Welcome to the first Chappell Roan election

What’s happening on the other side of the post-reality curve and why am I being doxed by Ray Bans?

I just recently bought a new mattress because my old one was a sagging memory foam hell-slab and it was ruining my life. I currently live with a cursed addiction to luxury goods so I bought one of those fancy mattresses with over 4k springs in it, activated charcoal, natural latex, divine fibres of bamboo, fine silken angel hair, and the promise of bodily renewal via stem cells or something idk.

The mattress contains technologies that are beyond my reckoning. Even if I snapped one night and ripped it open to check that the mattress company wasn’t lying about what was inside, I would have no idea how to identify activated charcoal (isn’t that just dirt basically??) and natural latex. Like with so much of technology, this is a relationship of trust.

I’m reminded of that famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” — from Arthur Clarke, who co-wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. While I’m well aware this is a pintrest-level inspirational quote, it has me thinking about how with magic tricks, you are literally asking the magician to deceive you. But with technology that is not at all what you’re asking, because you want your various apps and devices to perform their expected function.

Shocking and unfair: modern devices and digital products do not have expected functions any more. Instead, everything is connected to the internet now, which tethers your favourite technologies back to the companies that sold them to you via miles-long unbreakable tendrils. I think most of us are kind of aware of this by now on some level, but it does leave a lot of room for user-hostile deceptive practices (like with HP printers and their horrific ink subscription model), and exposes users to business failures that should have nothing to do with them.

Cory Doctorow recently wrote about Fisker, an EV company who made ‘software cars’ and went bankrupt earlier this year, leaving their customers with totally bricked cars sitting on their driveways. This is the luxury vehicle equivalent of Second Sight, the retina implant company who got acquired by some other company, and then stopped pushing firmware updates, so the implants went obsolete inside people’s heads. This IS indistinguishable from magic if by ‘magic’ we mean a dark curse that traps you in a toxic relationship with inanimate objects.

Moving deeper into the fanatic murk, we now find ourselves geared with AR glasses made by Meta, but designed by Ray Ban, as to avoid the infinite 2010s cringefest that was Google Glass. The issue with an inconspicuous IoT device that you wear on your face is, of course, that you can use it to engage in deceptive activities — such as doxing nearby strangers on the street. As reasonable human beings we understand that ‘this is not something you should be able to do’ with a pair of fuckhead smart glasses, but this speaks to a wider issue: the glasses were wrought in an ecosystem that rewards technologies of scale. Companies must design products that are everything to everyone in order to achieve market capture. Sure, you’re not supposed to sync the glasses with Pimeyes (the image-to-image search engine for faces), but there are no sufficient guardrails to prevent you from doing so.

This Everything App renaissance assumes nothing about individual whims: social media platforms are so durable that you can use them to simultaneously spread election misinformation and receive granular updates on Chappell Roan’s life. In fact, I would say this US election has been almost as confusing and overwhelming to follow as Chappell Roan’s career. What the hell is going on with both? I need minute by minute updates from multiple sources so I can piece together the news myself in a highly conspiratorial way!

Ever since CR posted that video of herself saying very reasonable things about how to decide who to vote for — rather than flat out endorsing Kamala — it’s been somehow impossible to untangle her celebrity presence from campaign rhetoric. I’m also deeply worried about her mental health (Chappell’s, not Kamala’s — we all know Kamala is irreversibly unwell because she has a desire to be the president); it can’t be easy having everything you say and do scrutinised by a highly critical anonymous public.

This is the stuff that’s making this election hard to follow (from the UK anyway). It’s all Brat Summer, Femininomenon, and Elon Musk’s weird ritalin jump — and nothing else. All the information feels very fragmented, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that online virality is now meaningless. The stuff that goes viral is whatever beige slurry appeals to the most people, like cat videos. The true mind-melting conversations are happening within dark sticky niches that are not visible until the most extreme parts of them pop-out like a discourse pustule and become newsworthy.

A great example of this is the hurricane hysteria from a couple of weeks ago. Helene and Milton has destroyed people’s lives, but right wing pundits won’t stop talking about how these were orchestrated by the government in order to clear out swing states. There’s also been weird AI images depicting a sad little girl and a puppy who apparently only have each other after surviving one of the storms. A right wing activist shared one of the images saying it’s been “seared into my mind” — and when she was told it was fake, she doubled down, explaining that it doesn’t matter that the image is fake; its “emblematic” of what people are going through.

We’ve clearly pushed ourselves too far around the post-reality curve and now we are at a point of no return. But anyway, I hope Kamala can extract just the right amount of content out of Chappell Roan at just the right frequency, so that she wins this election without also completely ripping Roan’s life to shreds.