I parked my car in a mostly empty downtown lot, initiating the main screen on the dashboard. A scrim of light covered the windshield and enlarged a web browser with my most visited sites and applications, including Parlor, the only dating app that properly interfaces with driverless cars. I scrolled to its home page - a menu of photos and videos of possible dates - and opened my inbox to see who had messaged me since I'd last logged on that morning: seven users, almost all of them bots. One wrote to me in a garbled English: $$$ now. Red light that is yours for keeping sir Another: make or act fast as soon as you READ this. I am convincing you my friend. Another: Yours now free Euros Swiss Francs British Pound Sterling yes And Now. All if you, sir, administer your account. I deleted the messages and scrolled through the rest before stopping at one from a profile named @_Monica23: Hi. How are you? I replied: Hi. She lived in Oak Park, the other side of town, and checked no car as a conditional stat. I messaged her again: What are you up to tonight?
I never liked to drive. With the sophistication of self-driving technology and its cheap implementation in the past few years, things changed. I prefer the ease of driverless protocol with its open sense of spatiality, lying down in the backseat to watch TV while outside everything continues to slip past, eliding destination and surface into a liquid state of travel, distance flattened to a frictionless, horizontal plane, the slide toward point B. Riding in cars is easy. Romance, social-networked for idle moments mid-commute, is easier. The proliferation of dating apps - with their universal binaries of choice - followed the popularity of reality dating shows in the 2000s, where prayerful hope of a partner was regimented in network-produced pageantry, imaging interpersonal complexity as a series of recycled gestures and "challenges." While reality TV is more or less dead, we can all play The Bachelor online. With Parlor, we can play it in our cars. Hey. Hey. Hi. How are you?
In The Bachelor, which broadcasts though almost no one watches it anymore, courtship follows the accelerated logic of the elimination game, rendering "true love" an antiquated if not totally imaginary idea, one referent in a system that has otherwise reduced all feelings to a series of staged make-outs in the hot tub and dinners on the deck overlooking the 9th hole. Like, although dating remains gently gorgeous and fragile in the presence of all those cameras, hovering over the women vying for the Bachelor's attention, it's easy to get lost in the mess. "Honey, you look lost," one woman says to another, who, in becoming her target, looses face, her otherwise calm expression breaking into a nervous grimace in recognition of the accumulating losses presented by each bad date with the Bachelor, a man whose good looks and generic dress leaves him nearly faceless. A masculine composite that never coheres beyond he's so hot, open shirt with a bit of chest hair, "razor-sharp jawline," and yet who remains by virtue of the game an elusive object of desire. She sits up, regaining her composure, and winks at her competitor across the dinner table. I'm not lost, she things, looking into the camera.
The interior of the Bachelor's house is always open, a spacious domestic array of luxury couches to fall on and talk, open windows, a pool, and a large kitchen. Spotlights managed by hired specialists isolate both happiness and discomfort whenever it's felt. Everyone is seen. Regardless of the show's disorienting arrangement, she doesn't feel lost, rather force-marched to the denouement of ter brief, televised romance with a moderately wealthy man, vaguely sensing the path that will lead her to the finale, if he permits her. In the mean time she will never be alone with the Bachelor until he proposes to her and they depart together in the luxury driverless car that will await them at the entrance of the mansion, drone cameras poised overheard to capture the moment. She often dreams of the finale,of turning to wave to the mansion that housed them and her defeated competitors. They will offer the public a kiss in tribute to the losers when they leave. Sensing this, the car's windows will slowly roll up and self-tint.
Hi. How are you?
I'm going out. What are you doing tonight? @_Monica23 wrote to me. The dashboard beeped when the message was received, flashing Parlor's logo - a cursive P circled in a shimmering loop extending from its base - on the windshield.
Nothing, I responded. U?
Oh yah? No plans on a Thursday?? Lol.
:(
Want to meet up? Come to this party. It's called Shush. It's this girl Abhor's party. It's on the north side. Belmont Avenue area. At Shore Club if u look it up.
k.
I leaned my head against the driver's window and fiddled with the car's web interface as it located a parking spot outside the Shore Club. I swiped to Parlor and found @_Monica23. Her profile pic featured her sitting next to friends in the grass in a park, everyone's faces blurred except hers. A dot beside her name indicated that she was online. Hey, I wrote. I'm here. I waited a few minutes for her to respond. No response. Finally, the dot went red: she was offline.
