The Fall Of The Faux-man Empire:
A Cultural Criticism and Running Log

Fiona Flynn

I live in a bubble made up of people I have deemed real and those who are cardboard
cutouts if I dare to get too close and push them over. Hours spent doom scrolling on the cyber war zone of my post-ironic social media accounts have molded the physical and the ether together so now I know no bounds between things on the screen and the drugged up body I am stepping over as I walk down the pavement. I have become so skilled at tapping a keyboard that I can barely keep track of what I type. My jittering hands move with more speed than my anxious brain. In my dreams I have full text conversations or Instagram interactions so that I spend the next day thinking I’m actually quite a sociable person, even if it is only online. I could be sending you an @edgyhegel meme while ignoring you at the coffee shop or dodging my reply guys in the dms as they simultaneously pass me by in their silver infinity sedan. The basis on which I place reality is tipping, spinning, and deteriorating into pixelated fragments that surge in and out of the surface of this physical body. Every weekend I black out, partly from alcohol partly from mania, so that my life feels like a flagstone path in a garden, but where there should be moss between the slabs of rock instead is a deep drop into black and I have to jump from memory to memory of flagstone, avoiding the black of non-remembrance. In an effort to retrieve my lost braincells (I can feel their absence), I read a book each week, as if each flowery, wordy
sentence that whips around the page will somehow grow my brain synapses.

Reading thus far, it may seem like all I do is sit in my room and allow my body to corrode into my stained mattress as my phone becomes permanently cemented to my hand like some futuristic conjoined twin. I’d like to remind you that all of us are already at that point whether we know it or not. You are a conjoined twin. But no. Even when my perception of reality is especially failing me, to the point that strangers faces meld into those of familiar ones, I continue to pursue my wandering through corporeality. I truly do not understand how some of you still have social anxiety in this imitation crab meat California roll of a society. 

Firstly, most quote unquote people are not even real. Here’s a list of those I can factually say are not real: Tourists. They spawn from some made up lands called absurd names like “Kenosha, Wisconsin” or “Sandusky, Ohio” and expect me to believe that. Their creators were so hasty in the making of their behavior functions that most of them glitch and idle around completely deprived of any social or bodily awareness. Just in the amount of times I have almost run them over is enough evidence. Even when they throw up their arms as if they have any actual autonomy I continue on my way singing along to my music, almost regretful that they didn’t step one more foot in front of my bumper.

Children and the elderly. I know some of you will get angry at this one but here’s my argument. Neither parties have any sort of real consciousness. Both are a walking liability whom at any moment could wander into a strangers car or off a cliff. Their comprehension of their surroundings is basically on the same level as someone who has washed down a Xanax with 5 tequila shots in the matter of half an hour. From personal experience at that point of incoherency you could literally shoot yourself in the head without hesitation and not realize it.

Anyone who is going down the maggot hole of micro trends and consistently shops from
Shein, Asos, Edikted, TikTok Shop, etc. etc. etc. You are a complete micro trend eating zombie to
the consumerism slave ship that commodifies anything it’s Medusa eyes touch, cheapening it into a conglomerate of suicidal atoms that will pollute, destroy, and thwart as it sits on your porch until you wear it once to only then sit in your closet for the rest of its useless life. You shuttle yourselves out every Friday night in your polyester, formaldehyde drenched skin suit hoping to feel like some ideation of coquette, office siren, mob wife winter, tomato girl summer, corpcore, clean girl, succubus chic, coastal cowgirl (y’allternative), or blokette, when really you are just a clone of the next group of girls to walk through the bar door.

Influencers. I feel like this is an obvious one. Who even knows if theirs a meat bag
attached to the online personality. Calling them names or coming for their integrity would be a
low blow so instead I’ll say this—there is no sign of life behind their eyes. Note that many celebrities are real people (there’s a spectrum). 

