Enemy Territory

I don’t know if I can work in advertising anymore

The only reason that I’m so good at marketing and that it comes so naturally to me is because I am very afraid of it. I’ve now spent nearly the majority of my life on subconscious high alert, becoming increasingly aware of the million ways that the world around me is bent around persuading me to make certain decisions. I remember being 12 years old and attending my first Major League Baseball game and having one of those consciousness-activating moments in the stands, when I suddenly became aware that I couldn’t position my eyes anywhere without at least 3 brand names or logos permeating my vision. I could only either close my eyes or leave.

This perverse intrusion really bothered me, and it never really stopped bothering me. I coped in strange ways; I discovered the street artists of the 2000s and their crusade against billboards and the like; I joined them in their fight long after it had ended by beginning my stencil/sticker art project that has since become central to my identity (employing the same invasive marketing techniques (repetition, iconography, guerrilla marketing) to advertise nothing, the nothing being the point). I wouldn’t realize until later that the street artists had long since succumbed to the commercial black hole and that in my art project I was actually training to work at a marketing firm. It has always been, unfortunately, flowing through all my veins.

In the time since my great shock at the ballpark and now, ad technology has advanced in new and frightening ways. Mostly thanks to The Phone. It’s no longer enough to slip in 45 seconds of commercials between sections of your TV show; the machine is hungrier and more resourceful than that. Our best and brightest psychologists and engineers have been paid top dollar to construct the most guard-lowering, subconsciously intrusive messaging avenues that one can imagine. The visual real-estate Busch Stadium problem now happens constantly in your browser window. Trusted Internet personalities can be financially coerced into selling you something, taking advantage of the simulated relationship they‘ve cultivated with you. Entire farms of fake user accounts can be purchased and orchestrated to present a sense of grassroots urgency about a topic or idea. Internet platforms can be bought and manipulated to outright shift your perception of reality. Everything you see can only be met with intense scrutiny and paranoia. The practice of which has led to me becoming the sort of schizophrenic maniac that tries frantically to wake people up to the fact that Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift are not in fact in love, but are performing a high-stakes tap dance routine orchestrated by the marketing specialists at the National Football League and Universal Music Group. The only way I’ve been able to effectively cope with the horror is to know my enemy and try to understand their tactics.

I guess I should explain why it’s horror to me. Put simply: I do not like that there are systems in place that can alter the way that I think without my consent or knowledge. It feels unnatural and spiritually unclean. Something about the fact that my brain has been hacked into, by people who have worked very hard to find its exploits, twists my stomach up. It makes me feel small, it removes any agency that I thought I had. It makes me feel like I’m not in the driver’s seat. I really like to be in the driver’s seat.

It seems like becoming wise to the game would help me mentally deflect. Not the case. You can recognize that heroin is addictive and then still get addicted to heroin. I have started to feel a little bit frightened, however, that I might be a heroin dealer.

I don’t think that the marketing that I’m doing right now is particularly pervasive or evil. Sure, I’m greasing the wheels of capitalism and with that comes its attached sins but I’m not doing the thing that I feel particularly exploited by. But I finished my portfolio website last night, and I’m about to take a real, honest swing at applying at a bigger and better firm. And I think the work would be fulfilling to me, because (I did lie in my intro) paranoia isn’t the only reason I’m good at marketing. I love to observe and deconstruct and communicate and optimize. And I could make enough money to live very comfortably. But if I start offering my efforts to an organization with farther reach and a bigger machine, do I run the risk of turning some poor 13 year old at a ball game into a schizophrenic? Could I be dooming others to the paranoia that so often consumes me? Would it just happen to them anyway? Could I be more fulfilled digging ditches or putting together furniture if I still got to come home and play on the computer? Is this a real worry of mine, or is this some sort of moral posturing to cover up the fact that I’m still scared to progress in my life and career no matter how much preparation I’ve done? Who’s to say! Not me! But in my 20 minutes of ranting into my notes app I’ve accidentally stumbled into the truth behind my spiral so I think it’s time to sign off and take some deep breaths. I’ve got a mission to go on tomorrow.

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The Best Billboard on the West Half of Interstate 24

Having spent the majority of my early 20’s alone in my car driving to and from every nearby major city, I get to know certain sections of the highway pretty well. My most traveled section, Interstate 24, is a big stretch of road that runs from southern Illinois all the way down to eastern Tennessee. I’ve only made it all the way down to east TN once, and even then I didn’t make it to the end of the road, so I’ve felt the need to reign in this essay’s hyperbolic title ever so slightly by specifying that I’m only talking about the western half of I-24, meaning the 192 mile section between Marion, Illinois and Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve been up and down this particular road in every sort of weather, every time of day, every state of mind that one can imagine. It isn’t a particularly interesting road. There are a few scenic sections and a few nasty congested sections and a (shockingly disappointing) lack of reputable establishments in which to take a highway poop (but it’s only about a 3 hour drive from one end to the other, so one can usually time their bowel movements or gastronomically triggering food intake strategically to avoid that problem altogether). It’s the road that takes me from my little hometown in Illinois to the bustling evangelical faux-country Hollywood of Nashville, TN. A city that, for all of its faults, has a fantastic and remarkably active music scene. Being a frequent patron of the arts (guy who goes to a lot of concerts), I’m down there a lot, and thereby often burning up the western half Interstate 24 with ever-increasing speed and familiarity.

