"WhatsApp for the spaceless non-void into which a blind universe expands."You can no longer expect forty years of drudgery and then a spluttering death from good old-fashioned blue-collar pneumoconiosis. You can't make it through life hating your boss instead of yourself, not when new forms of labour discipline demand that you be your own boss. Your flesh is already obsolete. But there's an answer: to survive in the coming era of automation, you have to bring it in faster; announce its apocalypse, learn to code, add yourself to the army of programmers building an appier tomorrow. [...]
Desperation is everywhere; exhibitors make lunging grabs for any passers-by wearing an "INVESTOR" lanyard, proffer stickers and goodies, scream for attention on their convention-standard signs. These do not, to put it kindly, make a lot of sense. "Giving you all the tools you need to activate and manage your influencer marketing relationships," promises one. "Leverage what is known to find, manage, and understand your data," entices another. The gleaming technological future looks a lot like a new golden age of hucksterism. It's networking; the sordid, stupid business of business; pressing palms with arrogant pricks, genuflecting to idiots, entirely unchanged by the fact that this time it's about apps and code rather than dog food or dishwashers.
None of these start-ups are doing anything new or interesting. Which shouldn't be surprising: how often does anyone have a really good idea? What you actually get is just code, sloshing around, congealing into apps and firms that exist simply to exist. Uber for dogs, GrubHub for clothes, Patreon for sex, Slack for death, PayPal for God, WhatsApp for the spaceless non-void into which a blind universe expands. [...]
Capitalism doesn't know what to do with its surpluses any more; it ruthlessly drains them from the immiserated low-tech manufacturing bases of the Global South, snatches them away from a first-world population tapping at computer code on the edge of redundancy, but then has nowhere better to put them than in some executive's gold-plated toilet. This soil breeds monsters; new, parasitic products scurry like the first worms over the world-order's dying body.
