Professional Friend

There's a wacky new startup idea: human friendship. By signing up to an app, you get paid $20 an hour to be somebody's friend. You hang out with them, eat together and even go out socialising with the killer new app taking America by storm. I spoke to the founder of Frendli to find out more. 

"Dude, you're disrupting the market, your startup is worth 20 bill and climbing, you must feel like you're the second coming of Steve Jobs right now." I say, fistbumping the camera. I am conducting the video call in a bog. Dragonflies keep bumping into me as I stand up to my waist in cooling swampwater.

"I'm just a guy with a big heart. You know, I was there back in the pandemic and thought to myself; bro. What if the Deliveroo driver could stay for a few beers? Its human connection that matters, and is what's missing in America."

"Some say that your workers-"

"They aren't workers, they're called frends."

"I'll just say workers. So, your workers are being exploited almost as bad as your customers. That they are forced to go to meet people's families, posing as their partners-"

"That's against our T's and C's. Frendli is specifically a friendship delivery model, there is no exploitation on our service."

"Well, people are getting exploited though, aren't they? Off the books, cash in hand. You haven't heard the stories?"

"I thought this was going to be an interview for Business Magazine."

"It is." I lied. I had just made up Business Magazine to talk to this scumbag.

"Our brand values ensure our frends understand boundaries. That the customers agree not to break contract by pressuring frends into situations they aren't comfortable with or vice versa. This is backed up by our rating systems that ensure our users and frends have a great time."

"Cut it out. Your workers are constantly taken to bars and forced to drink for hours on end, sometimes they arrive at remote locations, or they are pressured to do what your customers want. You can't be rented out to be somebodies friend. As soon as money's involved it changes the balance of power. The person paying for the friendship resents it, the person acting like a friend resents it. It's bullshit." I say, getting a video up on my other phone. It is of one of the workers for Frendli getting invited to a party and given a $100 to be a table for the night.

"Look. I'm going to stop this interview now. My legal team will be in touch." He said, closing the zoom call. I look around, spotting a nearby duck.

"Can you believe this shit?" I say, before submerging myself in the bog.

As I walk the forest trail, I think about the commodification of human flesh. Warehouses split into rooms, livestreaming girls masturbating for hours on end whilst organised crime collects profits, invests in more pornography infrastructure, potential sites for virtual sex workers to operate from across the globe. Whatever organised crime does illegally, Silicon Valley follows years later. What if the exploitation of women could be backed with hundreds of millions of dollars and use technology to shave the edges off? The technology itself is always meaningless, instead it is how far its owners will go to take advantage of humanity's laziness, greed and fantasy. From delivering food to human furniture, it is less a question of what the business idea is, but the willingness to cater to the depths of humanity's depravity.

The ultimate Silicon Valley startup is an app where you can buy babies and children at an auction. People would make a living from the premium experience, showing videos of themselves pregnant, dietary plans, DNA analysis. At the cheaper end of the market, you could buy a baby for a hundred bucks. This killer startup idea was taking a free resource and adding value through customer empowerment. Some would complain, especially when babies were eaten, but in the end, weren't a majority of sellers and customers better off via the transaction that had been enabled through the free market?

You might think to yourself, there's no such thing as an app. Its just an icon that takes you to a website. And you'd be right. But what if, we actually embedded a website into the human body? What if, we wrote lines of code between the double helix of DNA? What if you could reprogram life itself to be an Alienware laptop? I don't know. But what I do know is, the leeches that had attached themselves to my legs had swollen up to the size of balloons filled with my blood. It made me reflect on the concept of human friendship. Was it symbiotic or parasitic? Or something else entirely.

I drive the Hyundai around the streets of Tulsa, reflecting on my own lack of a social life. I was a travel writer with multiple mental health disorders and substance abuse issues, but I was also just a man. A simple man, with great hair and exquisite fashion sense. I was wearing those sunglasses where you could flip the shades up from top of the frame. I kept pulling up to traffic lights, looking at the driver next to me and tilted the shades up, mouthing 'wow', as if to say, 'wow, you seem cool, maybe we can be friends'. After several hours of doing this nobody had asked to be my friend. Maybe I had been wrong to dismiss the founder of Frendli as a greedy midwit preying on the desperation of lonely people, but actually he was an entrepeneur delivering a great service to the post-covid generation. Historically sex work was a way of selling something that wasn't readily available, but in the present, even a conversation with someone else had become a rare commodity. It was only natural for somebody to get paid for it. Perhaps this kind of social prostitution was the way forward. For sale, emotions, never used.