Becoming familiar with an unremarkable road isn’t always the most enthralling experience. It’s more something that just sort of happens to you, like having fond memories of a really boring movie. Not because it’s any good, but because it was one of three DVDs you owned as a kid so it was just always on. I specify an unremarkable road because, hard to believe as it may be, there are interesting roads. An interesting road may have a lot of nice houses to covet and admire; There might be a particularly beautiful stretch that’s perfect for a sunset drive; I even know some interesting roads with stomach-dropping steep country hills that I’d take my high school girlfriend down at full speed to try to convince her that I was brave and spontaneous and fun. W-I-24 isn’t an interesting road, but in its mundanity emerges a lot of subtle character and depth that you just don’t get from the bombastic showings of our hall-of-fame interesting roads.

W-I-24’s almost-features and bits of stories are what elevates it to unremarkable road status, opposed to, god forbid, a boring road. This is a subtle but important distinction, as prolonged exposure to a boring road can tend to have some nasty side effects. (Drowsiness, disassociation, dry mouth, dread. Suicidal thoughts and actions may occur.) Boring roads are the kind they have in northern Indiana or up near Chicago, where there is absolutely fucking nothing going on for eye-wateringly long stretches of time. You don’t know how to properly appreciate a hill until they’re taken from you. It’s the kind of road that a third grader paints when they’re trying to learn about perspective. Just endless and straight and flat. Scenic in a photo, sure, but there are hardly things to understand or get to know. You’re left with your thoughts and the clouds and other people’s vanity license plates. Contact your doctor if you plan to traverse a boring road.

W-I-24 fits firmly in the middle of these two types of roads. You don’t spend the whole time glued to your surroundings, but it’s usually enough stimuli to fend off intrusive thoughts and prevent any mental spirals. The natural landscape of that part of the country helps us avoid boring territory, leaving some suspense as you round corners and top hills. There isn’t much to see atop those hills and around those corners, though. Too much to take in and we might lean towards interesting. There’s the forests to admire and the fields to gaze across and the occasional body of water to see for half a second before the brush returns, intermittently marked by little towns with copy/paste gas station/McDonald’s exits in case you need to pee or you’re about to starve to death. It ain’t half bad. Or maybe it’s exactly half bad.

On an unremarkable road, you’re allowed to enter a sort of meditative state (only accessible to me while I’m driving because that’s the only time I’m required by law to put my god damn phone down) where your brain becomes hypnotized by the hum of the tires and the subtle repetition of your surroundings. White lines in the center, empty blue attraction signs followed by big green exit signs, a run-down gas station on either side of you, trees, hills, repeat. Once your brain adjusts to this pattern, you run two risks: The risk of being consumed by intrusive and uncomfortable thoughts, and the risk of becoming bored-to-sleep and careening into a big green exit sign. You can prevent this by starting to notice things that aren’t The Pattern. On our beloved W-I-24 heading east, we cross a section of Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area that provides a couple minutes of awe and beauty (more than a couple if it’s under construction, which it always is.), we top some moderately scenic western-KY hills, and then hit Clarksville, TN, where things intensify traffic-wise enough to keep you busy until you hit Music City. The section between LBL and Clarksville is the most properly unremarkable, and that’s where you spend most of your time trying to find things that aren’t The Pattern.

I, as a traveller, (and as a member of a species that used to do this to find their way back to the cave they were hunter-gathering in) tend to subconsciously designate objects and buildings and signs on the side of the interstate as personal landmarks that let me know how far along I am on my journey. It feels distinct emotionally from simply looking at my GPS to see precisely how far away I am in miles, probably because it allows me to force a sort of highway-deja vu that lets me recount exactly how I was holding up emotionally the last time I made this drive and saw this landmark. Some of my favorite examples include:

• The Huck’s gas station in Beaver Dam, Kentucky (Western Kentucky Parkway) that is built into the center of the two interstate lanes, allowing drivers to exit left to get gas and pee without ever setting foot in Beaver Dam proper. Part of me thinks they should have built one thousand of these when they laid our great Interstate Highway System, but if that were the case I’d never have an excuse to spend 15 minutes in the mid-south’s most-forgotten roadside towns. So it’s probably fine that there’s just that one.

• The little green sign designating the SITE OF FATAL BUS CRASH, MAY 14, 1988 (I-71) that I pass on the way to Cincinnati that lets me know that I am within reasonable distance of seeing my friends and I can start to replace the meditative unremarkable-interstate-zen in my brain with excitement and anticipation (without ever thinking too much about just how fatal the bus crash must have been to warrant its own sign. It’s on the side of a pretty steep cliff, so signs are pointing to it being very fatal and very bad).

