Adam Leroux had managed to avoid most of social media.

Facebook, the company that owned Instagram, had another social media platform which was also called Facebook.

The company was named for the platform, which had started out as a student project at Harvard University.

The Harvard version of Facebook, the ur-Facebook, had been designed to rate whether or not the hedge fund’s female students were sexually attractive.

The ur-Facebook evolved into actual Facebook, spreading beyond the hedge fund’s campus, and conquered the world.

 

Adam Leroux only logged into his Facebook account about once every three years, which gave him a slightly unique perspective when he checked it in the year 2016 AD. He’d last been a heavy user of Facebook in 2008 AD, when the most annoying thing on the social media platform was people insisting that they were so happy and so in love with their latest semi-monogamous partner.

Things had changed.

By 2016 AD, no one was boasting about how their latest semi-monogamous partner made them so much happier than their previous semi-monogamous partners.

Now Adam Leroux’s friends were bombarding each other with images of murdered bodies and shrieking about the corruptible nature of human beings while they apologized for social privilege which derived from their relative position in the global hierarchy.

“Fuck this shit,” said Adam Leroux, logging out of Facebook for what would be the last time.

 

Another social media platform called Twitter held even less appeal.

 

Twitter was a place where people practised bumper-sticker morality while other people threatened to rape and murder each other for expressing simple sentiments about banal objects.

 

“I like cats,” a user typed into Twitter.

I will fucking rip your ugly fucking shit face off you fucking jew cuck jew, replied Twitter.

“Crayons are good,” a user typed into Twitter.

Your soul will be mine in hell as you suck molten fire from my demonic warted prick, replied Twitter.

“My grandma wears a knitted hat,” a user typed into Twitter.

I am coming to kill and rape you until you are dead and raped you assfucked pussy, replied Twitter.

 

Twitter was also where Donald J. Trump ruled over America.

It had become necessary to enchain every human being with some form of social media. New platforms were being developed every minute of every day, attempting to unlock each individual mind.”

Donald J. Trump on Twitter was the ultimate tool of distraction.

Each day of Donald J. Trump’s Presidency, his administration dismantled some aspect of the federal government, terraforming America into a dystopian misery, but no one talked about it and very few media outlets gave it any coverage.

All anyone paid attention to was Donald J. Trump’s activity on Twitter, where he issued mean-spirited and stupid opinions about nonsense.

Concerned about Donald J. Trump stacking the federal bench with crypto-conservatives who believe that dinosaurs were made of chocolate pudding?

Shut the fuck up!

The President is upset about professional sports!

On Twitter!

Worried about nuclear war?

Who fucking cares?

The President called an actress ugly!

On Twitter!

 

Adam Leroux stayed away from Twitter. But the multi-tentacled hivemind of global capitalism was nothing if not adaptable.

It had become necessary to enchain every human being with some form of social media. New platforms were being developed every minute of every day, attempting to unlock each individual mind.

In Adam Leroux’s case, it turned out that Instagram was the key.

 

And I could easily write some very long and possibly pithy descriptions of Instagram’s terrorist attack on female self-esteem, explaining how it had become the #1 destination on the Internet for plastic surgery disasters, for a plethora of fake asses, fake tits, hair removal, skin lightening, lip enhancements and Botox, and how female celebrities with certain physical features used their Instagram followers to advertise products that they’d been paid to hawk, and how the products were inevitably chemical warfare on the natural beauty of women, and how all of this was a sustained spiritual attack and how I myself know a handful of amazing people who’d gone haywire with plastic surgery inspired by Instagram.

But why bother with that?

Here is the simplest way to describe how awful Instagram was for women: it had weaponized yoga.

Instagram had created an environment where ridiculously blonde women from the ridiculous upper classes could flaunt their ridiculous lifestyles comprised of samosas and endless Caribbean vacations and could, somehow, wrap this excess of capitalism in a blanket of spirituality, photographs of Downward Dogs and Warrior Poses, the language of body-positive affirmation, and cloying truisms about the ability of anyone to achieve their dreams if they put enough effort and faith into the achievement of those dreams.

Yoga was one of the many weapons of mass destruction employed in Instagram’s terrorist war on women’s self-esteem.

A tool to bludgeon people with the things that they couldn’t have.

Impossible bodies, impossible wealth, impossible life.

 

If anything could have resisted, it was yoga.

Yoga was as old as the hills.

It was ancient technology. It was almost as old as Fairy Land.

And it too had fallen.

It was like everything else on Instagram.

Just another weapon in a long war.

So don’t even ask about the fucking Kardashians.

Say what you will about the strippers of Philadelphia, but they’d done something nearly impossible. They’d monetized their participation in Instagram’s terrorist war on women’s self-esteem.”

Because heterosexuality is a bullshit con on women, the accidental byproduct of Instagram’s remorseless terrorist war was the even more remorseless arousal of Adam Leroux’s sexual desire.

His particular demesne was Instagram accounts belonging to women who were strippers in the city of Philadelphia.

Adam Leroux liked their fake asses, he liked their fake tits, he liked their fake lips, he liked their fake hair.

Say what you will about the strippers of Philadelphia, but they had a leg up when it came to Instagram. They’d done something nearly impossible.

They’d monetized their participation in Instagram’s terrorist war on women’s self-esteem.

Their primary motivation for using Instagram was to advertise to potential customers.

They posted pictures of themselves and alerted the world about which nights they’d be working the clubs.

Adam Leroux’s attention was an accidental byproduct of this monetization.

 

Adam Leroux had discovered these women in 2015 AD.

Using his own Instagram account, he had spent almost two years commenting on their photos.

 

Here are some of the choicer comments that Adam Leroux had posted to Instagram:

 

(1) bae i wanna crawl up in that a$$ like a small wood land animal and die

(2) would lick that pussy until u exploded just one taste its all im asking

(3) beautiful face bootiful body y wont u let me touch

(4) girl u got wot i need and wot i need is a$$ lol

(5) wont u let me show u a good time my hand to god above ill come to philly and teach u bout brotherly love and u can buy whatever u like

 

Adam Leroux had left thousands of these comments.

For some inexplicable reason, the dark magic of Fairly Land had left them unaffected.

The comments remained long after Leroux’s death.

This was Adam Leroux’s legacy.

Comments on Instagram that expressed his infinite and endless thirst for the surgically inflated buttocks of Philadelphia’s strippers.

Welcome to the future.

from Only Americans Burn in Hell (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99)

 

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA, a psychedelic biography of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, was an unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada. His novel I Hate the Internet was a bestseller everywhere (doing especially well in Serbia). His follow-up novel The Future Won’t Be Long wasn’t a bestseller anywhere, but was shortlisted for the Literary Review’s 2017 Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Only Americans Burn in Hell is published by Serpent’s Tail in hardback and eBook.
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