Our New Taste

A History Of Hollywood

The city streets were shape shifting, caught in a transmorphing temporal wormhole of culture generated through the Hollywoodland media cluster. The combination of population density, money, technology, crime, topology and cinema had made Los Angeles transcend from reality into a metaphor, exemplifying humanity's utter present, using the city as canvas. It's architecture a continuous set for the people acting out potentials, the asphalt and concrete and glass and metal sprawling outwards, increasing in citymass hour by hour. There are times in the year when stood at precise points across the city that its entirety reflects back at you and you are caught in the composite eye of Los Angeles and it burns you with a million reflections from windows in high rise buildings, the shafts of light are caught against your retinas then stabbed into your brain, the concentrated beam melting through your neurons like satan's lasers.

The city of Los Angeles. Home to Hollywoodland, built in 1902 by the Warner Brothers. The Hollywood sign now rests on the side of mountain, an old ad gimmick, white letters arranged amongst rocks and scrub land. It is a kitsch icon, a set of modernist erected fonts each as tall as a building that further went on to dub it's surroundings as Hollywood in 1947. Hollywood is home to several film studios, including the empty sets of the olden days you may have seen in pictures at your local cinema. All of the Hollywood executives ride around in expensive cars and they wear nice suits, they have the final say in the taste in style as they're the ones that decide which film is going to be made! The producers often have big piles of money stacked up on their desk, ready to give to the best director. The director then takes the money away and begins to hire writers, camera crew and actors to be in his picture. These stars and starlets of Hollywood are as follows: Johnny Depp, Simon Agby, Brad Pitt, Joanna Lumley, Sarah Jessica Parker, Justin Timberlake, Will Smith, Johnny Knoxville, Angela Carter, Channing Tatum, Harrison Ford, Morgan Freeman, Ben Kingsley, John Travolta, Courtney Cox, Nicholas Cage and Michael Cera. The film executives often spend a few hours a day looking through glossy black and white photos of potential actors for their films, muttering to themselves whilst smoking cigars. Meanwhile back on the sets of Universal Studios the film will begin to be made whilst the marketing gurus begin to advertise the picture, using social media, alternative reality games, merchandise, trailers, the web, billboards, newspaper articles, events and a word of mouth campaign. The film will be broken down into its basic components before being reconstructed by CGI. All of the best films nowadays are 3D and shown on cinemas around the globe, with 5.1 Dolby Surround Sound and comfortable chairs. Some cinemas even offer popcorn to munch throughout the movie viewing experience as you whisper to your friends;
“This movie rocks!”
“I don't know what to say, I love it.”
“The ending...it's a killer!”
“That was one seriously funny movie.”
Viewers are then persuaded to go home and think about the film as they lie in bed, unable to get to sleep. They can't stop thinking about it! For the next few days it will be all they will be able to talk about, often stopping people in public, physically restraining them by the shoulders, and telling them about the film. They would speak immensely quickly and sometimes get their words jumbled up, often being pushed to the ground by other people due to the enthusiasm they display in talking about the movie. There bodies would begin to convulse and blood begin to leak from the ears, nose and throat, muffling their voices in the sticky iron redness. The eyeballs would melt out of their sockets and the face would begin to turn inside out, the roof of the mouth being pushed out of the lips as the entire skull cracks. The organs begin to dissolve the skin and tissue surrounding them, displaying a bed of human entrails sitting in the body cavity that thump and twitch along to the rapidly beating heart and everything begins to bleed and rip itself open and scream. The director walks in front of the camera and yells 'Cut! That's a wrap.'
The actor sits up in his prosthetic latex suit.“How did I do?”
“You were great!” says the camera man. The crew begins to clap and the actor looks around, smiling.

