Sean Monahan, reporting from what seems to be the frontline of a nation speed-running the descent into decadence:

Last week, I went I went to a meme opera featuring giant Italian brainrot characters, corporate mascots, and the TikTok rapper, Jay Guapo. A launch event for the NFT project Pudgy Penguins’ new mobile game, Pudgy Party, the stage featured Pax and Polly, giant plush penguins twerking along to trap music. Tung Sahur, a giant stick from an Indonesian legend, and Ballerina Cappuccina, a dancer with a tea cup for a head, mingled with the brand mascots. Periodically, the stage would flood with hangers-on from the rappers crew, then be cleared out by event security.

I think I’m wise enough to know that part of my flinch here is the very thing the Dixie Flatline warned Case about in Neuromancer: you can’t let the little fuckers generation-gap you. But in this, our “then-as-farce” timeline, it seems the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis gets twerking penguins instead of the Panther Moderns.

All things considered, I guess most USians of my acquaintance would probably rather have the penguins. Things are getting weird everywhere, Europe very much included, but even when you peel away the top-level political stuff—or perhaps even more so when you do that—the US seems way out in front.

In conversation with a friend earlier in the week, I floated the idea that the central myth of that polity, the so-called American dream, has lost its former power as an orienting and structuring narrative. It was always a thing with multiple (and frequently contradicting) interpretations, of course, and people have been reporting its death since before I was born… but shared dreams take a long time to die, and longer to rot. It feels like it has finally become mere litany on both ends of the political spectrum, a mumbled grace said out of habit over a meal summoned by app and delivered invisibly by a gig-worker.

Hell knows that guy on the scooter doesn’t believe in the American dream. Maybe his options and opportunities are still better there than wherever he came from, but that’s not the same thing at all.