Warning signs:

I know what I look like: old, blonde, fat, as a cat, painted in oil, and dead. I don’t want to be old, blonde, fat, a cat, painted in oil, or dead, but I’ll give my face to any new app that offers me this sort of service. I can’t care where the data goes. I can’t make myself feel afraid. I used to be afraid of the dark. When I was a kid terrified of hallways and parking lots I smiled into every security camera I saw. I also licked parking meters and talked to ghosts, but I grew out of those completely by the time I reached double digits. I still instinctually nod to every security camera I see. This isn’t some 1984-type instinct. It’s just who I am.

When I was young I didn’t nod. I smiled and I showed my teeth. In the elevator or at the bank I would look right into the little orb, grinning as wide as I could. I knew it was a camera, but I didn’t picture someone watching on the other end. I just liked to smile at cameras. It was like smiling at myself, but easier. Giving away my data is easy too. I imagine myself as data rich, like Kylie Jenner rich, youngest billionaire ever rich, like infinite data to spend on infinite things, enough to give away to every security agency, data mining operation, shadowy corporation. Is my data like oil or like love? Is it going to run out or can more always be made? I trade in my face for other versions of my face. Here I am with a longer, cartoonier tongue. Here I am as a man. Here I am as a clown. Here I am with a rainbow dripping out of my mouth. Here I am as a medieval portrait subject. Here I am with no eyes. Here I am with your face on mine. Here I am and I am and I am.

Here I am and here she is. She smells like pumpkin spice hand sanitizer. We’ve only just met, but we’re drunk girls and it’s the bathroom and it’s a party so for this brief moment in time, we’re the bestest friends in the whole wide world. She has vampire teeth and we’re taking a selfie in the mirror. On her phone, through this filter, our faces are freckled, our lips plumped, our ears pointed. We’re elves and we’re so beautiful. I tell her that I wish it was Halloween every day and she tells me that soon enough it will be.

Halloween is scary, but so is everything else. Is that why I’m having no fun this year or does this party at a Bushwick bar just suck? Feeling haunted is no longer reserved for these late October nights of pumpkin carving, a truly absurd activity, or breaking into the graveyard on a freshman year dare or any other classic stupid traditions that allow fear to be conjured up and even controlled. I get goose bumps every day and have bad dreams every night. I have no good reason to be scared of anything, but I am often struck with a quick and horrible feeling of terror that runs up my spine out my head and says in a sharp little whisper, Be careful, I am warning you something bad is coming, it’s called tomorrow and tomorrow and next week and next year. Something bad is coming. You have been warned. This flutter of fear is the only Halloween tradition I have left, and it is not a group activity. My lightning moments of doom are just for me, like these selfies I take with hearts for eyes. Just for me, and whoever needs my data of course.

Blind dumb fear is startling, but I am familiar with the feeling and nothing familiar can really be more than a feeling felt. It doesn’t change me. I wish it did, then I could be a Greta Thunberg or a David Hogg, who are noble in their fear, like I imagine the tiny soldiers marching across Europe to the Holy Land in the Children’s Crusade of 1212. It’s just the ozone has always been thinning and forests are always on fire and the market has always been free. I understood that the world was ending back when I still licked parking meters. My world has always been ending just like everyone else’s. We are all familiar with the wars that never end and the elections that change nothing and the climate changing everything. We should be terrified, but in the harsh headlights of approaching doom, no matter how slow or fast we think it is coming, we are stuck, like the paralyzed deer that just stand in the road and then make our lives there. The headlights still approach little by little, but the doom becomes as familiar and constant as the sunrise. We will die before the sun does. This comforts us, just as we know we will be dead when the doom collides with our deer body on that road. We won’t feel the impact. We will already be nothing more than a light stain on the pavement. Stagnation scares me. Forward motion does too. Life is scary, always true, always will be. There’s nothing else to try besides getting familiar with it. There’s just too much to be afraid of. Lab-made diseases, school shooters, student loans, fentanyl, aspartame, cops, robbers, Russians, Americans, racists, being racist, living, dying, becoming, unbecoming, you, me.

In the bathroom, through the mirror, on her screen, this girl and I become elves. In the future, we will be elves on the dance floor and the subway. She was right—it will be Halloween every day. AI transmogrifications and filters will be real or more real or reality will be less real. We will all have some sort of little eyeball lens that communicates with other people’s little eyeball lenses and changes faces in real time. This is what the boy from Stanford dressed as a cowboy tells me as he takes a Jell-O shot. When I see you, you will appear as you want to appear. It’s the next step in beauty and identity. Makeup will be over. I like yours of course, but I usually don’t like being reminded that girls spend time painting their faces.

