Why My Friends Move to California
An essay. About four paperback pages.
The dream of the 19th century is alive in Oakland. This essay was published on January 19, 2024.
This morning I tapped the news; read the headlines, almost all the same as they were last night. I tapped Instagram, for no reason. There’s nothing there that I want to see.
There’s a notification from Substack. I spend the next half-hour reading, curled up on a too-small couch, scratching at the too-far space between my shoulders like a monkey. It’s a new headline, a new picture, the hit that lasts until I read the last word of the last footnote, then the crash. Tap the news again.
I don’t care about what I’m reading. At least, I don’t care about it any more than I care about the next latest thing. I care about it all, desperately (when topical), but I mean—God, who cares? I tap the link, I read the thing, it’s the tick, tick, tick that helps one moment move into the next a little easier, makes me pick at my skin a little less.
There’s a fantasy among young men of my generation that I call the Salon. The Salon is a coffee shop, or a dinner party, or a hole-in-the-wall bar filled with just the right kind of people. There they discuss ideas, which can be on any subject, but which must ultimately be social in importance: the Earth might orbit the Sun, but it is a subject worthy of the Salon only if it challenges the Church. Television and movies are fair game, but only qua culture or art (or as meta-commentary, or meta-meta-commentary). Only music can be enjoyed for its own sake, and then only to the extent it is Taste. The Salon is where networks are woven, and manners are formed, and the Revolution begins. Before, there was a drink in hand; then, a cigarette; then, a joint; now a vape pen, or a mealy mushroom elixir. There is a chess game in the corner, with a few onlookers, and secret plans are laid by the window. There is eating and drinking and discussing well into the evening, when at last spouses or paramours must be attended—but only until the next indolent afternoon, when compatriots will again fill the space, exchange secret signs, and settle in. There are habits of dress to display, and social orders to establish, and they will be so here. Everyone at the Salon is important. Everyone here is a friend.
The Salon, like other male fantasies with a premodern European fixation, is only available as a videogame. The final Western social order having been established before our generation finished high school, there are no more stakes to be raised. God being dead, and God being dead being dead, there isn’t a moral implication to anything, anymore. Without a code to defend or attack, it’s hard to imagine what a fruitful—or even enjoyable—moral discussion would sound like, unless you count tired Culture War skirmishes. And you don’t. Tech-utilitarianism, be it Effective Altruism or something spookier, ends up the lingua franca. One can gesticulate with his glass of scotch while debating whether chicken farms or server farms are the bigger threat. Neither of them knows or cares about anything, including your opinion.
The great social movements of our time include an aesthetic rejection, express or not, of the congregation anywhere of privileged, self-important, talkative men—which is the whole vibe. So we play pretend on the computer.
And the computer tells us that there is still a real Salon. It’s to the west, where the sky meets the sea, behind a cover of mist.
The Salon is in the Bay Area, where tech-oligarchs and bloggers and stylish ghouls with new digital money have reopened the question of the Western order. They have brought liberalism under attack, and by doing so have freed liberal thought. They exchange secret signs, they speak in code. With their code they have raised new gods, and their word will be made flesh in a way that the Church Fathers couldn’t have dreamt. God, look at them—they’re friends, they have friends. And more than that, their friendships are important.
And so my friends move to California.
I slide my finger down my little black screen. Substack has invented new ways to tell me that someone has said something about someone, somewhere, slowly oozing into a shape like Twitter, or X, and tick, tick, tick.
I will find a new article about ChatGPT and the coming AI Doom, even though I understand functionally nothing about how this technology works. I will check the price of Bitcoin, even though I don’t own any; I will read about heterodox economic ideas, even though I have no chance at parsing, let alone influencing, the consensus on domestic policy. I will write the first half of a book review, and I will read the first halves of a dozen more. It will all make me feel less lonely.
I will wonder how my friends are doing.
Dec 2, 2019 at 11:42 AM
Happy birthday bud hope it’s a good one!
Dec 2, 2019 at 12:57 PM
thanks my friend! hope you are doing well!
Dec 2, 2020 at 7:24 PM
Hey man happy birthday!
Dec 17, 2020 at 10:46 AM
Thanks man!
Dec 2, 2022 at 11:13 PM
…