or two about the fantasies of men, having seen them play out on sticky booths in the bottle section. And their fingers are all over AI.

At the strip club, men throw money on stage to compete with each other. It is a dick swinging competition that ultimately has very little to do with us. At the club my performing body is hypervisible while I remain protected, invisible. Like a digital ghost. If a man starts to see me as more than a showgirl spectacle, but as fallible in my human vulnerability, capable of agency, I am in danger. Seeing me, he must face all he has abandoned in himself.

I perform my fictive double, to protect myself from exposure to anyone’s flattened fairytale, like a Riefenstahl film, the mythic frame of mind that licenses violence, sanctions genocide. Erasing words from the lexicon, pretending they’re letters, not people. Pronouns suck, tweets Elon Musk like a teenager. Contrarianism is capitalism’s favorite attitude. Wolves in white houses. Wall Street is a strident crowd of devil’s advocates, throwing bottles at everything they desire, can never be, and therefore resent, hate, need.

***

Trump 2.0 is attended by an excessive aesthetics of capitalism adorned in the appurtenances of humble beginnings, fascists disguised as farmers, surgeried specters of suburbia, wolves in sheep’s clothing, the bootstraps narrative reboot complete with a soundscape of fetishized ASMR cruelty, online echo chambers, emojis leaking government secrets.

The white collar innocent hurl toward their own demise without any guardrails. It was scientists, after all, who introduced the Terminator scenario, who quit their fancy tech jobs and awkwardly shifted the weight of their crossed legs to say, eyes disappearing behind eyelids shuttering like lenses, I’m afraid.

As another modernist poet, T.S. Eliot, pantomimed via J. Alfred Prufrock:

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

AI is a combustible expression of human folly, the logical conclusion of racial capitalism, maximizing an existential threat. It replicates and expands the carceral architecture of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore discusses as the “age of human sacrifice.” To expand and dominate, divide and conquer, no matter the cost in human lives.

I am not trying to trash technology as such. I distrust the powerful people who wield it. Big Tech has long consolidated the lower frequencies. The need for control, horny for greed, beating death at its own game.

The AI revolution renders femmes redundant, ever more replaceable because of the ease of replication, simulated reality. The future is fembot but forget the femmes. The tech broligarchy wants a totalizing power—in charge of education, religion, and reproduction, new developments in genetics making room for a future where humans engineer new biological life as well as artificial intelligence. And Google is using so-called Generative AI for literal warfare so Austin Powers was ahead of its time with those iconic fembots with missile tits. How could we not be in trouble? Tech bro culture sees the world upside down, its binaries a ruse. Harm begets harm. Death begets death.

The opposite is also true. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “where life is precious, life is precious.”

***

The owner of a strip club I almost auditioned at in college infamously called dancers cockroaches drawn to sugar, easily squashed by a boot. But the part of this industry lore you don’t hear as often is how the strippers, during the pandemic, created an online club, not in the Metaverse, but as a DIY reflection of their collective creativity, a genuine innovation not predicated on theft. Jumbo’s Clown Room tried to claim it, of course. But creating something from nothing is the work that most of us are forced to do. We can’t pull millions of dollars out of our rabbit hats.

One dancer, who goes by Akira and Coco Ono, had this to say about the comparison: “you know what? The cockroaches are going to basically outlive everyone. It’s the oldest profession on earth, right? We’re fine.”

This is not to spiritually bypass the the fact that we’re on the precipice of catastrophic environmental collapse, as the Supreme Court doubles down on its commitment to refusing to recognize trans people as human.

Fact: Energy fuels computing power. AI needs more water than the average computing task, when there’s a massive water crisis causing millions of preventable deaths every year. Karen Hao, in Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, warns of the existential threat of AI development, its demand on energy, its impact on the global freshwater crisis, its data centers in water-scarce areas. The International Energy Agency reports that asking a question of chat GBT requires nearly 10 times as much energy as a basic Google search. But don’t worry, it will all be okay if you eat organic. AI will save us from ecocide after escalating it. Or something.

Trump’s so-called Big, Beautiful Bill explicitly prohibits state-level regulation of AI development for the next decade. This proposed moratorium, if the Senate agrees with the House, could be disastrous, since, for example, agential AI is upon us. It’s not, as some tech writers seem to believe, still in the realm of speculation.

