Dagmar Chili Pitas & Doxowox: Now With Slightly-Less Unofficial Mirrors
It is with great pleasure that I share that the following two Internet classics have been brought back to life at their own blessed domain names, with TLS and everything, honest to God 21st century websites:
-
Dagmar Chili Pitas, the Two-Year Chili, demonstrably the peak of what’s possible with Hypertext Markup Language as a medium. The original domain name (dagmarchili.pitas.com) wasn’t available. In the years since The Chili went offline, pitas.com has changed hands. It’s replacement uses a hyphenated URL instead. ….the enemy of the good and all that.
-
Doxowox, the older sibling to The Chili, a beloved precursor, has also been resurrected. Enjoy!
Reader please note: these are not my writings, but I am honored to steward their continued presence on the Internet. They are works of art and deserve grace and aesthetic elbow room.
{}oe|e|ep[]
Deep Fake
(The following is an excerpt from a short story. Read the whole thing here.) I have reposted this November 2022 since our dear dear Elon Musk has nudged this work of fiction one more notch closer to reality.
On weekday mornings the Safespace product leadership gathers in an airy conference room for triage. Usually it’s forgettable stuff, scaling issues with a server cluster or the homepage stumbling over a program error, but today’s different. Ralgo, the founder and CEO of Safespace, mounts the dais and says there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is Vencent, our senior Distressing Content Moderator, jumped off a balcony in the rotunda and burst open on the foosball table. The good news is Vencent’s replacement is already lined up so none of our deadlines will slip.
The news of Vencent’s suicide lands on the leadership team in uneven ways. Glarry is sobbing with Aimie in the Quality Assurance pit, grieving the loss of their Borg LARPing comrade. Stavros in Image Analysis says nothing, dons headphones and resumes tweaking the scrotal recognition model. As for me, well, I suspect I’m in for a reaming when Ralgo tells me to meet him in the Privacy Cylinder.
Vencent’s death marks the third time I’ve lost a Distressing Content Moderator in the last eighteen months. The previous one flung himself in front of the Palo Alto BART, and the one before that self-immolated at the annual company acid trip, taking an investor’s dog with her. I thought I’d never stop being the butt of the What’s your burn rate? wisecracks. Content moderation is a rough job, don’t get me wrong. A moderator has to sit in front of a grid of displays all day, double-checking the media that our A.I. flags as too disgusting, incendiary, or violent for human consumption. There’s gonna be some turnover. But the spate of suicides is a big problem for me personally because I’m the corporate Vice President of Spiritual Health and, at least on paper, I’m supposed to be the load-bearing wall that keeps morale from caving so badly.
Ralgo seals the red anodized walls of the Privacy Cylinder around the two of us and tears into me. He says it would be cheaper to install jumper nets in the rotunda than it would be to keep me on staff another six months. He wants to see Vencent’s spiritual performance review notes. I tell him I don’t have any. I’ve stopped taking notes because the distraction interferes with intersoul harmonics. Oh boy, does he ever not like hearing that.
“W. T. Fuck?” he says. “I’ve got senators crawling up my ass over these suicides, and the investors are spooked another public incident will tank the valuation. If they hear about Vencent and come snooping and we don’t have a liability paper trail, we’re one-hundred percent fucked. Do you hear me? Eternally. By thorny cocks.”
I vow that I will recommit myself to diligent notekeeping and he says he’ll believe it when he sees it. I ask him what he meant during standup RE: the good news about Vencent’s replacement.
“About that,” he says. “I’ve hired a Deep Phakes consultant to replace Vencent. And don’t get pissy that I didn’t loop you into the candidate selection process, there wasn’t one. Their salespeople won’t allow it.”
The instant I hear Ralgo mention Deep Phakes I realize why we’re having this conversation in the Privacy Cylinder and not in the breezeway he uses for public humiliation. Deep Phakes is one of the darkest secrets in the Valley. You’ll never hear anyone admit publicly they’re working with Deep Phakes. What they do isn’t entirely legal, and for my money it’s morally fuzzy, but their product is legendary. A Deep Phake shows up at your office a nameless nonentity of programmable meatware, unencumbered by personality or desire. They’ll become anyone you want, utterly and wholly. I’ve heard they’ll even swap genders if you spring for the surcharge.
Ralgo says we should count our blessings that Vencent offed himself on company property, out of the reach of journalists, and that all the witnesses are on the payroll.
“It needs to be like Vencent never jumped off that balcony,” Ralgo says.
“I’m not sure I get it,” I say.
“I’m saying the Deep Phake is New Vencent. We dump him in the same cubicle, have him pick up wherever Old Vencent left off. He’s got to become Vencent, sans, obviously, the suicidal tendencies.”
