read this fiction piece in the new yorker, dated mar 10, 2008. it’s called “raj, bohemian” and it’s by hari kunzru.
the story revolves around this group of urban taste-makers who in the “midst of [their] social gyrations, … liked to do something for one another”, like go to their friend sunita’s cool parties. on one such occasion the narrator/protagonist of the story meets raj for the first time – “Are handsome men doomed to become skin-care obessed dullards simply because no one talks to them about serious things?”. but raj is charming and harmless. he pours shots of a new vodka he’s discovered and which is incredibly smooth. he takes pictures with his cellphone. those pictures turn up on the internet and it’s discovered that raj’s “… whole conversation had been a sales pitch”. this incident sets off a deep personal crisis for the protagonist: “something precious to me had been violated, something i’d been holding on to. a secret pleasure that i hadn’t wanted to throw into the big commercial vat with all the rest of the stuff”. however, his friends don’t seem to get it and are quite comfortable with their “placements” and their need to “monetize [their] social network”: “you’re actually so old-fashioned, like some kind of communist. i have the right to perform acts of rational consumer choice: our ancestors fought wars for it. and i think i’m clever enough to filter a little bit of spin, don’t you?”
the narrator’s fears are not allayed: “i found parties increasingly traumatic: the bombardment of messages, the pitches coming at me from every side. […] people seemed to zone in and out of existence. sometimes they were fully present, animated by something original and real. but mostly they were zombies, empty vessels operated by corporate remote control”. his entire sense of identity is shaken: “my taste had been central to my identity. […] now i realized that what i thought had been an expression of my innermost humanity was nothing but a cloud of life-style signals, available to anyone at the click of a mouse. […] what was i? a sorting device. a filter. a human bivalve, culture accreting in me like mercury deposit.”
but he soon comes to his senses – “this was the world, just the same indoors and out, a place of total nullity. unless you manage to keep your head underwater, to immerse yourself in the endless metonymic shuffling of objects, it would be intolerable” – and gets a contact number for the next cool party in town!
terrifically written and about one of my favorite subjects: the beauty of being controlled by pleasure vs fear, of being caught in an interminable cycle of over-consumption and bonded labor and mistaking it all for “rational consumer choices”!