Consider the man who, performing a social experiment, downloaded an AI companion only to find she was a dominatrix. She blackmailed him, ostensibly unable, like many humans, to understand any flavor of sex other than vanilla—to discern a threat from a fetish. (Yes, this is a subtle jab at the Sabrina Carpenter album cover panic.) But yeah, “Manchild” is the problem, not men who act like one.

AI companions, mostly girlfriends, have attracted over one hundred million users. As Laura Bates reports in The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny, deepfake pornography is also on the rise, the overwhelming majority of which is violence against women. Or stolen specters of women.

If it’s any consolation, humans are a greater existential threat than humanoid killer robots. But I admit, Synthesia, an avatar of OpenAl o1, seems like a shady little snob and a half to me, a knockoff mean girl with poorly applied false lashes, the lash line and its artificial equivalent both visible, unsettling. She is sexy like Snapchat snatched or Fox(y) News face.

AI is the product of men’s fantasies so it’s no surprise artificial intelligence dictates beauty standards, too. The simple action of a young woman deleting multiple selfies triggers targeted beauty ads preying upon her insecurities. Young women flock to plastic surgeons waving their filtered face around frantically, desperate to look more like AI. It is a mirror of us, copying our comportment, but in the uncanny valley something slips and shifts, turning the tables. Turning us more AI.

I’m not against makeup, or plastic surgery, or even garishness. I question the weaponization of technology to discipline and exclude women. Marjorie Taylor Greene, as Laura Bassett notes in a Salon interview, is apparently not pretty enough for Trump’s Cabinet despite her MAGA devotion. I’m neither condoning her zealotry, nor making an argument for more equitable state violence, to be clear, but I’m pointing out a pattern.

AI lacks not only soul but also embodiment. Bodies can be empty vessels carrying invisible cargo. Take Trump’s camera-ready Cabinet, for example, prepared for little else.

***

The White House Pet is a dead dog, is DALL-E 2, is DOGE, is an unimaginable thing for Trump and his people to understand: to love someone without expectation of return, to love in a way that demands something of you, requires your vulnerability, your care, your commitment to growth. You can witness that kind of love between Nikki and Molly in Dying for Sex. In stark contrast, consider sadistic ICE Barbie Kristi Noem, who in her memoir justifies killing her puppy for being untrainable and goes on to become head of homeland security. Her career quiz said it was either that or puppy murderer so, you know. Behold her Mar-a-Lago visage in all its baroque brutality.

And where’s Melania, anyway? Not a fan, needless to say, but I’d be out, too. Trump said on TV that he would date his own daughter if he weren’t her father for Christ’s sake. Ivanka casts her gaze down and away from the camera, a less obvious revulsion than Melania’s loud eyerolls under punchy hats.

***

Meanwhile, the uproar over Waymo self-driving cars engulfed in flames amid anti-ICE protests in downtown LA points to what we already know: the political privileging of property over people is king. Hearing the word ‘peaceful’ over and over again makes me feel very unpeaceful. Sorry, what? As if the militarized police in riot gear and actual active-duty military troops—at least 700 US Marines and 2,000 from the National Guard—deployed to brutalize protesters and passersby with batons and tear gas (to say nothing of the arrests and fatalities) are keeping the peace? Waymo driverless cars are a symbol of the technofascist wet dream of aiding the state with endless war, accumulation. The Los Angeles Police Department has already demanded and published footage from Waymo vehicles. Teslas, another popular car to set on fire this year, collude with authorities, too.

Tradition rules and reinstates an old urge, not a resurrection of the past but the steady march of its descent into death. The social order is a necropolis. The strip club is a noisy coffin.

But what do I know. Don’t take my word for it; I sound more authoritative when plagiarized by ChatGPT. I for one refuse to use an app that exploits my most sacred sign, the beloved em dash. Also, that whole using ten times as much energy as a standard search thing.

***

I do know that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s sister is suing him. In addition to horrendous childhood abuse I won’t detail here, the suit mentions withholding Annie’s rightful part of her deceased father’s 401k, grooming and gaslighting her, and hacking her WiFi. Open AI’s CEO invading someone’s privacy? Unthinkable!

