Streamlining

Dear diary,

Everyone’s interviewing everyone nowadays. That’s my take on modern times. In the past, only a single Star Reporter would be allowed to conduct interviews, and the only soul that this reporter was able to interview was the nation’s High King: “What’s your favorite type of burger?” (Ham.) “What’s your favorite color of body-stocking?” (Nude.) But now that the average citizen has access to lapel microphones and reel-to-reel tape recorders, anyone is able to interview anyone. So that’s why, nowadays, everyone’s interviewing everyone.

And I applaud this development; I like that we’re all able to get to know each other better:

A garbage collector interviews a lawyer and finds out that they both share an interest in lovemaking. An astronaut interviews a librarian and discovers, after the very first question is met with awkward silence and an unblinking stare, that the latter is dead.

I myself would like to interview all of the people who live in my small town, here in Thief River Falls. I’d like to make a documentary film where I simply sit down with each of my neighbors and let them say whatever they want. I’d like to let them represent their own self to me — to us, the audience of the outside world. I’m interested in seeing how individuals prefer to be perceived, when they themselves are allowed to choose what we hear about them.

I assume some folks would want the interview to focus on their children (they really are great parents, you can’t deny that: their kids are so fine); and other neighbors would want to wax eloquent about their career accomplishments — especially the aforementioned garbage collector, lawyer, astronaut, and librarian. I’d like to lob softball questions to everyone, so that they develop a trust in me: they would soon learn to see me as a friend; someone who’s on their side and whom they can trust. This way, I would also secure access to future interviews with these people — I might even become the only reporter they feel comfortable talking to; thus, in the case that they accomplish anything of worldwide interest, the big networks will send their professional news teams to this neighbor’s house and try to get the breaking scoop, but this neighbor would inform them:

“Sorry, I only do interviews with Bryan, who lives down the block in that brown house there. He actually listens to me and allows me to speak freely; he doesn’t put words in my mouth or pressure me to give him a sound-bite that will appear sensational when slickly edited, just to boost ratings. The only reason that you bigshot corporate news outlets care about me now is that I’ve found the cure for cancer. Yesterday you didn’t give a fig who I was or what I was researching. But when Bryan came and featured me in his documentary about the inhabitants of Thief River Falls, he let me talk uninterrupted for as long as I liked; so I told him about all the cute things that my dog does. And then I gave him my life story. At a certain point of the interview, I even started to make up lies, just to see if Bryan would challenge me or push back. But he let me speak; and, in the final cut of the film, he only lightly edited my speech for style: pretty much everything I said was kept in the film. Even the part about me being a ‘lady of the night’. That’s only a dream of mine — I never actually dared to monetize my beauty.”

So that’s what I’d like to do for my first feature-length film. And, for my second, I’d like to interview the rich. I mean the ultra-rich; not just the regular old boring normal rich (they’re basically poor, in my opinion). Cuz I’m fascinated by this idea of automation, which is usually considered as being enforced from the top down, and I’d like to see how it might work to consider it from the bottom up. Does that make sense? — I fear that most moviegoers might not get the connection that I’m trying to make; so, here, let me explain:

Say that you and I are a farmer. OK, so at first we own two oxen: they plow our field just fine; but it takes them a while to do the work. Then we decide to purchase a mechanical field-ripper. That field-ripper accomplishes in one instant what it took our pair of oxen a fortnight to do. So it saves us time. Now, since time is money, we become ultra-rich. Moreover, we formerly owned a dozen moving-trucks: we used these to haul to the marketplace all the fake meat that our field-ripper yielded (fake meat is made from vegetables — if you find that phrase offensive, simply swap it for a more tasteful term, like potatoes or soybeans); and we were forced by law to pay twelve human disciples to pilot these trucks. But then a team of self-driving oxen were invented, which look exactly like steel bulls — the kind that are used to woo clowns in rodeos. And a giant trailer is welded to the haunches of these robo-oxen’s mainframe (yes, the computer that impersonates the mind of this contraption is so large that it has its own haunches; however, don’t worry: the oxen have assured us that they felt no pain when the trailer was affixed to their exterior, even tho the process required the use of hot flames to meld the respective metals together, for these creatures are animatronic: they’re only standard machinery that resembles beasts of burden, whose souls are likewise artificial); this trailer could be filled with fake meat and hauled to the market; which eliminated the need for that fleet of trucks that we owned. In short, this single team of robo-oxen allowed us not only to sell off our vehicle fleet but also to fire all the mortals who were bloating our payroll (that is, we terminated their employment; we did not literally set them ablaze — they did that to themselves, as a futile protest). Now here’s my point:

When the living oxen were replaced by the mechanized field-ripper, we saved time and made money. Yet when the human drivers and their trucks were replaced by the robo-oxen, we saved money but froze time — which is to say, we broke even, temporal-wise: the job that the robo-oxen usurped (the hauling of the fake meat to the marketplace) still required the same amount of intervals to perform as it did aforetime, only now we no longer suffered the cost of maintaining the trucks or paying the salaries and benefits to our human livestock. Now here’s my point:

I wanna figure out what the ultra-rich actually DO. — I mean, what do they do all day, that keeps them so ultra-rich? I plan on figuring out the answer to this question, by way of conducting interviews. I will then edit these interviews into a documentary film; and when my subjects finally behold their performance on the big screen, in the theater, they will smile when they see how faithfully I allowed them to portray themselves:

“What’s your favorite type of burger?” (Nothing.) “What do you do to maintain your place among the ultra-rich?” (...)

