The Signal and the Serendipity
A rectangle has four sides.
On my rectangle, the corners curve inward. It is heavy, but not so heavy I can’t hold it. It is dense but comfortable. It is quiet until I don’t want it to be. One side is smooth, shining, and one side is black.
Except when you turn it on.
It is evening. The day is full of noise but tonight things are finally quiet. Just creaks and groans of home. And that’s when I open the app and begin my descent.
A woman who plays child puzzle toys for a living. Choreographed beat machines. A room full of neon Pokémon plushes. A world of silent admiration, or its close relative, jealousy. A buffet of things everyone is better at than you. No skill is too niche, only out of reach. Sounds blip at random.
“LOVE YOU TOO, ANNA. Thank you for subscribing.”
“Thank you so much. I appreciate YOU.”
Who is the “you”?
Two people randomly battle each other, competing for the most interesting stream. One man had his shirt off and is addressing the crowd. The other is a woman, chatting about plans for a chicken dinner with her husband. She seems not to hear anything the man is asking here, like where she’s from, if the flag in her room is Puerto Rican.
He sits on a couch, elbows resting on his knees as he genuflects toward the battle. She just looks at the camera for one instance, then turns her head to the left for the latest updates on dinner, including an order of a KFC family meal, complete with mashed potatoes and macaroni sides, and which the audience learns will be delivered in 45 minutes.
The app decides that she loses the battle, and congratulations are in order, but even as the man takes his victory, she looks away, caught in something elsewhere.
“I’m going to stay true to me and myself,” he says.
It’s cliche, unprompted. She scoots back and the camera shifts from what was just her face to her profile. Comments fire. He finally asks if she can hear him but there’s no response. When she checks her phone it’s held within two inches of her eyes. He starts to talk about his workout regimen and she pulls out a bag of peanut M&Ms.
Their usernames are sporadic. Her name is se********rl. His is Sco********v.
“Are you a tourist?”
He says this, something out of left field, and to my surprise, she says yes. The ramifications are now that she’s having a full chicken dinner, while live streaming from her presumable hotel room, and is, indeed, spending the last hours of vacation battling a random man from the internet for meandering points.
“This is my first battle,” she says, grabbing another handful of M&Ms. It’s still unclear if she can only hear him on random occasions, and therefore choosing to look at the camera and say nothing to the others. Plus, there is the absent man speaking in the background of her world, orchestrating the chicken. Eventually, she disappears.
I scroll to the next page and it’s a man squatting in a bedroom filled with garbage, taking a long sip from a two-gallon jug of water. He then gargles the water, getting louder in waves. He’s wearing one of those furry Russian hats, and the wall has a large poster that says “do not poke.” He looks to be in a fallout shelter.
A grainy live stream of a parade at Disneyland. A bike cop in LA.
A random man telling viewers to ask his opinion on anything — but I don’t even know who he is, and I assume the other 650 viewers don’t either.
A middle-aged woman turns on the ‘party lights’ as she answers random questions from the audience. She’s running a trivia game and changes her dwindling outfit based on the category of questions.
A girl, whose post says she is deaf and mute, dresses as a mime and reacts to music styles.
The last stream is a girl speaking assigned words based on an emoji. A poster board in front of the camera directs the audience. For a rose she’ll say “mommy,” for a donut “daddy,” and for the low price of a lolly pop, she’ll say “uwu.” I assume there will be voices, but she quite literally watches for the awards to roll in and fires the words in monotone succession, barely able to catch her breath. No affectation, just a steady rhythm of payment and acknowledgment. I look to the corner and 2200 people are watching.
I run into an apparently new genre of content where the trophies are assigned to a sound, and the goal of the audience is to keep the streamer from sleeping. There’s a continuous stream of Taco Bell rings, Bollywood movie sound bites, SpongeBob one-liners, and “Ho Yea-uh” samples as the steamer thrashes on the bed and attempts to cover his ears with pillows, his legs bouncing to accent the anxiety. A clock nearby reads 1:00 am. This wouldn’t be the only deprivation game I’d come across.
One man plays gentle guitar music and does scratchers. The commenters tell me this is “the best scratchers stream, ever.” A woman documents the drinks she’s had in the evening, a kind of home movie experience, like it was taken by a camcorder. She checks for boogers and someone calls her ghetto fabulous.
The guy in the fallout shelter comes up again, and this time he’s off-camera making ghoul noises.
The trophies, I figure out, are actual monetary exchanges, with a rose being the rough equivalent of a dollar. The real prize is a galaxy. This was a flowing monetary ecosystem, rife with grifters and curbside attractions seeking your spare change.
One of the larger trophies I see is a cactus with maracas. Two commenters get into a scuffle over sending large quantities of trophy gifts, one pouting about the spender directing the stream at will, which everyone is hoping can get cheeky in the immediate future. The woman, slowly showing all the tattoos on her body, cheers on the highest spender. The host boots me because I’m not a regular, and there are more trophies to be earned in the night’s demonstrations.
I’ve now ascertained two genres. One is cute women selling perfunctory trophy challenges, and the others are showing off an eclectic but honed talent.
I come across two different streams of crossword puzzlers, then three different streams of rock polishers showing off amethyst and quartz.
I manage to pop into a room and am surprised to see I’m the only one. I immediately felt lonely, denuded from the other formless avatars, and somehow, vulnerable.
I scroll immediately to more endless happening, the rage and horror and jubilee of it all, infinitely earnest, stretching out of an interminable now.
As I lean over the rectangle I could feel my creaturliness, my animal habit, and for one moment thought of the millions of decisions that led me here, to who I was right now, unique yet in the end, predictable. This was both a waste of time and everything life was meant to be. Connection, complexity beyond imagination and including imagination itself, taxonomized into neat articles, things you should know before you’re 30.
It all felt so ephemeral and yet this was an apex, one of individual millions. All lost in a single moment. Doing nothing was a way of life; doing everything was too. I reach for some language of philosophy to explain it all, but in this world, philosophies did not compete so much as they died.
A random notification, a chirp, a shy flag waved over an LED corner.
No life, then suddenly, the eyes and fingers of dozens, summoned like worshipers at a call to prayer. Small beautiful moments, finger taps, eyes drying out in midnight screens. A kind of empty connecting, like hugging a person made hollow and resonant, a series of instruments playing their tune in an imaginary and pixelated corner.
The comments fly faster than they can be read. I ventured to send a simple script, just two lines, about the miracle of this cacophony, this mess that’s pulled so many to one place at this exact time, like a casual rapture.
got called SWEETIE by an old man over phone today
i love Little Bird give some chin rub for me
ugh my stomach BLEH
At least with the Blarney Stone They wipe it after each kiss
i don’t know a lot about black holes but I do know that they have enough concentrated mass to bend light
he cooked his sons Nintendo Wii on a grill
my mom just took my shit and sold it
Goose signed my top gun cart
Were they all like me? Were they all scrolling in the dark? Who were these people made loudly mute? What did they love? What did they admonish? What did these five minutes mean to them? Moments tucked into the creases of the evening. The beautiful flying text, so fast you could feel the hum.
That sounds badass, but no. I don’t have velvet portrait money.
i tried feeding seagulls some of the shitty food I bought but a worker threw it away
The beautiful personless moments, the stories’ terminus, everything quiet and unmoving and full of nothing but anticipation.
The intimate silences speak to me here, and as I close my phone and nod off to sleep, I feel untrained eyes searching for me through the mute black screen, as if, should I want it, I could cease to be a watcher and choose to be a watched one too.
I don’t know which is better.