“Obviously,” I echo, and he gives me a look that says don’t be cute, fuckwad.
“Against my better judgement,” he says, “I’m putting you in charge of New Vencent’s onboarding. Don’t make me regret it.”
We emerge from the Privacy Cylinder and Ralgo grabs a compostable dry erase marker and scribbles NEW VENCENT on the Kanban board over the same column of post-its that Old Vencent had been assigned.
The Destructors, or, Yet Another Rant About That Basecamp Post
First, here’s a link to the lazy Googlers among you who don’t know what I’m referring to.
At a historical/philosophical level, the entirety of that Basecamp post is antithetical to the prevailing values of American workplace culture today, at least among white-collar workers who demand that their employers make deliberate, overt efforts to effect social and political change. Whether or not blue-collar workers wish to make those same demands of their employers is a moot point. The gutting of unions have left them without any bargaining power. White-collar workers — “skilled” labor, a perniciously false term — enjoy the privilege to bargain by virtue of being competed-for by multiple prospective employers.
All this is received wisdom by now, received gravely and with simmering, powerless anger. What is new and fascinating to me is not that Basecamp is experiencing such a backlash from the Twitteratti. From a superficial (and true) perspective the backlash is almost entirely deserved. Rather, the interesting thing is to understand why there is such a backlash. To understand that requires acknowledging the unusual role that the American workplace has taken in our lives, unusual relative to previous centuries of Western culture.
Neoliberalism, the prevailing ideology of our times, continues to eat the world. Under neoliberalism, “the market” and an illusory “freedom of choice” are the organizing principles governing human bodies. Employment/employer have seized the scepter that was once held by religion/church. “What do you do?” is the de rigeur ice-breaker question of our times. Whether we like it or not, the tides of Western culture, at least in the US, have plunged us into a worldview (usually unspoken and unexamined) that makes work the center of one’s life. It’s not a surprise that most workplaces are flowing along with that tide. It is in the nature of tides that few can resist them. At a large enough company, you can practically live your entire life on the company campus: eat, exercise, shower, get child care, sleep, play, relax, do yoga, get medical attention. There was a time when this kind of lifestyle was viewed as dystopic. It’s a relatively recent invention (the last century or so) that we expect the average person not only to work, but to have a vocation. For most of the previous millenia, it was viewed as a kind of doom or failure to be employed by an employer (serfdom). Attitudes have shifted over the past century, coinciding with the loss of influence from historically powerful religious and secular institutions. That power vacuum was filled by work. Work as the center of one’s life. Work as an identity. Work as the only place that people gather with folks outside their immediate circle of family and friends.
As I reread that Basecamp post, it strikes me as extremely at odds with the status quo of the culture and values of the American workplace. Each bulleted decision and change moves the company away from being central to employee’s lives and instead “back” to a more restrained, vintage view of the role of the workplace. I’m not arguing for or against their views here, I’m pointing out that if you can’t put a finger on why the post is bothersome to you, it is in large part due to the fact that the entire thing is countercultural.
In Graham Greene’s short story The Destructors, a group of idle teenage boys systematically dismantle a working man’s house that had barely survived the German bombings of London. They boys moved meticulously through the house, prying up every plank and tile, sawing down every interior wall and joist, until the only thing left standing was a wythe of brick along the perimeter of the house. A single wood pole remained outside propping up the house, a remnant from the war, which the boys tied to the bumper of a neighbors car.
At seven next morning the driver came to fetch his lorry. He climbed into the seat and tried to start the engine. He was vageuly aware of a voice shouting, but it didn’t concern him. At last the engine responded and he backed the lorry until it touched the great wooden shore that supported Mr Thomas’s house. That way he could drive right out and down the street without reversing. The lorry moved forward, was momentarily checked as though something were pulling it from behind, and then went on to the sound of a long rumbling crash. The driver was astonished to see bricks bouncing ahead of him, while stones hit the roof of his cab. He put on his brakes. When he climbed out the whole landscape had suddenly altered. There was no house beside the car-park, only a hill of rubble.
That house is Western social order, and those boys destroying it are the forces of neoliberalism and capital eroding every form of social belonging and power except for one’s employer. Your employer, if you’re a white-collar worker, is that lone wooden strut propping up the house. When a company like Basecamp announces that they’re trying to retreat to a yesteryear posture of detachment, I feel complex emotions. On the one hand, I bitterly despise living in a world that has been so thoroughly gutted that we have to go groveling to our employer to effect social change. Isn’t this supposed to be a goddamn democracy? Why should Basecamp employees be reliant on motherfucking Basecamp to exert sociopolitical influence? On the other hand, I recognize that this shitty world, in all it’s blistering shittiness, is the only world we have, the only world that actually exists. If all we have is that one rickety strut propping up the whole edifice, we had better guard it with our lives.