The car found a parking lot a block away from the Shore Club and directed itself to a narrow spot at the far end, between a motorcycle and an Audi. It eased itself in between them, adjusting itself with surgical precision as it crept forward. When it stopped, the car shut itself off. I exited into the chill October air and the door locked behind me. I headed for the entrance of the lot, where a few people stood nearby, talking and smoking: "It's OK, yah," one said. "You should check it out. I mean, it's definitely fun."
I never liked to drive. With the sophistication of self-driving technology and its cheap implementation in the past few years, things changed. I prefer the ease of driverless protocol with its open sense of spatiality, lying down in the backseat to watch TV while outside everything continues to slip past, eliding destination and surface into a liquid state of travel, distance flattened to a frictionless, horizontal plane, the slide toward point B. Riding in cars is easy. Romance, social-networked for idle moments mid-commute, is easier. The proliferation of dating apps - with their universal binaries of choice - followed the popularity of reality dating shows in the 2000s, where prayerful hope of a partner was regimented in network-produced pageantry, imaging interpersonal complexity as a series of recycled gestures and "challenges." While reality TV is more or less dead, we can all play The Bachelor online. With Parlor, we can play it in our cars. Hey. Hey. Hi. How are you?
In The Bachelor, which broadcasts though almost no one watches it anymore, courtship follows the accelerated logic of the elimination game, rendering "true love" an antiquated if not totally imaginary idea, one referent in a system that has otherwise reduced all feelings to a series of staged make-outs in the hot tub and dinners on the deck overlooking the 9th hole. Like, although dating remains gently gorgeous and fragile in the presence of all those cameras, hovering over the women vying for the Bachelor's attention, it's easy to get lost in the mess. "Honey, you look lost," one woman says to another, who, in becoming her target, looses face, her otherwise calm expression breaking into a nervous grimace in recognition of the accumulating losses presented by each bad date with the Bachelor, a man whose good looks and generic dress leaves him nearly faceless. A masculine composite that never coheres beyond he's so hot, open shirt with a bit of chest hair, "razor-sharp jawline," and yet who remains by virtue of the game an elusive object of desire. She sits up, regaining her composure, and winks at her competitor across the dinner table. I'm not lost, she things, looking into the camera.
The interior of the Bachelor's house is always open, a spacious domestic array of luxury couches to fall on and talk, open windows, a pool, and a large kitchen. Spotlights managed by hired specialists isolate both happiness and discomfort whenever it's felt. Everyone is seen. Regardless of the show's disorienting arrangement, she doesn't feel lost, rather force-marched to the denouement of ter brief, televised romance with a moderately wealthy man, vaguely sensing the path that will lead her to the finale, if he permits her. In the mean time she will never be alone with the Bachelor until he proposes to her and they depart together in the luxury driverless car that will await them at the entrance of the mansion, drone cameras poised overheard to capture the moment. She often dreams of the finale,of turning to wave to the mansion that housed them and her defeated competitors. They will offer the public a kiss in tribute to the losers when they leave. Sensing this, the car's windows will slowly roll up and self-tint.
Hi. How are you?
I'm going out. What are you doing tonight? @_Monica23 wrote to me. The dashboard beeped when the message was received, flashing Parlor's logo - a cursive P circled in a shimmering loop extending from its base - on the windshield.
Nothing, I responded. U?
Oh yah? No plans on a Thursday?? Lol.
:(
Want to meet up? Come to this party. It's called Shush. It's this girl Abhor's party. It's on the north side. Belmont Avenue area. At Shore Club if u look it up.
k.
I leaned my head against the driver's window and fiddled with the car's web interface as it located a parking spot outside the Shore Club. I swiped to Parlor and found @_Monica23. Her profile pic featured her sitting next to friends in the grass in a park, everyone's faces blurred except hers. A dot beside her name indicated that she was online. Hey, I wrote. I'm here. I waited a few minutes for her to respond. No response. Finally, the dot went red: she was offline.
The car found a parking lot a block away from the Shore Club and directed itself to a narrow spot at the far end, between a motorcycle and an Audi. It eased itself in between them, adjusting itself with surgical precision as it crept forward. When it stopped, the car shut itself off. I exited into the chill October air and the door locked behind me. I headed for the entrance of the lot, where a few people stood nearby, talking and smoking: "It's OK, yah," one said. "You should check it out. I mean, it's definitely fun."
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