I laugh because “painting a face” sounds so old-fashioned, something a cowboy would really say. My laugh makes him smile and turn pink as he adjusts the red bandana around his neck and swings the lasso attached to his belt. It reaffirms his masculinity to swing it around, counteracting his blushing moment.

I bet he feels really good about how he’s appearing right now. I bet he wishes he could always be wearing cowboy boots with spurs and that sexy wide-brimmed hat, all authentically Western and vintage. He tells me he got them in Wyoming, where the west is still wild, and the buffalo roam freely yet cautiously, as if they know what happened to the people who lived there among their ancestors before the cowboys, saloon girls, pioneer families, and railroad men arrived to conquer America’s frontier. Those people turned what they saw as an empty terrifying void of the total unknown into cities and states using their quick wits, raw democracy, rugged optimism, and radical individuality. The Stanford cowboy could go on and on with this list of adjectival phrases. He must repeat them to a lot of girls at a lot of parties. There’s no point listening to his boring road trip adventure if the stakes are this low. I could kiss him and raise them, but a little shiver of fear stops me and I say thank you, fear. You are right sometimes.

He learned a lot, road-tripping back East after graduation, all alone with no cell phone or maps. I’m too afraid to dance, so I listen with my elf ears to how the West was won and what was lost in turn and how a place of lawlessness became the place of structure and surfers and Stanford that it is today. The Wild West was beautiful, but in taming it some of that beauty was reduced to myth. The wildness of the West was lost, for John Wayne and Ronald Reagan and Clint Eastwood to search for in many a film about manifesting collective destiny while riding horses through lawless infinite space.

Wow that’s crazy, I reply. I wonder if the cowboy is going to offer me cocaine. Whenever I’m high I rant about Marxist revolution, basically the way the cowboy is going on about the cowboys.

It was wild, really, really wild, he says again and again. I stare at his big silver belt buckle and wonder what real cowboys smelled and talked like. The West was freedom, he says, just like the internet originally was! He asks me if I understand what he is saying. He’s afraid he’s lost me. I laugh because he never had me. Freedom is the stuff of dreams and nightmares only and our free market doesn’t make us free people, but the cowboy doesn’t care. Silicon Valley must have burrowed itself deep into his brain underneath that hat. He is probably afraid of blood, or social media, or something stupid. My drink is seventeen dollars. Poor cowboy, I think again and again as I listen to his musings slur.

The internet used to be destiny we could manifest, lawless, no Gods or governors or corporations or censors. Everyone could be a sheriff if they wanted to in their own little unmapped digital ghost towns. That’s over now and the cowboy sulks for a second, his hat droops down and his phone lights up and I almost just walk away to look for the elf I met in the mirror, but he begins again on that “internet as the Wild West” metaphor we all know and love. His words sound like cursive, each syllable spilling into the next, as he says, The Web 2.0 was a frontier. It just demanded to be conquered and so we, or I guess like old millennials and Gen Xers, or whoever came before us did just that.

Yes, I say. They did just that. They conquered it and then perverted it by forcing their identities of adventure and violence and organization onto it. The cowboy nods, like my professors do, so I go on blabbering, building some identity of an identity. My words are as fake and as real as a filter that makes my lips big and nose small. The west was about collectivity . . . but also so much about the individual’s power. That’s why you’re so attracted to it, why you bought these boots and wear this outfit on regular Friday nights. I hope you get bored with it soon.

Damn, he says.

Damn is all there is to say, so we do some coke in the empty bathroom, just the two of us in the sort of silence a tumbleweed could blow right through. The cowboy lets me do another line and then another and another and another and another and I’m asking him if he thinks the revolution will ever come or a revolution, or any change at all? and for another line, please. The two of us finish the bag and rush back through the party to the bar. The cowboy wants to dance, but I’m too chicken so we drink instead. A lonely Freddy Krueger sits down beside me and scrolls through his Instagram feed. Things can always be worse. That’s something not to be afraid of.

If a snake bit you I’d suck the venom out, he says, all hat and bandana and boots, just a levitating cowboy costume. Whatever boy was there, filling the blue jeans with skin, is gone. I can see him as he sees himself, as he wants to be seen by me. I smile at the floating hat with my pointy teeth because I am now a rattlesnake, and with a shake of my tail I make the scariest noise you’ll ever hear. Back when I was a human girl who smiled at security cameras and cried at the dark, back before I’d ever even taken a selfie or known that word, I was at sleepaway camp and something happened.