Deep Fake
(The following is an excerpt from a short story. Read the whole thing here.)
On weekday mornings the Safespace product leadership gathers in an airy conference room for triage. Usually it’s forgettable stuff, scaling issues with a server cluster or the homepage stumbling over a program error, but today’s different. Ralgo, the founder and CEO of Safespace, mounts the dais and says there’s good news and bad news. The bad news is Vencent, our senior Distressing Content Moderator, jumped off a balcony in the rotunda and burst open on the foosball table. The good news is Vencent’s replacement is already lined up so none of our deadlines will slip.
The news of Vencent’s suicide lands on the leadership team in uneven ways. Glarry is sobbing with Aimie in the Quality Assurance pit, grieving the loss of their Borg LARPing comrade. Stavros in Image Analysis says nothing, dons headphones and resumes tweaking the scrotal recognition model. As for me, well, I suspect I’m in for a reaming when Ralgo tells me to meet him in the Privacy Cylinder.
Vencent’s death marks the third time I’ve lost a Distressing Content Moderator in the last eighteen months. The previous one flung himself in front of the Palo Alto BART, and the one before that self-immolated at the annual company acid trip, taking an investor’s dog with her. I thought I’d never stop being the butt of the What’s your burn rate? wisecracks. Content moderation is a rough job, don’t get me wrong. A moderator has to sit in front of a grid of displays all day, double-checking the media that our A.I. flags as too disgusting, incendiary, or violent for human consumption. There’s gonna be some turnover. But the spate of suicides is a big problem for me personally because I’m the corporate Vice President of Spiritual Health and, at least on paper, I’m supposed to be the load-bearing wall that keeps morale from caving so badly.
Ralgo seals the red anodized walls of the Privacy Cylinder around the two of us and tears into me. He says it would be cheaper to install jumper nets in the rotunda than it would be to keep me on staff another six months. He wants to see Vencent’s spiritual performance review notes. I tell him I don’t have any. I’ve stopped taking notes because the distraction interferes with intersoul harmonics. Oh boy, does he ever not like hearing that.
“W. T. Fuck?” he says. “I’ve got senators crawling up my ass over these suicides, and the investors are spooked another public incident will tank the valuation. If they hear about Vencent and come snooping and we don’t have a liability paper trail, we’re one-hundred percent fucked. Do you hear me? Eternally. By thorny cocks.”
I vow that I will recommit myself to diligent notekeeping and he says he’ll believe it when he sees it. I ask him what he meant during standup RE: the good news about Vencent’s replacement.
“About that,” he says. “I’ve hired a Deep Phakes consultant to replace Vencent. And don’t get pissy that I didn’t loop you into the candidate selection process, there wasn’t one. Their salespeople won’t allow it.”
The instant I hear Ralgo mention Deep Phakes I realize why we’re having this conversation in the Privacy Cylinder and not in the breezeway he uses for public humiliation. Deep Phakes is one of the darkest secrets in the Valley. You’ll never hear anyone admit publicly they’re working with Deep Phakes. What they do isn’t entirely legal, and for my money it’s morally fuzzy, but their product is legendary. A Deep Phake shows up at your office a nameless nonentity of programmable meatware, unencumbered by personality or desire. They’ll become anyone you want, utterly and wholly. I’ve heard they’ll even swap genders if you spring for the surcharge.
Ralgo says we should count our blessings that Vencent offed himself on company property, out of the reach of journalists, and that all the witnesses are on the payroll.
“It needs to be like Vencent never jumped off that balcony,” Ralgo says.
“I’m not sure I get it,” I say.
“I’m saying the Deep Phake is New Vencent. We dump him in the same cubicle, have him pick up wherever Old Vencent left off. He’s got to become Vencent, sans, obviously, the suicidal tendencies.”
“Obviously,” I echo, and he gives me a look that says don’t be cute, fuckwad.
“Against my better judgement,” he says, “I’m putting you in charge of New Vencent’s onboarding. Don’t make me regret it.”
We emerge from the Privacy Cylinder and Ralgo grabs a compostable dry erase marker and scribbles NEW VENCENT on the Kanban board over the same column of post-its that Old Vencent had been assigned.