• The Jack Flash travel center with attached Subway in Farina, IL, (I-57) where I made the nice ladies who worked at the Subway laugh by trying to recreate the sandwich that I’d drunkenly constructed in Chicago the night before (my 23rd Birthday). It was such a ridiculous sandwich that I was having so much trouble trying to recall the composition of that the woman putting it together just started to laugh at me. I did not successfully reconstruct it but I was still a little hungover so what I ended up with was still effective and healing.
• What must be the world’s largest Confederate flag just outside of Paducah, KY, (I-24) complete with matching shrine to the Confederacy, all attached to a gigantic flea-market warehouse building. I mean, this is a car dealership sized flag. You can see it a mile down the road. It’s apparently privately owned by some “heritage not hate” ass organization and is technically protected under the first amendment so no matter how often the people of Paducah complain about the loud and unwelcoming tone-setter that might as well read “WHITES ONLY” just outside of town, the city is powerless to make them take it down. The city’s solution was to paint a mural onto the water tower that sits across the highway from the flag, featuring a black hand shaking a white hand in front of a big American flag next to the words “United we Stand.” Which I always think is a little bit funny because it doesn’t really do anything to meaningfully combat the enormous racist flag, but it does sort of put a little “Yeesh, sorry!” band-aid on it. The visual combination of hateful ignorance and half-assed opposition never fail to make it clear that I’ve almost made it back home.

The most common type of object that becomes a de-facto landmark is the mighty billboard. I’ve always admired a billboard. All-seeing and all-powerful, forcing its message onto the millions of puny pedestrians below who are too weak and feeble to resist the forceful injection of information. Billboards are a mostly dead marketing channel in 2025, since printing costs a lot and there’s no real way to measure impressions or clicks or referrals or any of the of great advertising metrics that keep our digital lives so full of relevant marketing. Most of the money in tactical advertising is in being able to tangibly prove that you really did place a client’s message in front of a specific amount of/group of people, and billboards don’t allow for that sort of proof. I guess there are estimations of how much vehicle traffic a certain section of the road might see on a given day, but even then there’s no way to measure how many of your new customers first heard about you through your billboard. Those people might not even realize it if they did. In that sense, it’s a beautiful sort of vibes-based advertising tool, and when I’m in office it will be one of the only ad mediums allowed to continue to exist.

Anyway, the result of billboards being mostly dead is that the only ones worth really investing in are the ones in large metropolitan areas where people are going to see them constantly. The billboards on unremarkable roads are either left vacant or doomed with the menial tasks of letting you know that there’s another Cracker Barrel coming up in 8 miles; that there’s a Pilot gas station or another McDonald’s. Stuff you would quickly become aware of anyway as soon as you saw one of their skyscraper-height signs peeking up over the trees. There’s no competition out there, it’s barely conscious communication. It feels a little bit like those companies are buying billboards out of courtesy. “This 54 year old road still tells you where to get a Big Mac the old fashioned way.” The big corporate chain billboards obviously aren’t the kind that become landmarks, since they lack the bite and exhilaration of advertising that needs to be creative. The really good billboards — the landmark kind — are the ones put up by local businesses who are clueless as to how to properly advertise a business. They are the best. On W-I-24 alone we have:

• A billboard for (what seems to be) a roofing company, featuring all six of (what one can presume to be) the owners’ kids standing in descending height order, diagonally holding up a sign that probably contains a cute pun or slogan but is rendered absolutely illegible by poor color and font choice. It ends up coming across as an advertisement for someone’s children and their varying heights. Hilarious.
• A double billboard (top and bottom sections combined for maximum billboard) for (what seems to be) a liquor store, featuring a stock photo of a bunch of ecstatic young people smiling and laughing in a semicircle, having what looks like a really fun party, with a big white box beneath them that contains italicized Times New Roman text reading “Nobody Likes a Quitter!” I cannot for the life of me figure out what message they could be trying to convey besides “KEEP DRINKING.” and it makes me laugh every single time.
• A positively baffling yellow billboard with big red text that says “WE UNDERSTOOD THE ASSIGNMENT.” above a little character that looks like Mario’s estranged cousin who really leaned into the whole Italian thing. No calls to action, no discernible branding of any type. Hilarious in its waste of visual real estate and company resources, whatever company it may be attached to. I eventually came to learn that the little Mario character is the new mascot of regional pizza buffet chain Pizza Inn. I remember their mascot being a little beady-eyed character with a pointy hat, so this new guy was a stranger to me, and I assume a stranger to the rest of the world. Combine his unfamiliarity with a nonsensical and outdated internet reference and it feels like the billboard equivalent of an AI-generated blue checkmark Twitter account trying to piece together an approximation of what a person would post, only blown up to 14’x48’ and placed on the side of the highway for all to see. Remarkable.