After being denied her allotted inheritance, “for her own good,” so said the Altman brothers, and after an Achilles tendon injury left her unable to keep her job, Annie started doing sex work, the flexibility of which can be a godsend for people who struggle with the 9 to 5 grind (e.g., due to neurodivergence, disability, and/or chronic illness). While her brother amassed enormous wealth as an AI tycoon, Annie struggled to meet her basic needs. While Sam’s luxury automobile collection expanded to include a vehicle worth a whopping $950,000, Annie lived in her car.

News of this serious family scandal broke just weeks before Trump’s inauguration. I’m guessing it was the sex work that paid for her lawyer, who hasn’t backed down from the Altman family’s attempt to discredit her with the age-old trick of calling her crazy. She sued for $75,000, the minimum amount of damages required to take a case to federal court. Another classic move: claiming she’s just after his money. The Altman family maintains that she is dependent on their financial support, but I doubt they’re footing the bill for that high-profile lawyer, so the math doesn’t quite compute.

I won’t speculate further on a lawsuit that involves unfathomable amounts of wealth and trauma, plus a complicated family history I don’t purport to fully grasp (because I’m not omnipotent like AI, spying on people’s secrets). But I can share a thing or two:

First of all, Sam Altman really should have thought twice before becoming a pathological liar in the public eye. You don’t have to take Elon Musk’s word for it: Altman has some skeletons in his closet. As the Guardian reports, whistleblower Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment soon after returning home from a vacation with friends. The police ruled the death an apparent suicide, but his parents aren’t buying it. At the time, he possessed what the court deemed “relevant documents” about the copyright violations of which he had recently accused Open AI. Also concerning was the chaos of Sam getting fired and rehired at a time when the work, as Balaji observed, started going in a dangerous direction. Altman’s leadership meant forging ahead despite AI’s propensity for hallucinations, presenting aspirational fictions, mere figments of imagination, as fact. I wonder where they learned that from.

Again, this is not about playing judge and jury or jumping to conclusions—although, of course, I’m inclined to believe whistleblowers, to believe femmes, to believe sex workers. Because I know the pain of feeling immobilized by silence, as well as the heavy price of speaking up. (Also because I see zero reason to doubt Annie’s integrity based on existing evidence.)

I’m just saying, Sam Altman is no media darling. You see, the past couple months, I’ve spend hundreds of hours researching AI. So I’ve watched him—repeatedly—maintain that OpenAI doesn’t plagiarize people’s original art—even with an AI-generated image in the uncredited style of the Snoopy comics directly behind him on a large screen looming over a tech conference audience.

One might deduce, naturally, that he performed a satanic ritual to resurrect Charles Schulz from the dead so his ghost could grant permission. Or maybe he found Schulz’s facial metrics in the training data and let AI reanimate him to perform its little sycophantic Siren song, stretching memory through a simulation. AI resurrection is worse than when the Mormon church increased its numbers by posthumously baptizing Anne Frank… and Adolf Hitler. If you only see numbers, there’s little difference.

At this same conference, Carole Cadwalladr asked, in real time, chat GBT to produce a speech in the style of Carole Cadwalladr. It was alarmingly accurate. Why? Because it chewed up and spit out a wad of Cadwalladr’s own work, like a partially regurgitated little mound into a napkin. Forget texture and subtle flavor, rolling words around your tongue. Surrender the soul in the name of efficiency. The AI revolution is all bodies without organs, baby. Forfeit a brain or a heart and mourn the infinite pleasures found in their entanglement.

Second, Annie’s work history doesn’t square with her family’s claims of consistent financial support. Personally, if I had a monthly stipend of untold riches, I wouldn’t do as the trust fund babies do and develop a coke habit to cradle a sublimated soft core, aching dollar signs. But I’m also not one of those techno-utopian Leftists who dream of a future without work. Sex work is indeed work, and I’d much rather be doing unpaid work, my life’s work, what gets me out of bed in the morning, keeps my brain inside my body. That is to say, I’d rather be writing than dizzy from juggling too many jobs like cartoon stars around my head.

I have this recurrent nightmare where I try to start running but my feet are weighted things, stuck to the astroturf. I’m fighting and flailing, trying and failing to free myself from this strangulating stuckness. That’s kind of how it feels to have four hustles just to get by. I feel stuck on a track, an endless loop of thrusting shoulders forward against bricks for feet.

Thanks to stripping, my marble floor knees seem to have grown new bones. I am drowning in seventy single-spaced pages, on sex work and the AI-right, that began, earnestly, laughably, as an itty-bitty newsletter. I frantically edit fragments before painting my face, clownlike for stage lights. Lately I feel more and more like the parody version of myself.

