Ftrain, by Paul Ford

Detail from Albrecht Dürer, “The Angel with the Key to Bottomless Pit.”

On a hunch I searched the files—I'm leaving the name out because I don't want that SEO—and found myself—15 tweets from the daily “in your network” email that Twitter sent out back in the day, and a citation from an article about Bitcoin. Of course. Oddly some tweets are redacted—a URL, so perhaps they just automatically scrubbed URLs. I expected to feel some way or another but aside from a kind of grim irony it doesn’t mean anything. Just database noise. I told my wife and she went, “huh.”

When you participate in the world you then participate in the worst of it. You can’t write up a sign at the beginning of an article that says “no monsters.” All attempts at this fail. Even if you did they'd ignore the sign, because they're monsters. Someone awful will eventually read this too. Maybe you.

What makes this so wild to me, looking at other emails, is the legibility of the evil. I have two words I use excessively: Metabolize, as in how will this system metabolize this change? And legibility, as in, can people perceive this change? In general I find that my function in life, prose, and organizational management is to make the way change works through a system legible. I'm a consultant.

But there's no need to explain anything here. Their intent is always right in the subject line of the email. That's what makes it so confusing. No moral quandaries, no ambiguity, no seeking, no neoliberal Davosian hedging. A typical day for an associate:

• Go to work at the bank.

• Go yell at some underlings

• Email your buddy on his island asking if he could hook you up with your dose of exploitative cruelty

• Ask him for tax advice

It's a monolithic system of greed and narcissistic feeding—miserable, transactional, high-fiving vampires descending on the orphanage with wide grins. All humans are things, except for you, who lead Harvard. All in a blobby database of subject lines. One wonders about BCCs.

And this is what we knew, always: But in popular imagination it involves masks and rituals, Hellfire clubs, and cruel viziers. Things cooking in fireplaces and oaths on parchment. Basically our myths are useless. Of course Satan has a gmail account and posts to 4chan. Milton at his wildest never imagined two-factor authentication.

All the masks came off. I mean we all have our masks. But this is They Live level. Goblin faces everywhere, and no need for secret glasses. Not even suits and ties, but middle-aged shits in soft linen shirts. Comfortable on the deck chairs as they plan revenge on Gawker.

In general it seems like anything too large, with too much process, was kept at bay. Because accountability would have rapidly identified the void, called attention, ruined the party. Any orderly system based on rational actors, good faith, and accountability was avoided at all costs. No systems allowed, only people who could be trusted, and twisted.

This is what runs the world now, this network, and this is the mold into which they are pouring the whole country, and they hope the world. We have the Enron emails too but they're deadly stuff—the performance of bureaucracy in the service of greed, but greed is a pretty minor sin compared to whatever this is.

Why in God's name did they keep invoking his name to win the election, knowing what was here? Convenience, I guess. An assumption they could keep the lid on, or shape it, or use it further. How could you go about your days running global finance, playing tennis, hugging your kids, knowing you're named in here? Actually I guess it would be pretty easy. (The inability to metabolize shame is a secret power. Our side is all shame, addicted to it, and they can and do use that addiction to manipulate us, too.)

It's a reminder, finding my name popping up in those files: You’re always closer to the malevolent heart of things than you think. And typically you'll never know it, that you're just skimming over the water and below it's all sharks. Unless you fall over the side, or get pushed, or—deciding that you are a shark yourself, decide to jump in. Or unless they put a freaking search engine in front of the fraction they release, while continuing—barely even pretending otherwise—to hide the most implicated. Nothing makes sense but if you take a long breath you gotta admit it also makes perfect sense.

I am a passive verb. I operate in language and business and descriptions of future state; basically my brain is entirely for describing. I find action confusing. This part of myself is not always under my control. So I gravitate to actors.

My spouse acts. She takes news hard. She does more every day, is a node in a network of people who act to make things better. She invites, cooks, assembles, 3D-prints, coordinates. She brings 20 people around the table to make things that will be given away, and since the table can't hold that many people, sets up another table right next to it.

This leads to some funny processes; one night I host an event about AI and marketing at work—the opposite of an activist occurrence. I moderate. But the caterer is out of slider buns so sends us 100 full-sized hamburgers, leaving 80 because no one wants whole snack burgers before dinner. And trays of assorted apps and crudités. We mingle for hours. I close up the office—I like being last to leave—and pile up all the remaining trays and bring it all home on the Q train in Fresh Direct bags (the Birkin of New York City mutual aid).

There are waiting clean, new plastic trays by the hundreds. We'll also recycle the aluminum trays that hold the burgers. I pack dinners for a half hour, two per tray—you want to get as many calories in a box as you can, even if it smushes a bun. I put bits of tape on each container then mark vegetarian vs. meat in Sharpie. Then I repack the Fresh Direct bag with the containers, and jam them into the fridge.

I find this all boring and wish someone would acknowledge my decency and good intentions and do it for me. But then I put on headphones and lean into the process and it goes by fine.

Each community fridge has its caretakers; my spouse goes with the food and comes back with a story: The burgers were exactly right, this appetizer will probably not be eaten, and so forth. It’s all halal which is great but not mandatory because so many are Caribbean. I love this data, which is localized and cannot be found on Wikipedia. There's pleasure in pure information. Did you know it is offensive to whistle in some cultures?