These are each hilarious in their own special ways, but they all emerge from the same spiritual place. In their badness and inefficacy they let slip the shiny veil of marketing; they let you in on the big secret: the secret that every billboard you see was actually designed by a human being with a computer and a job and a brain, and that this time their brains misfired to create something strange and off-putting enough that you, the viewer, are forced to ask “Who thought that was a good idea?” Thereby becoming suddenly conscious that someone had thought of it at all. They break the illusion that billboards just grow out of the ground, spawned by the roadside to impart their wisdom onto travelers. Peeling back that curtain is always a rush, it’s the same feeling as noticing that your teacher misspelled something on the board. It’s a little victory against something that seems impossibly more powerful than you. It’s an inkling that something that’s only ever presented as an institutional force might secretly be human. In our case, it’s a window that invites you to imagine a person, not so different from yourself, deciding that their billboard should say “Nobody Likes a Quitter,” typing it out, adding an exclamation point, and pressing send on that email. Terrible billboards are a little speck of humanity amongst a sea of messages that have successfully had their personhood ripped from them by corporate interests.

Terrible billboards aren’t the only kind of billboards with humanity, and they aren’t the only sort that become landmarks. Thus finally allowing us to arrive at the titular Greatest Billboard on W-I-24:

RIDDLE’S TOWING.

On the (notably uninteresting) section of I-24 that runs through an unincorporated territory called Gracey, Kentucky, heading East, there sits on the opposite roadside a billboard whose two back panels have been conjoined to form one enormous 28’x48’ orange sign, touting only two words in black Impact font: RIDDLE’S TOWING. Note the lack of a photo of a tow truck, the lack of eye-catching composition or font variation, the lack of an emotional appeal or a call to action or even a phone number to call. No URL, no fine print, no QR code, no little jokes, no tagline, just orange and black and RIDDLE’S TOWING. With its size and imposition and matter-of-factness it might as well read “RIDDLE’S TOWING. FUCK YOU.” It borders on the “CONSUME,”“OBEY” billboards in Carpenter’s They Live, but its earnest allows it to avoid becoming dystopian. It’s a piece of communication that respects its audience. RIDDLE’S TOWING knows that you don’t need to be sold on a towing company if you’re in unincorporated Kentucky and in need of a towing company, and it doesn’t patronize or try to convince you that it’s the choice for the job. It simply stands at attention, half a mile past mile marker 71, and lets its presence be known. It’s an honest, southern way to advertise.

RIDDLE’S TOWING not only respects its audience, it understands them in a deep and fundamental way. This sort of maximum-efficiency communication can only be achieved with a complete understanding of who you’re trying to speak to and how your message is going to come across. It understands the purpose of itself and strips away all fat. Imagine it: You’re barreling down W-I-24, reading license plates and billboards to stave off absolute boredom, rapidly approaching an enlightened highway-zen, when you’re abruptly snapped out of your trance by a POP and then a grinding sound that’s rapidly increasing in volume as your vehicle veers uncontrollably to the right. “Shit, did my tire just pop?” Once the initial shock wears off, you pull your poor, crippled car onto the side of the road and get out to investigate. Sure enough, shredded. Do you have a spare? Of course not, hypothetical You is a disaster. Even if you had a spare you wouldn’t know how to put it on. “What the hell do I do?!” you scream to the heavens. As you look upward (to see if God will respond), you see it. RIDDLE’S TOWING. [The lord’s trumpets sound] You proceed to do exactly what the billboard knows you’re gonna do, you type those two words into your phone and press on the little handset-shaped icon under the first Google result. Immediately, you’re rescued by one of the sweet old southern gentlemen who work for RIDDLE’S TOWING, and he makes sure you’re alright and offers you a blanket and a warm beverage in the cab of his tow truck while he provides you with the resources and next steps required to get back on the road in no time.*

*Some artistic liberties taken for the sake of example. Riddle’s towing is not a paid partner of Enemy Territory nor have I ever done business with them, however much I’d like to.

That might be a little fantastical but their sales pipeline is ingenious. They understand the fact that their ideal customer, someone in car-crash panic, does not need 3 bulleted reasons why RIDDLE’S is the premium towing experience. No customer will ever open their Phone app and type in a phone number, digit-by-digit, to make a distressed call for help. RIDDLE’S has seen how this situation plays out and they’ve adjusted their marketing accordingly. They knows that their name does all of the talking, and they just need their name in your brain. They’re brave enough to subvert and reject the traditional marketing conventions that our brains learn to tune out. A lesser company would have a worrywart that tries to make the case of “How will anybody know what we do or how to contact us?” to which RIDDLE’S TOWING once again replies, “FUCK YOU.” They’re brave enough to recognize the new social structure in which a modern driver is Googling stuff behind the wheel. They understand the idea of our iPhones being extensions of our bodies; our access to the hivemind and to all collected knowledge. This is the sort of bravery and mastery of advertising that you only usually get to see executed by the biggest and bravest agencies in the world’s metropolitan centers, but they’re doing it out in Kentucky, just past Cadiz. What really makes it the best, however, is that I truly believe this achievement to be unintentional.