The cowboy listens even though he has no ears.

I was moping around behind the cabin when I heard it rattle from the bushes. Right as I was about to run away, I stopped to listen again. It was beautiful, out of sight, but so close. I listened and I understood that it was a familiar sound, the sound of fear. Look at my fear, the snake said with its tail. How afraid I am is how afraid you should be too. The cowboy and I both come back from our filtered heavens, relieved to again be as normal as we’ve ever been. If I had a rattler it would never stop rattling.

The cowboy is yelling about all these beginnings beginning to begin. His words are lost in the self-conscious music and laughter and my brain’s blur of ghosts. My eyes must go blank because he starts shouting all of a sudden—really trying to reach me, as if I’m on the other side of some empty great plain, to be galloped toward on his horse of drunken Stanford-educated thought. I wish there was a Technicolor John Wayne sunset for him to ride off into, but there’s not. Instead he just shouts all his words and I smile with normal teeth each time he finishes a sentence with three exclamation marks that dance right out of his mouth.

When we have these lenses we won’t need any screens; our bodies will be the device. You’ll get to choose how I see you, for real. You could be a snake on the floor! There will be rules because there are always rules, but within these rules, we will all be our own avatars!!! The future is coming! Can’t you feel it?! The rules will be fair and they will protect us!

Don’t laugh!

We can write the rules! We can build this world and ourselves in it! There’s so much to explore!!! I can be a cowboy and you can be my cowgirl! Being will be completely different! We will be everywhere!

Not here I hope. Thank you for the coke. Goodbye cowboy. I hope you manifest your destiny. Happy Halloween: it’s every night now, forever. We close our tabs. I search the dance floor for my sweaty beautiful friends who never get scared of anything.

See you everywhere, the cowboy says as I walk away.

What’s scarier, to be everywhere or to be invisible? Is to be invisible to be nowhere? Kylie Jenner, queen of the filter and the filler, is agoraphobic. She struggles to leave her big white house in the Hidden Hills. She’s trapped like a ghost haunting its swimming pool, but she gets to be free when she posts a selfie. She arrives onto all our phones.

A hunter from Thespiae drowned from staring at his face for too long in a pond. They named a flower after him.

Terrorists are monsters, or at least that is what my Republican ex-step-grandpa told me. I laugh because I know monsters aren’t really real, except the one under my bed of course. 9/11 is still fresh. It’s Thanksgiving 2001, but I wish it were Halloween. When I grow up and I am thirteen, I get a Facebook. I friend my Republican ex-step-grandpa. He posts pictures of his golden retriever. I post funny statuses. My dad tells me not to make jokes about terrorism, not because they aren’t funny, but because we are being listened to. We are constantly being surveilled. We need to watch out. You need to be careful. It’s the Patriot Act and it’s not for patriots, he says. What’s the big deal though? I don’t have anything to hide. I’m not bad. How could it be bad?

He tells me it’s not bad, it’s the worst, and it’s the beginning of the end of everything. Every adult I know has their own beginning of the end. Everyone has monsters under their beds. My uncle has his newfound knowledge of incels. My grandma has the disappearing bees. My other grandma has the Russians. My mom thinks that cell phones are giving us cancer. She buys the whole family anti-radiation cases, but they won’t protect us. My dad says there is another cancer, and it’s called the Patriot Act.

A week before Halloween 2001, Congress passed legislation to strengthen national security. While children went trick-or-treating, collecting Laffy Taffy and SweetTarts in pillowcases, data collection began. Nothing was private anymore. Privacy was made up a long time ago by someone, just like filters and elves. My dad sees privacy as a right. He is afraid, but I am not because I cannot remember a time when I assumed that privacy was real. He tells me to be careful because I am being watched. I tell him that I like to be watched. I need to be seen.

Other people’s moms and dads must have explained this government surveillance thing to them too. I’m sure the cowboy could tell you all about it. PATRIOT is a shitty acronym for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.

There’s this meme about being surveilled by our very own personal FBI agents. Knowyourmeme.com explains,

Government Agent Watching Me refers to a character referenced in jokes in which a person engages in conversation with a government agent spying on them through either their webcam or smartphone. Rather than sinister, the relationship between the agent and the user is usually sympathetic and emotionally supportive.

