The injunction everywhere to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness it maintains itself on, to such a point that everything seems to take on a therapeutic aspect, even working or love. All the times we ask “how’s it going” all day long - like a society full of patients, taking each other’s temperatures

The theorists cum insurrectionists

Scripted Adventures of the International Hacker/Op Sec Analyst/Freelance Intelligence Officer continued . . .

Down and out in Corfu, with black mark on his soul and a significant contusion on his face, earned by way of bailing from his scooter and skidding about against a rail overlooking a beautiful coast out on the coast on the west side of the island. He eventually found the driver of the truck that had been leaning out into his lane and made the accident necessary, and he reduced the driver to chum that he took with him on the boat, Plump Buck Mulligan Stew, which the client had agreed would be available for his uninterrupted use following completion of his assignment in Belgrade. . . .

Down and out in Samarkand, sometime in 2014 or 2015, after cruising Shenzen but before pursuing a calling in Cairo, our hero succumbs to a powerful need to score, then finds a quiet, clean, well-lit place and to sit down with a packet of pleasure-death and study it, clutch it, snap it lightly against the tips of fingers, until ingesting it and hoping that it is more pleasure and less death or at the very least not immediate death, which sometimes it can be. And then traveling to rural Pakistan to kick with organic opiates easily at hand. Lips pursed around a hookah, eyes closed, he visualized in his mind’s jaundiced eye a lecture he would present in London at a UX conference in four days time, the subject of which he hadn’t yet determined but would at minimum cover this idea:

Down and out in Sao Paolo, with approximately $7500 on his person, cut up into $250 or $500 portions, to be used to pay bribes, he arrived at the appointed hour in his motorcycle leathers, with an echo-location device, two bottles of rum, the cash, a quarter ounce of marijuana, two vials of adenochrome, and a various uppers, downers, opiates, and amphetamines.

His instructions were rather simple: meet the contact, get the laptop/router/WiFi he needed to gain access to the physicist’s VPN network, acquire the model and its legend, download it to the secure network and then save it to a thumbdrive (for whatever reason the client had a fetish for redundancy that put the very thing he wanted to secure at risk), pay whatever he needed to pay to get out of Sao Paolo, get back to LA, hand off the thumbdrive, ride into the sunset and then surrender to whatever sundry bodily, chemical, and existential pleasures Southern California had in store . . .