Between this and the biweekly food distro—do I love cleaning up when she drives the 40 meals to the site? Not really, but it's the least I can do—and the donations to the food bank and the pandemic mutual aid and working with the school, we’ve fed what? Thousands of meals, I guess. Hundreds of people. Maybe ten thousand meals over a few years. Bulk bags of chicken breast, crates of broccoli.

That feels nice. Some full bellies. I remember it, getting bags of groceries from the community church. God all you want is Oreos. Lucky if you get grocery brand sugar cookies. Of course, now I take Mounjaro so I don’t want to eat, and to keep my blood sugar within mortal ranges.

We are, and this was our unspoken goal, infrastructure. I’ve never felt like I belong anywhere at all. Nonetheless I think we may be load-bearing. I like being infrastructure: Invisible but useful.

I emailed this to 311, and a year or so later those bikes were gone.

Today she went to a tiny bike shop run by two immigrants to drop something off and it was empty, stripped.

It was, I am sorry to say, the absolute greatest bike shop. In this neighborhood or any.

A NYC-typical shop you go in and they look you up and down and go, Come back in two weeks. Now you have no bicycle. You go back in two weeks. You went in with loose brakes but now they say, We had to replace your frame, it's made of pure moon aluminum, that's all we could get. So it's $6,000. And you have to pay.

But this one, pizzabox chef kissing fingers, it had a Spanish name and served everyone—delivery drivers, the ultra-Orthodox, intensely costumed bike nuts, and trundlers like me. They fixed your brakes in ten minutes for ten dollars, rewiring, and you'd give them $20. Right on the sidewalk. One guy would just run tools to another. Another kind of infrastructure.

It's all guesswork, working backwards from the empty shop, but—obviously they saw where this was headed and cleared out. Odds are they had their bugout bags packed, at least metaphorically. Paid in cash all those years, hopefully a lot went home and got stashed away. And a wonderful thing is taken out of the world. And I’m back to two week bike repairs.

I go there to get my bike fixed—but my wife had gone to drop off some different infrastructural output—little cards and whistles—for the deliveristas and was very sad that it was all gone. Told me all about it. I stretch out on the floor and she talks to me. She is very, very bummed.

I was quiet for a while. My business partner emigrated here as a child; I'd had my piano lesson in the morning—my teacher is Argentinian. Next morning I'll see my Lebanese therapist. Immigrants are essential infrastructure; the city collapses without them in all of its aspects—transit, culture, arts, finance, government, even policing. Our mayor was born in Kampala.

But look, I said, not knowing anything but trying to sort it out, this is a grievous time and it might not get better. We should think about that. Maybe we won't die as Americans. (Which made me sad. I would like to die as an American.) 

But…we probably will.

I am trying to update my website, and importing all the things I've written over the years. And I keep finding posts from decades ago. We knew this was here the whole time. We saw it when we invaded Iraq. And I found this thing I posted 22 years ago—“A Chinese View of the Statue of Liberty.” But it’s from 1885. The author wanted to be an attorney, and didn't have the right. I keep listening to a recording of the Bible. I'm trying to figure out what stories we are telling. 

I know you're worried I'm getting religious but trust me I am a stone atheist. I regret it but I am. But how different groups can believe the same story and come to these conclusions—you know in Jon Dos Passos's American Trilogy it's about Sacco and Vanzetti and the famous line from it is, “All right we are two nations.” And yet it seems intolerable to us. It breaks our heart. And I want to understand that, but every time I think I do, I can't quite figure it. Maybe it’s in the Bible. Or I should just finish Dos Passos. Both are hard to read.

The carpet is soft and gray. The steam heat is warm. I have a house. I have a refrigerator.

This will seem like a jump but stay with me. When I went on Mounjaro, I felt this immense sense of relief and freedom, and the only narratives that made sense were trans narratives. You take a shot, the hormone changes you who are, it's baffling, but for the first time in your life you see a future where you have some control. When there were shortages I would panic and despair.

We turned the world onto hormones. I did it because my endocrinologist prescribed it. We all lost all this weight. We could have realized just how wonderful it must be to be trans, to understand that the food noise was an analog to gender noise, but we did the opposite. We doubled down on hatred and made it worse. At the moment of maximum potential empathy we mounted a national twinkie defense. We see ourselves in the other person and it enrages us. We are broken entirely.

(I am always running my predictive model. Cynicism has high predictive function. Patriotism has very little. Hope does have some. Empathy has a lot, actually, if you listen to it very carefully. But empathy carefully applied mostly brings bad news.)

I wanted to write about that, about this possible bloom of empathy but I couldn’t find a way that didn’t require the reader to feel empathy for me. And you just can’t ask for that any longer, or I can’t. Empathy is dead from all angles. If you profess it you're a grifter from one side and a mark from another. Everyone has chosen a side, and seekers after common cause are good for target practice, only.

But stretched out on the floor I said, But I think that will pass.

I think it is good to see the real face of this place. It's good for people to look in the mirror and see what we do, the ways we kill people. This is what we are.

Now we have seen it. And most people want to do better. They may not let us, but we do. And so I take a lot of faith and hope in that. We keep finding each other, meeting around tables. [A friend] distributed 30,000 pounds of food in Minneapolis.

I got up and did the dishes, there are always some. Did I say it all exactly thus? No, but in this shape.