To illustrate how this is even possible, I need you to once again peek behind the curtain and imagine the person whose job it was to design that billboard and send it out to for print. Who they must be and what their thought process must have been. We’ll start with what we know: We’re properly in the middle of nowhere Kentucky, halfway from Paducah to Nashville. Fields outnumber houses on this stretch of road 5:1. Red-State Heartland USA, where you can still sort of make an honest living by being the one guy in town with a tow truck. Even if RIDDLE’S has expanded past the Tow Mater model of doing business, it’s not likely that it’s a bigger operation than the Riddle family and a few good ‘ole boys with their tow trucks and a couple sheet metal buildings, the image of which doesn’t exactly financially lend itself to a partnership with a giant advertising firm, or a real marketing manager, or even really a marketing budget at all. My safe assumption being that the designer of this billboard probably doesn’t specialize in or even really care that much about being the person that designed this billboard. It was probably just something on a task list for them, between “ANTHONY CDL RENEWAL TRAINING” and “COKE MACHINE REFILLS.”

I like to imagine it went something like this: “Hey, we need to get the word out about RIDDLE’S TOWING. Boss gave us $800 to throw at a billboard.” To which our designer, resourceful and utilitarian, opens their work computer and types in “Busiest road near me.” Of course! Beloved Interstate 24. The next question, “How do you get the word out?” Answered with similar swiftness and certainty: “What color will get everyone’s attention? Traffic-cone orange. What font do we pick? The fattest one installed on my computer. What should the sign say? I was told to get the word out about RIDDLE’S TOWING, what else would the sign possibly say. Boom, done, onto the next thing.” In this point-and-shoot approach, they manage to effortlessly create something more effective than a seasoned marketer could ever dream of, because they didn’t think about it enough to make it bad. It’s dripping in small-town human ingenuity. They’d probably spray paint their name on the sign if that would’ve been easier.

This isn’t to say that the kind folks at RIDDLE’S don’t know what they’re doing. Invoking Tow Mater is not to imply that our new favorite towing company is run by backwater hicks that are too stupid to operate Adobe Illustrator. Creating a pretend office assistant’s task list is not to diminish the work that our hypothetical person does for their towing company. It’s to illustrate the real beauty of RIDDLE’S TOWING: unintentional, honest sincerety and simplicity.

Especially lately, the I find the world swirling around above my head. Too nonsensical and complicated to grasp at any of the spinning threads and put them in any sort of order. A tangled nightmare where any attempt at untangling an individual mental thread can only lead to an endless schizophrenic spiral of ever-increasing horror. I’d describe one here but I’d hate to kill the mood. This is just to say that I often feel, when trying to trace an idea about modern life or politics or technology to its logical conclusion, that I’ll be rendered paralyzed at the complexity and chaos of it all. It’ll start to get to you if you aren’t careful. On an uninteresting road, it’s lurking around every corner, waiting for the mental vacancy to appear. On a boring road it might as well be listed on the back of the box. WARNING: Your mind will run wild. Take caution.

Something I’ve become very interested in is the fact that, regardless if they realize it or not, everyone can feel this swirling, and that everyone copes with it in different ways. The most common way that we cope is by telling ourselves stories. This is the real reason that I love RIDDLE’S TOWING. The reason I point at it and holler “RIDDLE’S TOWIIIIING” when I pass through Gracey. Because, for a moment, without even realizing it, I get to indulge in my fantasy of a simple world. Where a business can operate in the most straightforward way imaginable. A world with no ulterior motives, where the signs on the road aren’t trying to get in my head and subconsciously infect my mind, but they’re instead opting to present their offering with honesty and integrity. A world where a caricature of a tow truck driver spent an afternoon fiddling around with Microsoft Paint. A story about a sign put up by the kinds of people I grew up around. Regular country folk, seemingly only concerned with getting in a hard day’s work and coming home to their families. A passing comfort on an unremarkable road.

This is, I cannot emphasize enough, a fantasy. It’s important to make that distinction, because the idea that there is some sort of ideal utopia in small town America where you can just offer a service without exploitation or residual victims is the kind of delusion that makes people think that capitalism is a beautiful and perfect mode of operation. Believing that the fantasy is real might make you inclined to protect it, and before you know it you’ll find yourself holding a protest sign outside of a Planned Parenthood or wearing a red hat. The world is never that simple, and the solution to the endless chaotic nightmare thoughts is not to try and create that simple, black and white world. You can find comfort in a dreamworld while still recognizing it for what it is. In my case, it’s something to occupy my mind for about forty seconds until I notice my next landmark, or a car with a funny bumper sticker, or some sort of roadside animal. And it’s an opportunity to exercise wonder about the mundane; To piece together a human story using only your context clues. It’s the most fun you can have in your life, flexing your imaginative muscles to try and explain the world around you. Letting yourself get a little silly with it. It’s certainly the only way to stay sane on the interstate.