Most people you meet at bars. They exist exclusively within the sticky walls of the Hotline Bling blaring establishment. Some may even be a figment of your inebriated imagination. This is especially true for anyone who buys you a drink at the bar. You could start speaking French to their face and they would probably reply back “mets-toi à genoux, petite salope.” You can really make a fun game out of bar hopping if you remember this.

Don’t misinterpret these list as simply specimens of my unequivocal hatred. Quite
contrary to that, I actually have friends that fall into these categories. I have met people within
these lines that I really enjoy. But that does not mean they are real. Real recognizes real. But
sometimes real likes to play with barbies.

Secondly (and I know I have been preaching this for a while but bear with me), jobs are
not real. Please for the jury of the court tell me what a “Communications Coordinator” means. Take a stroll through Indeed and soon the meaning of manager, director, or associate will disburse into a phantasmic blasphemic chamber of futility. When I think of the jobs that my father is telling me to look into, all I imagine is an office forty stories high, each level filled with fake people imbecilely walking into corners with empty papers in their hands, conversing over “demographics,” “reach and engagement,” and most of all “emails, emails, emails.” If suddenly all of the creative directors of the world developed some brain eating fungus I guarantee the only change we’d see is a few less annoying instagram pages loitering on our discover page. All anyone seems to be doing is making another inutile reel or campaign with just the right amount of millennial cringe and gen z queerness to convince the fools, jesters, and harlots that all this means really anything at all. Is this embarrassment really what we’ve told ourselves is humanities purpose? That isn’t to say I think we should all be out foraging for berries and drinking from waterfalls. But to think we have become so disillusioned with false importance and diluted with superfluous enchantments that I have to now listen to the tenth person today tell me they work as a digital marketer for blank blank meaningless blank company is exhausting. No more street ware brands, no more bikini lines, no more wellness labels.

Here’s another predicament I have found myself in. Inexplicably feeling so unseen and seen at the same time. I will spend hours in my head thinking diabolical thoughts, talking and joking to myself, getting the most pharisaic reactions from the not real people aforementioned, only to then come across a fucking meme that sums it all up. Some mind-numbing world- encompassing one liner over a photo of a deer will literally make me question if I am even having my own experience or are we all just experiencing the same pointless existence all the time all at once. I fear this is a quandary I am not yet suited to confront. Maybe better suited to get to the bottom of that when I am walking through the desolate land of what is left of America after we have finally imploded on ourselves.

Finally I will say (until further notice), we have become sickeningly, grotesquely, abominably fat. Consume, ingest, indulge, gratify, hedonise, until we are bursting at the seams of total glutinous moral abandonment. Why do we find ourselves so disgusted by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Jabba the Hutt? Uncanny Valley my friend. Because somewhere deep beyond your capitalized steam roller brain still lives a piece of the animal that we have suppressed under years of corsets, politics, media, and swollen heads. The tiktoks that play the trifecta of a Subway Surfer game, a screen grab of some satisfying ASMR video, and the pointless story created by chat GPT infiltrating your brain through audio as well as hauty, vexatious captions is all I need to
prove this.

I am mogging every blonde trick around me because I have been lookmaxxing with the incels and avoiding the brain rot lobotomization of Cocomelon and Crumble Cookie reviews. Me and my sigmas are rejecting modernity and embracing tradition: trading in our iPhones for Motorola RAZRs and puffing on juuls, asking strangers on Omegle “Can We Talk about The Political State of The World Right Now??” I will not be your cyber slut and whore out my amygdala on cheap low effort content. Do the girl math and understand we are one more twitch streamer away from being a nation in its beta era. It’s giving fall of the Roman Empire. Free will is a scam, religion is a hoax, the culture is dead and the TikTok algorithm doesn’t actually care about your IBS. If you need me I’ll be sending nudes to guys in Arizona for money and taking the LSAT online while tripping on acid in a car wash watching the gay rainbow soap trickle down my windshield until the whipping carousel of bristles comes and pounds it away.