We know that when our laptops are open someone can see through the camera. We know that no message we send is private. Scary, but funny, but scary. We do all sorts of embarrassing things and our FBI agent watches. You ate a booger. You had a boy over. You spent all night searching for the perfect cowboy hat. You put tape over your camera. You got left on read. You watched some weird Wild West porn. You made a meme about the FBI agent. They saw it. They see it all and isn’t that funny? Isn’t it beautiful to be important enough to be watched? The government doesn’t think we’re important enough for health care, but to be watched, yes, of course, they can get that taken care of. We know that power is evil, but what if its agents are not? What if they are just like us? What if they could help us with our math homework, our flirtations, our little problems? What if they were our guardian angels? What if they are truly here to protect us? What if the protection we need is as simple as friendship, the gift of witness. Would that friendship look like this?

The Stanford cowboy is outside and getting belligerent. He’s breaking bottles with a gaggle of skater boys. I wonder how many people have been beaten to death with skateboards. I wonder if the cowboy can do a kickflip. I wonder if he will ever think of me again. The vampire-toothed girl is sitting on the curb waiting for her Uber. She’s alone except she’s not: her FBI agent is watching. It’s last call. Halloween is over or it’s beginning and it’s time to take the train home.

Three cops stand by the turnstile. I ask them what they’re dressed up as. They tell me that they’re cracking down on fare evasion. It’s no fair, but that’s just how capitalism works. The city would rather pay three police officers to make sure we pay to take the subway than have free public transportation. This is why I shouldn’t do coke. It makes me talk to cops. No fare. No fair. The next morning, on Twitter, I see a video of hundreds of students in Chile running together and hopping over the turnstiles as two police officers fail to stop them. That’s how revolution works. They can’t stop us all.

On June 27, 2019, three anonymous Facebook users created the event page Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us, scheduled to commence at 3 a.m. on September 20, 2019. The description reads, “We will all meet up at the Area 51 Alien Center tourist attraction and coordinate our entry. If we naruto run, we can move faster than their bullets. Lets see them aliens.” Two million people RSVPed and the event became the basis for a slew of memes. Over the following two weeks, “attendees” of the group made shitposts and satirical plans to storm the base, including one on July 5 from user Jackson Barnes that gained over ten thousand reactions. The plan reads,

Ok guys, i feel like we need to formulate a game plan, Ive put together this easy to follow diagram here for a proposed plan.

The basic idea is that the Kyles form the front line, if we feed them enough psilocybin and monster energy and say that anyone in camouflage is their step dad, and the entire base is made of drywall then they will go berserk and become an impenetrable wall.

Then the Rock Throwers will throw pebbles at the inevitable resistance (we don’t want to hurt them, we just want to annoy them enough to not shoot the Kyles as often). While this is all happening, the two Naruto runner battalions will run full speed around the north and south flank, and shadow clone jutsu, effectively tripling our numbers, and overwhelm the base (red circle).

P.S. Hello US government, this is a joke, and I do not actually intend to go ahead with this plan. I just thought it would be funny and get me some thumbsy uppies on the internet. I’m not responsible if people decide to actually storm area 51.

The soldiers of the first wave would be an array of meme characters, the expendables, Kyles, unvaccinated children, K-pop fans, Naruto runners, Karens, furries. Then the rest of us would follow safely and see dem aliens. I wanted to see dem aliens. I wanted to see what our government was hiding from us. So did two million other Facebook users. I figured maybe six people would show. Something like 150 actually went to Area 51. Others had a music festival instead of a raid. The west is no longer wild.

What percentage of a population needs to revolt in order for revolution? Only 3.5 percent, according to the math done by Erica Chenoweth, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School, and that’s just for nonviolent change! “We are the 3.5 percent!” I imagine the internet people shouting as they made the west wild again and stormed the base.

Couldn’t we really have pulled it off if we tried? Isn’t that why the Air Force characterized the event as a possible humanitarian crisis and issued an official warning telling people not to come? But at the same time it was silly, Halloweeny, having to do with outer space rather than politics. I imagine some intern being called into a secret meeting, deep in the bunker, to brief government officials on what Kyles and Naruto runners are. I imagine the generals and strategists trying to wrap their heads around these meme concepts. I imagine their relief on the day of the raid when the revolution did not begin. I imagine the intern being promoted to FBI agent, my FBI agent. I imagine him watching me. I smile into my laptop’s camera. I hope he smiles back.