And hey, maybe parts of my story are true! I’d like to hope so. Surely they picked the orange because it’s the road construction color. Imagine if it really was a guy with a big gut in overalls trying to use MS Paint. Maybe my next piece will be a journalistic deep dive into the real story of my favorite billboard. That’d be kind of fun. Until then, it can stay just a made-up story that I like to tell myself. One set on one of my favorite roads, where a nice guy doing honest business can provide help to a stranger in a time of crisis. Maybe one day it’ll be me.

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Hamster Wheel

Lately I’ve been a hamster running really hard on my wheel. Endless motivation, endless speed. Nothing particularly ahead, just getting better and better at running on my wheel. This past weekend I fell off my wheel.

To be more specific, I found the upper limit of how hard and fast I’m capable of running on my wheel, and, importantly, how long I can run on my wheel without completely freaking out. I hit a sort of emotional snag three weeks ago, but I figured I could just use my newly learned momentum to propel myself directly and completely through it, gaining speed all the while. This was not the case. After effectively doubling my speed instead of confronting my feelings, my weak little hamster legs fully gave out on me. I face-planted and spun around vertically at supersonic speed. In my spinning out I threw up in four unique locations, cried in three, and gave serious thought to jumping off of one roof (but only because I knew I wouldn’t die and I thought it might make the other people on the roof laugh). I was then forcefully ejected from the wheel, flying through the air in a cartoon arc (complete with slide whistle) and hitting the ground on my side, legs still kicking but completely ineffective. I kicked and screamed until I finally got tired, gnashing my teeth and screeching or whatever noise hamsters make, being a little embarrassing and a little too candid about my feelings. Anything but working through what’s bothering me.

Laying on the ground next to my wheel, I was completely broken down. I'd been effectively paralyzed with anxiety, guilt, shame, panic, most of the negative emotions that I had managed to outrun while I was on my wheel. They’d been waiting for me to stop. For two full days I was in disrepair. My pistons wouldn’t fire correctly, my fuel injectors were bad. Something was very wrong. (Wait, wasn’t I doing a hamster analogy? What’s this car stuff? It’s fine, that went on a little too long anyway. And my writing’s allowed to be bad on here. The only way I can get good at it is by being bad first, fuck you.) In my broken down state, however, I was forced to sit and reflect. To take some real time and get to the root of the things that were scaring me so bad that I was running for my life.

Now I’m sat back upright. Not fully ready to take off again, but I’m starting to feel the wind in my sail. (Jesus what am I, a boat now? I’m really ruining the serious and vague nature of my little reflection with this side monologue. But some might say I ruined it when I went from hamster to car to boat. I’ll stop interrupting.) I’m off my wheel, and I could climb back on, but I’ve seen where that gets me. I think I might actually start covering some ground for a change. Maybe I’ll use my newfound love of running to actually chase after that cheese. Or, after that apple? Whatever hamsters actually eat.

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Today I Bought a New Wallet

Today I bought a new wallet because the wallet I’ve been using for the past year and a half is too big and wide and the combination of its size and my gigantic curvaceous thighs and ass keeps causing me to rip my pants in the butt, right next to the back pocket where I keep my wallet. It also hurts to sit on for very long at all, which becomes a problem pretty quickly when you’re like me and your job is to sit at a desk and play on the computer and your favorite leisure activities are to sit in your car and drive for extended periods of time and to sit at a desk and play on the computer. It’s not a Big Wallet in the sense that there’s a ton of money in it either, I don’t carry cash, and if I did, I don’t think it’d be wise to carry enough to give me back problems. This wallet and myself just did not match, and after waiting entirely too long I’ve finally done something about it.

Today I bought a new wallet and in doing so I’m discarding one of the only remaining reminders of my first and only long-term adult relationship. I received my Big Wallet in 2023 as a Christmas gift from my now-ex girlfriend. I don’t remember what I got her for Christmas that year, but I vividly remember opening this wallet. I think if you you had slow-motion camera footage of the 0.2 seconds where I was opening my gift, you could watch my face start to contort, followed by a barely visible jolt going through my entire body that could only be properly described as my heart shattering a little, followed by my real emotions retreating behind a mask of A Guy That Really Liked This Wallet. The reason you could see my heart shatter was not because the wallet was a thoughtless, last minute gift of any sort. She was trying very, very hard to get me something that I would love and cherish, and that was exactly the problem. It was a fine gift. A nice, thoughtful gift even! My old wallet before the Big Wallet was one that I’d been using for the better part of 10 years. It was absolutely falling apart and the leather on the outside was scraped and gross and it was an all-around disaster. The one that she got me to replace it was a very nice Carhartt wallet, another detail of thoughtfulness because I was in a sort of workwear phase at the time, and I was always raving about my Carhartt jacket and my Carhartt pants.