Now the answer to that last question is the reason that I roped you hither today, O gentle reader. — Do you see where this is going? When the ultra-rich disclose their detailed duties (as they will, undoubtedly, since their vanity will not be able to resist preening all the fine points of their endowment, in answer to my inquiry, when I lure them into the safe space of my filmed interview), I say, when the ultra-rich unveil the secret of their success, we can pencil down in our notebook the content of this admission, exactly as if we were stealing the recipe for a pie. We can then program these ingredients into a source code that will result in THE PERFECT ANDROID.

In other words, we will automate away the ultra-rich. Their place will be taken over by electronic entities. And these entities will be molded out of titanium: They shall appear unique, while bearing a sisterly affinity from one to the next, so that each evokes a variation of Manet’s “Olympia” (in consequence of which, the artificial oxen in the transport sector will thank us profusely). Replacing the coterie of Scrooges who once ruled the world, these six or seven robotic maids will proceed to vend fake meat more cost-effectively than any mere man-dreamt schema could have done. This will afford the auto-laboring oxen a fresher quality of air to pretend to breathe, because new and improved pollutants will imbue the atmosphere. For, think about it: nobody will actually need to consume the fake meat. (Machines don’t eat.) Thus no more solid waste will be shat. And the electricity that the androids suck from their bottles will be transformed into exploits without dispensing more than a drop of liquid exhaust. (Machines rarely urinate.) Every ounce of energy invested will go into either making decisions about the corporation’s stocks, or help to motivate the field-slaves. And the neat thing about this setup is that not only do none of these bots require organic sustenance (so we can keep reusing the fake meat from last year’s harvest, instead of bothering to produce a fresh crop — maybe we can even get rid of the field-ripper mechanism, since it’s good for nothing now) but robots couldn’t care less about paper money — they have nothing to buy! — therefore the market itself can be sold on the market.

SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS

If we automate the ultra-rich, we will no longer need to pay our employees, as both we (the owners) and they (our private property) will be robots. Nothing will need to be bought or sold, either, with the exception of the marketplace; therefore the marketplace can retire from public life.

Stock prices will soar, however, because computers love to watch math figures explode. Our mechanical farming tools, being no longer necessary, will be melted into one ginormous heap, forming a mountain of iron, which we shall populate with real gods; all of which will be make-believe, thus only requiring minor maintenance (periodic feedings of bones and fat from sacrificed animals — we can designate the humans and oxen left over from the previous, outdated economy for this purpose). It will be fun.

The poetry that will be written in this improved system will sell well, too. And the vampires will be able to die whenever they like. Tame elephants will no longer need to be shot up with amphetamines so that they work faster — they will naturally want to help haul logs out of the forest. (Books of poetry require paper pages, and machines are prolific, so we’re gonna need a pretty fair amount of lumber.) And there will be no forests, anyway, because we will have flattened the landscape so that it’s easier to paint.

Only plants need air to breathe — therefore to hell with them. You try to produce a fresco on canvas with trees in it, you must execute a jagged line, and keep changing the color of your brush when filling it in (green, light-green, yellow-green, etc.); whereas a flatline can be achieved by simply hugging the “x”-axis of a graph. Make the sky slate; make the ground gray — boom: job is done. That’s the way to mass-manufacture masterpieces.

Yet it is recommended that we maintain the pastimes of lovemaking and interviews, cuz our data proves that both of those things seem enjoyable. To keep this perfected society in ideal health, occasionally we’ll need to exercise our physical and mental aspects. But we shall combine these two activities into one, so that all lovemaking shall be rendered indistinguishable from a televised interview: one shall not exist without the other. Yet it should be permissible for both parties to begin any interview fully clothed, even prudely so, and then gradually to work into a state of unbridled passion. Or, alternately, the parties could begin a lovemaking session in a wordless, feral manner (like an old-fashioned “quickie” or one-night stand, from back in the days when free-time was scarce), then slowly introduce sweet suspirations or moans that ultimately evolve into lingual units and further arrange themselves into sentences that are exchanged between the participants in the form of a proper conversation, albeit unclad. Either way, the two functions should be combined, so as to maximize productivity and efficiency.