“They make their own profiles. Do they know what a profile is? In the old days they existed for use in police records departments to classify criminals and the mentally ill. An accomplishment, so to speak. Today billions of people willingly and meticulously compile their own profiles. Hobbies, sexual and political preferences, networks, friends, family relations, consumption patterns, they even send in their DNA so they can tell people what ethnicities are in their genes, they send us their data twenty-four hours a day. The really clever ones blast all their info into the cloud. I could practically sing an ode to the cloud.

Sweet.”

Is

THE STUDENT

A feminist, blonde, young woman who on dates insists on paying for her own organic falafel. Who gets very angry if anyone touches her without asking or comments on her body. The nude photos she considers art. The student regularly has her teeth cleaned, eats vegan, and yes, she makes a big deal about it. Some new superfood or other is always making it into her meal plan, usually the hype conforms to a blueprint created by the economic system of foodstuffs that are overproduced or underpriced. Stuff that just has to be gotten rid of. Oats, quinoa, avocados, coconut oil, spelt, kale, fork it over. The feeling of living in a body whose guts are forming good, healthy excrement from healthy, nutritionally valuable, environmentally friendly products is indescribable. These days the money no longer suffices for that sort of fun. These days the student subsists on the same thing as everyone else she knows: good, cheap meat. The student is political. Like nearly everyone she knows, she is obsessed with freedom fighting. That is, theoretical freedom fighting for the oppressed. The Palestinians, for instance. She knows a few personally. She feels for them. She’s opposed to Jews, well, not on the whole, she doesn’t know any Jews except those at Goldman Sachs, who now control the cryptocurrencies, and those who have spread through the city of London. The student demonstrates in front of supermarkets against the purchase of Israeli chervil. It gives her a really good feeling. The student stage manages plays in fringe theaters with refugees who have experienced hardship. She had thought for a time about a theater piece with kids from troubled neighborhoods, but then it seemed too unattractive to her. It doesn’t make sense to her, because the poor in this country aren’t poor in the same sense as refugees. They speak English. They have themselves to blame for their situation.

To a certain extent.