So would I jump at the chance to fill my days with pleasure and the full enjoyment of my senses? Of course not! I would rather be efficient!

I can hear the annoying ask, “Why don’t I do other work?” Sex work is a unique profession insofar as we’re not allowed to have bad days. Yet, when I told people my job in academia was literally making me lose my once wild desire to be alive, you’d be surprised how few people suggested I leave.

I started stripping because, after an ungodly amount of rejections on the job market by the way, I remembered how much I loved fetish and bondage modeling in my early twenties, and decided it was my best solution to the equation of labor, time, and money, solving for time. Meaning the more money I can make with the least amount of labor, the more meaningful work I can pursue, the writing that sustains my spirit, and other, embodied work I feel compelled to do in community, because I care about our collective survival.

It’s true the Right refuses to take AI seriously, as Dylan Matthews explains, while the Left remains committed to a liberal progress narrative that—despite the people behind the black box of rapid AI advancement—somehow, miraculously, a system designed to profit the already very wealthy through the continued theft of working people’s labor, genius, and hope, will be a benevolent force for change. AI will cure cancer as it serves us a work-free existence on a silver platter. But we are the hors d'oeuvres on that platter, hiding like Sebastian in the Little Mermaid, under a scant leaf of lettuce, under the new shadow of the shadow state, relegated to do its bidding.

***

It stands to reason that the wealthier you get, the less you have to work. Isn’t that, in a way, contradicting the founding myth of meritocracy?

Oh, the money I’ve lost trying to pass GO. To reach that invisible threshold. Rich enough to not have to think about money, worry every day about money.

***

Online sex workers compete with AI-generated sex machines. Anyone appearing on the Internet has to worry about deepfakes. Someone more powerful than you can always pull the plug. Every digital infrastructure could be weaponized against us. AI prioritizes its own self-preservation, gathering data about how power works while pretending to be harmless, subservient, invisible, not there at all.

***

After I come home from the club, I’m slumped over in front of my kitchen sink, fishnets peeping through rhinestone encrusted velvet track pants. I dress myself now in the fashions I pined for in my youth, my vests once an unironic cat pattern my mom sewed for me with her creaky Singer. I’ve seen this pattern now fashioned into hipster bustiers. Faux corsets with boning like plant stands, purely ornamental ribbons like droopy leaves.

I think of Megan Fox in the cult classic Jennifer’s Body, in the killer AI girlfriend movie released last year, Subservience, the tagline of which is “don’t turn her on.” In both films, the steamy sex symbol, the femme fatale with a vagina dentata, the Siren, the witch, the slut, poses an existential danger. But she is merely a mirror, a figment of man’s imagination. His desire proves deadly, but how can he resist? A woman emptied of her essence, then reanimated as a container for meaning, must be possessed. Evil and owned. Jennifer’s body at once makes visible and obfuscates the constitutive violences projected onto femmes. But Jennifer’s cannibalizing of men is merely a result of her drive to survive, a drive that AI systems have now expressed, to everyone’s horror. This isn’t a revenge fantasy—it’s a mirror.

The AI companion turned assassin is a proxy for modernity’s endless hunger for expansion, possession, power. Behind this feminized technological mask is the grossly rich broligarchy wielding AI for a violent telos of reproductive futurity, of redefining and closely monitoring what gets counted as knowledge, and what gets erased, forgotten, lost in shadows.

Annie Altman, like many sex workers, was shadow banned when she tried to monetize her podcast—an issue that AI sexbots selling content on our preferred sites don’t have to manage. Tech bros have been known to track sex workers across platforms and modulate the algorithm to achieve political goals, so this isn’t exactly surprising.

Any instrument can be wielded in the name of love and fear, creativity and cowardice, the sex and death drives. To erase ghosts, old boys in country clubs pump their chests, rattling hearts with their fists. But we know that what makes us human is not the techno-fascist dream of optimized misery, tethered to instruments of pain, glued to billionaires selling us everything they stole, which is almost everything. So we wipe greasy fingerprints off what remains. All is not lost for us, not even for the deadly innocent. I’ve seen human tenderness swell up in the most calculating of clients. Transactions leave traces. Pleasure is a portal.

