When you brand yourself as the decay of empire, your brand is evergreen.
Capital, politics, religion—all fall into a vat of green credit offset industrial runoff and emerge a transmuted monster with a thousand eyes. It’s a Lockheed Martin float at the Gay Pride Parade. It’s the ExxonMobil educational exhibit at the aquarium. It’s Hunter Biden’s crack pipe. It’s Sydney Sweeney’s great genes. It’s the latest culture wars stemming from the culture wars about the culture wars.
I find myself in the eye of an all American storm; the biblical kind. My finger is on the pulse. I’ve captured a feeling that everyone knows, but can’t quite put into words; everyday alienation tethering hive-mind schizophrenia. It’s a prophetic tornado of mass hysteria. We propel together down a mudslide in a recalled Ford Pinto, together in a race to the bottom. As we fumble downhill voices ping inside the walls of our echo chambers, causing a unique form of psychosis born from the postmodern algorithmic age.
I’m a collector of this feeling; an itch you cannot scratch. I find it in every corner of our precarious sociopolitical landscape. The hell we’ve made for ourselves has no exit. I’m the court jester of neoliberal hell, adorned with doll eyes, ice blonde hair, inner world half earnest - half ironic. I doomscroll the days away, critiquing the panopticon from inside the panopticon. It may seem hard to sell something so unsellable, but the commodity machine will always find a way.
@neoliberalhell for The Branded Issue of @kingkongmagazine .
Photographs @dan_mancini
