By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit
Andy Warhol famously predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, but I think that Rupert Pupkin actually captured this prophecy much more accurately in The King of Comedy when he mused that it’s “better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime.” This simple philosophy has come to define entire generations of kids living in the decline of western civilization. Our lives have become so monopolized by consumer technology that people don’t even feel like they exist without the approval of an algorithm and the worst part is that they’re not wrong. What do you do when you can’t even get your own parents to make eye contact with you because they’re too damn busy picking at their flickering devices? You pick up a gun and do something terrible enough to start trending. This country has been armed to the teeth for centuries. People only turned murder into a competitive sport with the invention of television and it didn’t become a hit until we started carrying these machines in our pockets. Don’t blame the Rupert Pupkin’s of my generation. We’re just the players in a game you invented.