Mustang
Beulah treads carefully across the church lot. Frozen slicks cover the asphalt and sidewalks. The dogwoods are bare and ice coats them down to the last twig like blown glass. It seems to her that a single clap of her red hands might bring the whole thing crashing down like a severed chandelier. She grips the cold door handle and pulls. It’s Saturday. The church is empty. Only the smell, threadbare carpet and stale sugar, greets her. She’s come to see the pastor. All week long she’s pictured how their conversation might go, but now, here, surrounded by actual walls and floors and ceilings, self doubt floods her. Her questions seem selfish, her motives childish. She considers fleeing, but what good would it do? Imagine how embarassing it would be to see the pastor tomorrow in the foyer before the Sunday service. Besides the eerie red glow of an emergency exit sign overhead, the only light in the church comes from the pastor’s office door which waits ajar at the end of the hall. She draws a breath and raps it with her knuckles.
“Come on in,” the pastor says in his calm practiced voice.
Beulah smiles awkwardly and takes a seat. The pastor’s hair is grayer and thinner than it looks in the framed photos on the walls, Kodachrome handshakes with district leaders in smoky prescription lenses and camel-brown corduroy. Books bear witness from floor-to-ceiling shelves on all sides, Wesleyan hymnals, outdated biblical translations, the complete life works of forgotten theologians bound in blue and gold bindings, old paperbacks for new fathers needing permission to punish their children, devotionals to guide the mouths of the spiritually blank.
“So tell me what’s been going on,” the pastor says.
She swallows some doubt and goes into it, “During service, after we sing hymns, when it’s time to give testimonies, I hear people give thanks to God for so many things, for their father’s cancer going into remission, for closing on a new house, for their grandbaby getting out of the NICU. They say these things are answers to prayer. But how could that be? Is God infusing the chemo? Is God changing the tape on the feeding tube? Well, they say that God is working through these doctors and nurses, that they’re human vessels carrying out his plan.”
The pastor is touching his short gray beard, listening.
She continues, “But why then is God helping only these people? Is it because they prayed? What’s so special about them? What makes them deserving when others aren’t? Is God reaching his mighty arm past whole continents of raped villages and mudslides and starving children only to help Bob and Judy get a favorable fixed rate on a thirty-year term? Don’t those villages pray? Aren’t those children begging God every gray morning that today will be the day food comes? Is this what we’re supposed to believe? It’s absurd. It’s obscene.”
The pastor puts an elbow on an armrest and props up his chin. “First of all,” he says, “I want to thank you for coming here and sharing this with me. I assure you that you are not alone in these vexing questions. The Bible says that Jacob wrestled with God. I myself wrestled with these same questions, years ago, when I was about your age. Can I tell you a story?”
She nods, trying her best not to be too open to conviction.
“You’re driving down the highway in a car. It’s your car. It’s not new, it’s a used car, an old car, a gift from family. It’s your first car. It’s ugly, has a rusted door, rattles at top speed, but it gets you where you need to go. Suddenly one day it breaks down and you’re late for work. You get it repaired at great expense. It fails again and you miss a job interview. This can’t go on. What do you do?” he asks rhetorically. “It’s time for a new car.”
Against her best judgement, she lets the metaphor soften her anger. Maybe it’s the pastor’s dulcet baritone, or the faded comforts of the vintage furniture and shag carpeting, but she finds herself sinking into it like a medicinal bath, unpleasant but not entirely unwelcome.
“I believe what you’re feeling is that you have outgrown the simple faith of childhood, that you’re ready for something different, something more…” he seems to be searching delicately for the appropriate phrasing, “…nuanced. It is possible to have gratitude in this life without ascribing every fortunate moment to divine intervention or blaming every tragedy on a lack of devotion. We know so little, down here, and have to be contented by our faith that in the fullness of time his plan will be revealed.”
She considers for a moment. Some of the heat that brought her here flares back.
“Then why,” she asks, “do you permit all those testimonies, Sunday after Sunday, thanking God for the many uneven kindnesses he capriciously doles out among so few? Why don’t you intervene, set an example? You called it the faith of childhood. Are these adults or children?”
He tents his hands by the finger tips and shifts in his chair. His words are even more delicate now.
“There are some lessons,” he replies, “that a person may never be ready to hear.”
He asks her if they can pray together, and she assents. He holds her hands across the desk and closes his eyes. She keeps her eyes open, watches the way he bows his gray head, notices the whiskers in his ears and the flakes on his shirt. She sees his wedding band, his finger so swollen now around the metal that it would be impossible to remove it, and remembers how it was only a few years ago that his wife died when a drunk teenager entered the freeway from the wrong direction.