This was, in fact, a good gift. So why did we watch my heart break on the high-speed camera earlier? In that moment, the wallet felt indicative of a feeling that had been creeping up on me for a while. A feeling that there was some sort of fundamental misunderstanding in my relationship, a feeling of a ticking clock where love used to be. The wallet felt representative of an eternal mediocrity that was headed straight for me, one where I lived in a grey apartment and then a grey house with two regular kids and got socks and a belt and a wallet every year for Christmas. A safe and predictable and good-enough life. And the shattering of my heart wasn’t only because I was coming to realize that we wanted very different lives for ourselves, but also because I felt really guilty for having such disdain for the ideal life of the person I cared about. What was I, some sort of narcissist that couldn’t even entertain the idea of a life wasn’t centered around ME and my own pursuits? I felt guilty for knowing deep down that I would be more satisfied with a life that involved a lot more risk and rambunctiousness and inquisition. And I was quietly gutted because I knew that she either didn't realize this yet, or was denying it too. There was a hopelessness in that realization and guilt that I was actively trying to keep at bay, and for 0.2 seconds the gift of that wallet allowed it to rise to the surface. Those feelings spawned a new hopelessness that I’m grappling with almost 2 full years later; the worry that any pursuit of long-term forever romance is doomed to the creeping death-sentence of Knowing. That there won’t be any inciting incidents, things will just erode over time. Even the most beautiful connections rendered pointless or even hostile. I guess even if that is the case the fun “being in love” parts usually outweigh (or at least weigh as much as) the bad parts at the end. I know that logically these fears aren’t valid and that I can’t make those sorts of sweeping generalizations after one failed relationship that wasn’t even all that bad, but there’s a difference between what makes logical sense and what you can’t help yourself from feeling. And it doesn’t help that every time I sit down at my desk at work or get into my car I have to remember to take my stupid gigantic wallet out of my pocket and look at it and remember where it came from and be reminded of my fear of being incompatible with romantic love.

Today I bought a new wallet. It’s light brown and it’s a tri-fold and it’s genuine leather and it isn’t attached to any of my insecurities or fears. And it’s thinner, so maybe it’ll help me to stop ripping all of my goddamn jeans.

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Escaping Enemy Territory

In Mark Fisher’s 2013 essay Exiting the Vampire’s Castle, he wraps up his dissection of online political discourse with this description of social media:

We need to think very strategically about how to use social media – always remembering that, despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers, that this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital.

While that sounds like communist nerd shit, he was absolutely correct. A frighteningly prescient take on social media considering the time this was published (November 22, 2013). Twitter had been a publicly traded company for about 2 weeks and Facebook had purchased Instagram about a year and a half prior. Did he know how bad things would get? He would never even get to find out, since he killed himself in 2017. Guess he’d seen enough.

Something about his particular phrase, Enemy Territory, rattles around constantly in my mind. I think about it every time I muscle-memory open the Instagram app on my phone (which is roughly 25 times a day), I think about it when Tiktok feeds me a video that makes me so upset that I spend an extra 40 seconds lamenting in the comments with my fellow algorithm victims, I think about it when my mom tries to show me “the cutest video she’s ever seen” that was generated by a GPU in a data center and prompted by some engagement farming freak. Being bombarded by this thought is not a pleasant feeling. The feeling that I’m relenting to the ever-magnetizing pull of the social media machine. The feeling of their behavioral learning algorithms breathing down my neck while I try to decide as quickly as possible how to engage with the content on my screen so that my experience continues to be tailored correctly. It’s a paranoia, it’s a dull anxiety, it’s the feeling of being behind enemy lines and hardly realizing it. I did not used to feel this.

The day after Mark Fisher published Vampire’s Castle, I turned 13 years old. As a nervous, uncoordinated, and decidedly weird kid, I took every opportunity available to go on the computer. Internet culture was in relative infancy, and hadn’t yet truly breached the mainstream. (I think age 13 was the first time I found a shirt in the mall with a rage comic on it. It was the Troll face, soon followed by the Forever Alone Guy and the Nyan Cat. I had incredible fashion sense.) Little Sam would go home from school every day and log on to his favorite image sharing platforms and see what hilarity had taken place while he was busy learning. It felt like a window into a world that the people around me could not understand, a place where language and jokes and ideas could develop naturally and democratically without the friction and slowness of the physical world. There was a hopefulness and transcendence about it all, logging on wide eyed and full hearted to explore and learn and laugh and enjoy this new world-on-top-of-our-world.

At a certain point I’d come to wonder about and then understand the whole “you’re being advertised to” model of internet moneymaking, and that was fine, I thought. “Of course, the people who are in charge of reddit love the internet and the people that use it, and as it gets more popular, it costs more to keep the machine running. That makes sense!” Or I’d see the oft-regurgitated “If something is free, you’re the product,” taking that only to mean that my favorite internet hangouts could remain free because they were selling real estate on my screen, they were selling the opportunity to sell to me, which didn’t seem all that nefarious. I saw commercials and billboards and ads of all sorts every day, this was just the computer version of that.

