This website was archived on July 20, 2019. It is frozen in time on that date.
Exolymph creator Sonya Mann's active website is
Sonya, Supposedly.
Sending this Exolymph dispatch from my phone because I’m super 2016 like that 😬 lol millennials amirite ✌️️
So. I watched the second presidential debate. My head is full of that tonight. But don’t worry, international readers, this is not about the *content* of US politics.
We watched Trump and Clinton trade barbs. Everyone around me was upset — both IRL viewers in the same room and a substantial portion of my online companions (who were present via Twitter and the #democracy channel of the Cyberpunk Futurism chat group).
Maybe my reaction to the whole rigmarole is blasé because I’m far too jaded now. Maybe it’s because I’m still certain that my preferred candidate will win. It’s certainly not that I don’t care!
For me, functioning on a day-to-day basis requires filters of the kind mentioned in the @sargoth / Johanna Drott quote I opened with. Sustaining my baseline of mental health through election season might require heavy-duty filters. Perhaps my brain set them up instinctively and tags everything election-related as memes.
The political horse race is stressful to observe, but damn does it produce some good jokes! Picture via @ObeseChess on Twitter; origin lost in the swirling mists of memedom. (Usually true, but in this case the source is actually Obvious Plant.) In not-unrelated news, we’re careening toward a weird techno-plutocratic status quo and it’s pretty entertaining:
Of course, the current status quo is already quite techno-plutocratic… Which is the whole point of this newsletter.
IRL, the future labor situation will be mostly mundane, just like our current setup. Dystopia doesn’t feel like dystopia unless it accelerates especially quickly (knock on wood). Just be grateful that you’re not a protagonist! If you are a protagonist, please get in touch so that I can write about you and piggyback on your eventual fame and fortune. Unless you’re the other kind of protagonist…
Longer dispatch coming tomorrow. I hope you don’t mind when Exolymph is on the short side.