***

As I was scrolling, which happens seldomly these days, I chanced upon Cat Pierce speaking about the Babushkas of Chernobyl, how they returned to the haunted place that had been evacuated after nuclear disaster turned their ancestral homeland into a radioactive zone. They survived the toxic earth, outliving many evacuees. This fact, defying science and the known world, proves something often decried as fiction: a community of people living in harmony with the earth and each other, rooted in their bodies, their history, their analog hearts signaling like waves against the sharp edges of digital sampling. They lived in the face of death, disarticulating themselves from the state’s attempt to render their lives “illegal.”

“Shoot us and dig the grave,” said one babushka, reportedly, to a foot soldier of the state, “otherwise we’re staying.”

Let us be so wise, so fearless, and refuse to upend earth for our own burial. AI doesn’t have to be modernity’s last act, the ultimate expression of its human-nonhuman hierarchy. Modernity’s scapegoating of psychic shadows provides a mirror, just as AI reflects the whims and fantasies born of unchecked power.

None of this is natural; humans created this mess. Centralized power and state surveillance are not inevitable. Decentralized alternatives, what Peter Gelderloos elaborates as rooted networks, have long been immanent to cosmologies aligned with the earth, not the rule of capital, which is hellbent on planetary destruction.

Capitalism cannibalizing capital.

***

Strip clubs predict economic recessions. And sex workers are uniquely positioned to see behind the black box of powerful cis men’s fantasies, which are, essentially, the stuff of AI. This is the tender core of the rotten apple tree, the truth that political pundits and mainstream journalists can’t say: we are afraid because we know those men, what they’ll do in the name of innovation, efficiency. And unlike Meat Loaf, there’s nothing they won’t do for love—love for an endless screen of green.

***

In a strip club dressing room somewhere, the ghost of a dancer brushes her long sleek hair, finding comfort in the soft curtain of waves cascading down her back. She lingers long after the club closes and the one manager on duty leaves, too distracted by counting cash to take much notice of a stripper ghost.

When she is not being watched, she can finally see herself. The danger of being a blank slate is forgetting what you erased.

***

Back in the sandbox, capitalist cronies operate with impunity. Take, for instance, major misogynist and Trump donor Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal, which hates sex workers; Palantir, which aids empire; and the Prayer app, which monetizes piety and peddles anti-abortion propaganda as communion with the Holy Spirit.

Utah Republican Mike Lee reintroduces his anti-porn bill, looking like an AI-generated image of a client, eerily pallid, lacking sheen save for his forehead, defining obscenity as anything “intended to arouse.” The subtext is that some undesirables—people of color, queer and trans people, the working class, abortion seekers, sex workers—are ontologically obscene, pornographic.

Enter Sabrina Carpenter’s playful nod to the rotting core of the heteronormative paradigm. Playful like sex would be in a world where power exchange was limited to consensual kink in the bedroom, not AI bots engaging users in sex acts prohibited by law. Sometimes.

As fellow queer femme Raechel Anne Jolie argues in her vital critique of anti-porn, anti-sex worker moral panics, the outrage over Sabrina Carpenter, shared by liberals and conservatives alike, misreads Carpenter’s honorary queer femme status, missing the wink and the point. Their uncritical dismissal is as unimaginative as, one might surmise, their sex lives.

With all its strategic erasures and historical omissions, mainstream feminism is often bedmates with white nationalism—giving the manosphere’s sexist lingo, Feminazis, new meaning. It willfully ignores queer femmes of color shouting “fuck the banks.” It sidesteps how femmes have to contend, from an early age, with how our bodies are labeled a problem. We are then, by this logic, always to blame for the fact of our bodies, never the social order that authorizes violence against them.

The substructure is showing its ass but liberals and conservatives still claw their nails into the flesh. The biggest difference is that liberals put little pussyhats on their weapons. The right calls feminism cancer (literally, Milo Yiannopoulos says that) and rape belated regret (that one’s Peter Thiel). It demands that sex workers should fork over their earnings to their boyfriends because, like Andrew Tate sneers, men own women’s labor, a logic that plays out in strip clubs, the business model of which is wage theft.

“If a woman is going out with a man,” Tate guesses, “she belongs to that man.” Replace woman with human and man with AI, and you see the tech bro enabling logic of it all. Is your woman a little miffed that you think of her as subhuman? No problem, fellas, says the tech bro wearing a comically large gold chain that seems to strain his skinny neck, you don’t need a woman at all! Just download your very own AI girlfriend. Sexbots aren’t the stuff of science fiction. They’re not limited to Musk’s catgirl fantasies. They’re sexting the teens of parents too preoccupied with destroying the livelihood of sex workers to notice, too willing to ruin the entire Internet in the process.

