Depending on fluctuations in the stock market, on some days Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world.
Which meant that the motto was slightly disingenuous.
You don’t get as rich as Jeff Bezos without knowing exactly how people beyond the Cash Horizon wreaked havoc upon democracy: they said what they were going to do, in public, and then they did it.
In 2003 AD, about twenty people in the United States government told the world that it was going to kill a metric fuckton of Iraqis.
The whole world cried out, in unison, and demanded that the United States government not kill a metric fuckton of Iraqis.
But the Iraqis still died by the metric fuckton.
Remind me: who gave a shit about darkness?
The second problem with the motto was that it was based on an ahistorical assumption, which was that Americans lived in a democracy.
America was never a democracy.
It was a Republic.
It had been designed as a Republic.
The country’s founders were horrified by democracy.
American democracy couldn’t die because American democracy had never existed.
out of .
The front page of Twitch’s website displayed a live video stream from the Overwatch League.
Two regional teams battled each other in the game Overwatch while a live audience watched.
The stream was narrated by two men who’d patterned their vocal style after sports commentators.
“Dallas is going to swap things up a bit. Getting aggressive here and you have to worry a bit,” said one of the commentators.
“I mean that’s huge for Dallas,” said the other commentator. “Because now they’re going to have a player advantage. It’s a six versus five. That’s a big hit on the way out.”
“What the hell is this?” asked the sex worker.
“Are you not a millennial, madame?” asked HRH. “Is this not your natural domain?”
The vast majority of streams on Twitch were very different than Overwatch League.
A random person played video games in their home and broadcast this over the Internet. Twitch hosted the action, providing a central place for the meeting of broadcasters, who were called streamers, and their viewers.
The video game action occupied most of any individual stream. A small box, containing live video of the user, appeared in one of the stream’s corners. On the right side of the screen, the stream’s viewers commented in a scrolling livechat.
Depending on which streaming software was used, and depending on which plug-ins the streamer had configured, various graphics were displayed when viewers interfaced with the platform’s monetization.
In other words, the people watching videos on Twitch could give money to the people broadcasting on Twitch and these donations would show up in the stream itself.
“Over many arduous months, I have cultivated a personal fandom of several Twitch channels,” said HRH. “Permit a demonstration.”
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of an unremarkable young man.
The young man was playing Fortnite: Battle Royale.
The sex worker watched as the young man navigated his video game avatar across an island landscape, destroying objects and simulating genocide against the other players connected to the same Fortnite server.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a pretty young woman who lived in Tokyo.
The woman was not playing a video game. She was interacting with the livechat. She was receiving donations whenever she impersonated a character from Final Fantasy XV.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a young woman who was dressed as Diana from Wonder Woman. The woman was drinking AriZona Iced Tea and playing South Park: The Fractured but Whole.
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a man in his twenties, who was cursing wildly as he attempted to play a game called Cuphead.
“Cuphead is a crowd-funded odyssey into an ersatz replica of animation from the Great Depression,” said HRH. “I have never indulged, but I am informed that it is a work of manifold difficulty.”
HRH navigated to the Twitch channel of a young woman who lived in Sidcup.
The Sidcup woman was playing The Sims 4, a piece of software that simulated the appearance of a Twentieth-Century AD suburban life that been murdered by the international capitalist class.
The sex worker watched the Sidcup woman demonstrate the décor of a simulated house in The Sims 4.
The house in The Sims 4 was very moderne Danske.
It stood in contrast to the visible décor of the woman’s Sidcup home.
“This is live?” asked the sex worker.
“Twitch is where the Western world’s underclasses go to demonstrate their lack of utility in the face of increasing mechanization and globalized manufacturing,” said HRH. “Education has failed them. These children produce nothing but hours of live video. Each day hosts an onslaught of countless banal gigabytes. Millions of other children hang upon these performers, watching their every gesture and nuance.”
“It’s people playing video games?” asked the sex worker.
“What you are witnessing is the death of traditional media. Do you think these children have the capacity to thrill to the slight characterization that you discovered in Lovecraft? Do you believe that after hours of this plotless false intimacy they will return to television? Here we encounter the terminal point for millennia of narrative. Goodbye the Ferrari, Tony Kushner.”
“I feel fucking old,” said the sex worker. “And I’m only twenty-seven.”
“Worry not. All of the Shropshire lads who salivate over MILF pornography will seek to unlock your wisdom of the ages. Forget you not, madame, that blood is a rover.”
“Is this what we’re doing tonight?” asked the sex worker. “Are we going to fuck or what?”
“Such crassness!” cried HRH. “Delightful! Delightful! Did I not inform you that I would demonstrate the greatest perversity? Do not think that Twitch itself constitutes the horror. There remains another dimension.”
HRH scrolled down on the webpage hosting the Sidcup woman’s Twitch channel.
HRH clicked the donate button.
The donate button opened another browser tab in Google Chrome.
HRH switched to this tab.
HRH filled out the form on the donate page.
HRH clicked donate.
A notification appeared on the Sidcup woman’s stream.
It informed the woman and her viewers that HRH had donated £2,000.
The woman pulled off her headphones and began to cry.
“One cannot donate to any Twitch channel which experiences true popularity,” said HRH. “Fellows with an audience in the hundreds of thousands will not evidence the appropriate response when presented with a mere £2,000.”
The Sidcup woman screamed into her computer: “No. Oh my God. Oh my fucking God. What? No. No. No. Oh my God. No. Oh my God. No. No. No. Fuck. Fucking Hell. Oh my God, no. No. No. Fuck. No. What? What? WHAT?”
“How much money do you have?” asked the sex worker.
“The zeroes pile up like the bloated corpses of dissident intellectuals at Dachau,” said HRH. “Imagine the earnings from a weapons-for-hostages scheme with the Islamic Republic of Iran and multiply that figure by a billion.”
HRH leaned back in his DXRacer chair.