How much of my good-faith interpretation was childhood naivety and how much was genuine early-online optimism is impossible for me to say. I’d like to think that I didn’t become too much more cynical and the world really did just get worse, but reading that sentence in the context of my Unabomber-manifesto blog post certainly causes me to lean more to one side. Nevertheless, I never felt as if I was among an enemy of any sort. I felt a sense of community among the geeks and nerds and insufferable gamers. We were slipping under the radar of the mainstream and having all of this fun without any manipulators or bad actors sticking their noses too far into it. At least that’s how it felt.

When Mark Fischer was found dead in his home in February 2017, I was a sophomore in high school. I still loved to go online, but I was somewhere between too aware and too nervous to be a real user of any of the mainstream social platforms. I think my view of those sites at the time had something to do with the fact that high school is already the most insecure period of most people’s lives, and the ability to obsess over and compare yourself to (and mercilessly bully and be bullied by) your peers did not seem to be in my best interest. I also just hated every photo of myself and wanted to seem “cool” and “above it.” I made a Twitter because the girl I liked was a big Twitter user.

At some point during this period I was introduced to the idea that companies were “Selling My Data.” Nobody was ever very good at making it clear Who was selling What data to Whom, so I always just sort of imagined my email address and name being sold on a giant spreadsheet to some marketing company. Not a big deal. Taking a few seconds to unsubscribe from a spam email felt like a small price to pay for the entertainment I consumed and the friendships I had made online.

It’s hard to say exactly when the switch really flipped. Maybe it was when my Grandma got addicted to Facebook. Maybe it was the pandemic. Maybe it was when I stopped being the only kid in my class that knew about the Troll Face. Maybe (probably) it was when Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan decided to intentionally make Google Search show less accurate results to increase ad spend and ad engagement. There are plenty of things that you could point towards as the beginning of the tech-rot-nightmare-world, but they all take you to the same place: There was a turning point where the internet started to feel less like a source of enjoyment and connection and more like something that wanted something from me.

Maybe that feeling that I was being value-extracted was always there and I was hardly on the front lines enough to notice it, I never had a Facebook account (and still don’t). What’s more likely, and is my theory, is that the people in charge of ruining the internet and making it a more dangerous and brain-melting place have become more flagrant and empowered to be upfront about their actions. When I say dangerous and brain melting, what do I mean? I’m talking about all of the open evidence of Facebook hiring addiction specialists and behavioral therapists to intentionally make their platforms so engaging that 80 year olds who can’t use their cell phones can get addicted to the website. I’m talking about TikTok’s laser-focused algorithm that made it so rapidly popular and engaging that the US government acts terrified of it. I’m talking about the fact that Elon Musk was willing to purchase Twitter at a great financial loss because he saw an opportunity to artificially shift the conversation online into a more right-wing space, effectively killing wokeness. I’m talking about the fact that everything that little 13 year old Sam and moody 16 year old Sam and now me, erratic adult Sam has ever posted on any of my corners of the internet has now been swallowed by an AI training algorithm so the fruits of my human labor and the products of my collective human experience can be used in a smoke and mirrors magic trick to try and convince private equity shareholders to make Sam Altman an unfathomably rich God-King. It’s horrifying. You start to see why they found Mark Fisher dead in his house.

When I was a kid being advertised to online, I didn’t understand the extent to which I was being manipulated by those ads. When I was a teen getting my data sold, I didn’t understand that the data being sold was being used to build a functional copy of my brain to more effectively sell things to me and tell me how to vote, eat, act, and think. Every moment that I spent logged-on, the machine was surveilling me. Tracking my eyes, tracking my scrolls, tracking my keystrokes, seeing how long I lingered on an image and inferring how I reacted without me even realizing how I reacted. There are millions of data points out there on servers in who knows how many countries that detail the inner life of every year of my online life. Those are being sold to any willing party to do God knows what with, and there’s nothing I can do about that. All I have now is the unshakable feeling that my screen is staring back at me.

The acceleration of all of it is becoming a little too much for me to handle, if I’m being honest. The new AI-only video apps that will infinitely generate content that is custom-fit to your brain and its behavior are horrifying to me. Not only for the obvious “Everyone is gonna turn into the fat Wall-E chair people” reasons, but because I know it’s only a matter of time before they can make a version of that that works on me. They’ve already rewired my brain. I mean fuck, they own a piece of land in my brain. I can put together all of these carefully constructed arguments as to why I’m here, on this baby blue blog post typing into an HTML window, but I’ve checked Instagram 5 times since I started writing only to feel the slow poison-tick damage for every second I look at the app. And I have no intention of removing my ability to do that. Maybe it’s a moral failing, maybe I’m weak willed, maybe they built a digital opiate too strong and it needs to be regulated. Whatever the case, that’s why I’m here and you’re here.

This is my attempt at an escape from that enemy territory. If not a full escape, maybe a refuge. I wanted a place where it didn’t feel like I was being watched or manipulated or complicit in making an evil rich man richer. And I decided to name it after Fisher’s phrase as a reminder of why I decided to build it. And because it sounds badass.

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Hello

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