Thatcher's Funeral

After the death of Baroness Lady Margaret Hilda Thatcher on the 8th of April a committee immediately set about planning her funeral, as is the tradition after somebody's death. Thatcher was a controversial figure in British politics, dividing opinion during life and after her passing, though both sides would agree that the late ex-prime minister will be remembered for her actions and fashion sense. Nicknaming herself 'Iron Woman' due to her magnetic personality, Thatcher was an important figure throughout the eighties. She smashed the unions, brought in millions from taxation, saved English territory from Argentinian invasion, allowed people to right to buy their own houses and was an inspiration to a generation of women. She was also an old lady, who had a family, and it isn't fair to speak badly of the dead. Her funeral therefore will try to sum up her life succinctly, referencing the various trials and tribulations she endured in order to make Britain great once again.

The government had ring-fenced 200 million pounds in case of the late lady's passing, suggesting that it would cost more in the long run if they didn't give Maggie a proper burial. I was lucky enough to be invited along to a special preview event that would detail exactly how the two hundred million pounds would be spent in order to make sure that she was treated with the same respect she demanded whilst alive. Liberal Democrat leader Mick Clegg stepped onto the podium at the front of the hall. After the ice-breakers and toasts he began to describe what we could expect next Wednesday.

The funeral will start at 10 a.m in the morning. Thatcher will be contained in a special blue coffin covered in flowers that will be carried through the streets of London in a horse and carriage. Her family will follow behind, each riding a horse, then other various vehicles with important mourners. The prime minister and his friends will ride in a hearse for instance, The Queen will be in a limousine and Boris Johnson will ride a black bicycle. Behind these will be various soldiers and police officers dressed in full combat dress, overhead Prince Harry will hover in a helicopter.

The theme of the funeral will be Margaret Thatcher, as that who is being buried. The first of these special themed segments will begin just a few moments into the parade, with a green grocer holding a baby aloft to represent Thatcher's primordial origins. Milk will be squirted onto the funeral carriage by children picked from local schools who will then take the baby and hand it to Kenneth Branagh, playing Denis Thatcher, her millionaire husband who rescued her from being working class. The baby would then be transformed through a series of short vignettes into the woman who would go on to win the leadership of the country. This position would be played by the famous actress Meryl Streep, who'd act out her life whilst her body continued on it's path.

The first trial of Thatcher is the Falklands War. London Philharmonic Orchestra will provide the soundtrack for this section, in which a boat sculpture sailing away from the procession on the Thames estuary will be fired at and sank. A balloon representing the soldiers will gradually be inflated until it resembles Simon Weston. The veteran himself will then emerge from the crowd and join the procession, playing the saxophone every now and then. Afterwards comes the second trial of Thatcher, the miners' strike. Thick coal dust will be dispersed from the Baroness' carriage, submerging the mourners in a danger smog.

After having emerged through the danger smog, the next step was the way she dealt with the IRA. After a few fireworks being detonated around the horse and carriage an Irishman especially starved for the event will be released and is likely to begin to look for food. Funeral organisers have paid attention to these chaotic characters scattered throughout the parade, hoping that they add an element of excitement for mourners as well as acting as a kind of public arts thing.

At this point the coffin will be removed from the horse and carriage. The horse itself will be lead slightly away from the rest of the festivities and put onto a bus heading for Oldham. Meanwhile in a startling twist the coffin will be opened and Margaret Thatcher's dead body will be hoisted out by leading politicians and walked up the front steps of the cathedral. At the top of the steps will await David Cameron who will accept the body into his arms and give her a final goodbye before she is taken inside for the final stages of the funeral.

Inside the cathedral will await Jeremy Clarkson, Ben Milliband, Tony Blair, Prince Will, Kate Middleton, Jim Davidson, Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nancy Reagan, David Beckham, Theopold LeStranz, Walton Goggins, Clint Eastwood, Paul Merton and other famous celebrities. All of them are encouraged to cry as Thatcher is taken through the central aisle. Prayers, songs and quotes will be played for guests as Thatcher is brought closer towards the front of the cathedral where a small crucible will await her. The head of the church will say something before Thatcher is delicately lowered into the pot at her feet. Inside contains ethically sourced molten iron for her body to be dipped into, creating a Thatcher-shaped statue made of rapidly cooling metal surrounding a core of biological matter. It is thought that her tomb will remain safe for the next one thousand years.