There are no rings on Beulah‘s fingers, nor would there be in any forseeable future. Her mother’s condition leaves no room for a life outside of work. Oh, how Momma’s hands feel now when she holds them, gnarled and stiff like dried roots, how they tremble with age and pain, how Momma’s fragile skin breaks open over the knuckles. It’s nearly dinner time in the nursing home. Momma has to be fed like a child. The nurses there don’t feed her well. They leave too much food on the tray, impatient with how slowly she chews. They leave green beans smeared in the corners of her mouth and bread crumbs on her gown. Water dribbles down her wagging chin and soaks her bedsheets because no one places a napkin on Momma’s lap, not like Beulah does. She can’t bear to leave Momma alone in that place. Beulah leaves the house by quarter-to-five every morning so she can spend two hours before work bathing her, changing her linens, feeding her breakfast and coffee. Beulah will tell her about the weather, pass along news from distant cousins many timezones away. Momma won’t speak, she’ll just lie there making a wet bup-bup-bup-bup sound and squint at the drop-tile ceiling. Beulah will kiss Momma’s forehead and leave for work. The young nurse will stick out her lower lip and blow her dyed bangs when she thinks Beulah can’t see. It will be the same after work. Beulah will return and clean. She’ll wipe bits of lunch from Momma’s cheeks, brush her dentures, scrub the bedpan, disinfect the shower chair, fluff the pillows, let in some light, make fresh coffee, and feed Momma her dinner. They’ll watch whatever is on TV together, anything with a laugh track. Momma will fall asleep before the evening news, and Beulah will sit there a while, holding Momma’s knotted silky hand.
The pastor squeezes Beulah‘s hands and says “Amen,” and Beulah echoes it. He offers to see her out, but she declines. She walks through the dim red light of the emergency exit sign and emerges onto the slick cold of the parking lot. Freezing rain has started up again and it’s beginning to stick to her windshield. She gets it cleared away and drives carefully to the nursing home.
There’s an ambulance out front. Its lights are spinning wildly, scattering red and blue panic in the rain. Beulah rushes into the building. She ignores the front desk nurse who’s demanding she sign the guest log. Another nurse is walking out of her mother’s room and Beulah almost tackles her as she sprints in. Her mother is lying there, alive and awake, making the bup-bup-bup-bup sound. Beulah throws her arms around her mother, hugging her through a pile of hospital blankets.
“Oh, Momma,” Beulah says.
The nurse has left the television tuned to a talk show at full volume. Every other word is bleeped out and someone is throwing a chair at the audience. Beulah switches it off and goes into the bathroom to wash Momma’s glasses. From the bathroom she hears Momma softly screaming, like a newborn deer bleating for its mother. Beulah comes out and sees an old man, another patient, has wandered in, lost and confused. He’s trying to climb into the bed. “My darlin!” he says. “My darlin!” Beulah yanks him out of the bed and sends him down the hall. He’s missing a slipper and wobbles back and forth with each each step like a wind-up soldier.
“Paw-Paw?” a voice croaks from Momma’s bed.
Beulah turns.
“Maw-Maw? Paw-Paw? Is that you?” her mother says.
Beulah holds her hand and says, “Yes, it’s me.”
Momma hasn’t spoken since nine months ago when she looked out the window and said, “Is it gonna rain?” Momma raises her trembling hand, and Beulah helps guide it. She brings Beulah‘s hand close to her mouth and kisses it.
“Paw-Paw,” Momma says. “Please pray for me.”
“Yes, Momma,” Beulah says. “What shall we pray for?”
“Please pray that God won’t let me lose faith.”
“Okay, Momma, we’ll pray.” Beulah begins praying aloud and her mother squints her eyes at the ceiling again and again starts making the bup-bup-bup-bup sound through her wagging jaw. A tear traces a wrinkle in her old cheek. She falls asleep without eating her supper.
The drive home takes Beulah past the church. A heavy hauler has spun out on the ice and is jack-knifed up ahead. Traffic in both directions is at standstill. Beulah waits there idling for a long time. She looks over at the church and sees the light switch off in the pastor’s office. A minute later he’s tip-toeing across the slippery parking lot to his car. It’s a factory white 1965 Ford Mustang. The paint is still fresh and brilliant all these decades later, except along the passenger side where the drunk teenager’s car swiped it, crunching the door. The door looks desperately hammered back into shape, but is imperfect. It’s rippled and repainted in a color that doesn’t exactly match the original. The windshield is caked with solid ice. The pastor is hacking away at the ice with a long scraper, wildly stabbing with it like a bayonette. He swings the scraper too hard and his feet slip. The scraper tumbles across the engine hood. He pulls himself up and examines every inch of the hood as if frantically looking for nicks in the paint. He picks up the scraper and hurls it again into the ice, chip by tiny chip.