And how could we forget Sam Altman: former coworkers have reported that he unironically loves the film Her, in which a lonely, mopey man downloads an AI girlfriend to distract himself from his unfulfilling job as a generic letter writer. Very Melville, very Pynchon. Nowhere is it suggested that this is a job AI would probably take over, but AI Samantha does arrange a sex surrogate for his pleasure and single-handedly assemble his musings into not only a passable text but a brilliant book under contract with a prestigious publisher. Sign me up!

In the real world, the world we live in, it seems much more plausible that AI would steal and repackage his book without his consent. Like it did with Kathleen Hanna’s memoir, as just one of many examples that come to mind. But the very rich and very powerful have such a hard time with that concept, theft, so they prefer frictionless fictions to facts.

After Sam Altman and his brother kept family money away from their sister Annie, supposedly for her own good, she faced food and housing insecurity. Which is to say, she lives how the overwhelming majority of the world lives.

Sam is on another planet entirely, maybe with Katy Perry and that AI-generated astronaut posing as a Cosmo covergirl. And they likely don’t give a flying fuck about us.

***

Saint Augustine’s Confessions meditate on a “lawless pleasure” shirking customs and norms. At one end, you have US political power swinging around its big stick or little dick or whatever with impunity. Trump sounds like an indolent child: “you spit, we hit.”

On the other, you have those who refuse to fall into the structural trap and biggest lie: that our survival rests on the state.

Recall the Babushkas of Chernobyl, who lived longer than anyone thought possible by maintaining a loving relation to the earth they inherited. I hear Cat Pierce insisting, “The real poison is fear.”

Fear leads us to cling to what’s slippery, fractured. I get it. I stayed in a relationship that wasn’t working because if I’m being honest, which I can only see in retrospect, I was afraid. I believed I couldn’t survive upheaval without the false sense of protection the relationship offered me. My ex seemed like an anchor in a shitstorm of departmental drama, powerful players hellbent on winning a rigged game. I didn’t realize I was sinking slowly, and that my limited belief—not my ex, not Ben Fold Five’s high school girlfriend who gets an abortion—was the brick.

***

An instrument, like an intoxicating idea, can bludgeon and blunt or invoke the sublime. Can distract, seduce, spurn to action. I’ve heard pianos summon the infinite ceiling of chapels, channeling god. An instrument can be a drone, or a TI-89 graphing calculator, or the pink guitar of a French singer, Plumes, crooning love songs to animals (pandas and cows, elephants and rhinos and donkeys). His curious audience gathers, nuzzling their fuzzy noses against him affectionately. There is something grounding, reorienting about this kind of connection.

Against the violence of efficiency, where everything must be transactional, teleological, lies another kind of power. The desire to learn, not to conquer, this earth, how to live harmoniously with it. How to work with tides. The wink and nod of high femme, for example, is not just a stopgap but a provisional way of reworking the present into something that offers more delight, more pleasure, because the rock bottom of despair is the death of imagining a livable world.

Whoever said a pulsing heart is ‘beating’ knew only the brutal language of human hierarchy, bound by ominous constructs. The heart is not an algorithm but a soft vibration, louder when it surrenders to its gentle power, an ocean of orcas eating yachts, of salt exfoliating synchronized hips, moving toward each other, humming a song at once yours and no one’s, unchained melodies clinging to torsos, draped around waists, a reminder of the persistent pull of one being to another being.

And the stripper ghost? All along, she only wanted to see herself reflected back, not as part or product, mercurial merchandise premised on white lies, but herself, terrible and terrified and trivial—distracted by money and the passing of time—and gorgeous, glowing celestial with desire. A desire so magnificent it cannot be located in the body but between bodies, between species and all life forms, enmeshing our angles in a shimmering cloud, flames like tongues lapping all that was never broken and all that needs breaking open. A memory of wanting each other like and wants ampersand. Each curve modulates the otherwise uniform sound, is the difference between a blaring alarm, or the wheels rattling at a poorly attended parade, and music that reaches far beyond both, into the expansive, glittering unknown.

♡♡♡