AURA
His Yahoo Mail inbox contains 15,473 unread messages dating back to 2006. Instagram's red notification badge has reached its numerical limit and now displays a mute ellipsis. Netflix stopped asking Are you still watching? a long time ago and has begun offering increasingly desperate recommendations: Top 10 in Your Area, Trending Now, Because You Watched the Office Once Three Years Ago. Tonight, he is watching Finding Mr. Right (2014) on the Hallmark Channel via Hulu TV+ for the third time this year.
His browser is Opera. A college roommate told him in 2014 that it was more secure, and the recommendation took, and the path remained. His Facebook profile picture is the default gray silhouette. The prompt to upload a photo was dismissed at account creation and never revisited. His Instagram avatar is a slightly blurry image of a public transit schedule he once captured to remember a departure time. This is, now, his permanent digital face. His captions, when he writes them, are bizarrely literal. Tree beneath a photograph of a tree. Walking home saw this without context.
On his desk: a small collection of figurines. Fox McCloud. Tails. Renamon. He picks up Fox sometimes when he's on the phone. He likes the weight of the figure in his palm, the way the tail balances against his thumb. A coworker stopped by to borrow a stapler once, glanced at the figurines, and asked, "Oh, are you a furry?" The question hung in the air without resolving. He bought the Switch six years after release at full price; the bundle came with a choice of figurine, and he chose Fox over Mario or Link without hesitation. Sly Cooper is his PlayStation avatar. When the algorithm recommended Beastars one evening, he watched all the episodes in order over the course of a weekend, and on Sunday afternoon he was a little sad it was over.
The category furry presumes a subject who recognizes his own attraction as a position inside a culture that has names for its positions. His relationship to Fox McCloud or Nick Wilde or Sly Cooper exists before any such recognition: "The fox is cool." "The mask is cool." He looks at the figure with mild and continuous pleasure while the hybrid form speaks to him through the same ambient channel by which he immanently encounters human masculinity and its configurations: the bear, the otter, the silver fox, equally weighted. Suspended between the human and the animal, the archetypal werewolf perfectly mirrors the Pac Sun Avant Garde's own suspension between strategic and non-strategic engagement with the world. Here, the "companion species"40 becomes something else entirely. The complex, historical entanglement of human and animal flattens into a hybridized surface that speaks directly to his condition of categorical indifference.
The Pac Sun Avant Garde cannot recognize aura, because he is the only person in this essay who has any.
Aura, in the original sense theorized in the 1930s,41 was the unrepeatable presence of an artwork in the place it happened to be that was stripped away by reproduction. What was once the property of the artwork has become, through the imposition of critical distance, the property of the person who can correctly name it. The museum visitor who can identify the Agnes Martin is carrying more recognition than the painting. The friend who can identify the pickle brine in the cocktail is carrying more recognition than the cocktail. The artwork has been drained, and its contents have been poured into the subject who knows the artwork's name, its period, and the reason you were supposed to stop caring about it last year. The curator owns the receipt for having located aura, not the aura itself.
The aura itself has found somewhere else to live. It went into hiding. It moved into the people who never picked up the receipt.
Tuesday night, ten-fifteen, the overhead lighting at maximum intensity in his bedroom casting a harsh white glow onto his bed until he shuts them off with a remote on his bedside table and immediately falls asleep, no latency between "phone" and "pillow." His thumb is scrolling the home feed of an application he opened by accident at the airport three years ago and stayed inside out of mild interest. The screen offers him a sequence of small panels through which other lives are being narrated. He does not understand most of what he is looking at. He likes the colors.
A panel arrives. Soft natural light through an adjacent window, a woman's hands holding a ceramic mug above an unfinished oak table on which sits a single fig, halved, on a small linen napkin. The Hasami Porcelain mug is glazed in a particular beige. The napkin is the color of unbleached flour. The caption is a single lowercase line: slow morning. Beneath the photograph her tile shows three more squares. A sourdough loaf shot from above on the same linen. A pair of Birkenstocks at the threshold of a bedroom whose blue paint has been mixed to an exact value. A paperback of Normal People by Sally Rooney on a windowsill above a sprig of rosemary in a glass.
The post has nine hundred likes. He gives it a thumbs up and continues. He does not know that the apartment is a one-bedroom in Greenpoint into which the woman moved in 2017 and which has been, since then, the subject of a slow furnishing organized around the surfaces it produces in photographs.42 The mug is one of two that photograph well. The other is in the dishwasher. Her actual breakfast mug, a free promotional cup from Schoolsfirst Credit Union she received after opening her first bank account in 2012, lives in the cabinet behind the closed door above the sink. The fig was bought for the photograph. The loaf is the third Sunday's loaf, the first two crumbs being not the right kind of crumb. The Birkenstocks were placed at the threshold by a hand reaching out of frame. The paint on the bedroom wall was sampled against four other blues over a fortnight, and the rosemary in the glass has been there only since the morning. She has, in fact, read Normal People twice. She is being honest about that part. Her captions have, over the last four years, drawn the attention first of an editor at a small magazine and then of a literary agent, and an essay collection is in the early stages of acquisition. The Pac Sun Avant Garde, looking at the post, has registered a hand and the color cream. He has gone on.
A different panel, three swipes later. A clavicle in low light, a silver chain across it, a Chrome Hearts cross resting against the skin, the image blown out at the highlights and grainy in the shadows in the way phone photographs were grainy in 2009. There is no caption. The display name is four letters, all lowercase, "zhyr" , purchased on a username aftermarket43. An audio track plays underneath, a Mandarin verse from an up and rapper by way of Chengdu who coincidentally experienced virality on both sides of the firewall. The post has one hundred and eleven likes. The staccato rhythm of the comments from his "boys" (mad aura fr) hang there like coordinates. He gives it a thumbs up and continues.
He does not know that the man whose clavicle has been photographed maintains an account whose post count varies between zero and four; any post that exceeds four is deleted within the week. The chain is the second of two. The first, which the man wears more often, would have been recognizable to a particular ex-girlfriend. The display name was assigned in a basement in Bushwick during a conversation about Russian phonemes; the man does not himself speak Russian. The post will be deleted by Thursday morning. The man will have stayed up until four checking the like count against a private threshold the threshold will not have met. The post is for a hopeful audience of approximately fourteen people, of whom two are women he has dated, two are women he wants to date, and ten are other men whose own posts he monitors with a similar arithmetic. The Pac Sun Avant Garde is not on the list. The Pac Sun Avant Garde, looking at the post, has registered a chain on a person and the color black. He has gone on.
A third panel, the next morning, while the milk soaks the cereal. A man in his early twenties in a parking garage in what looks like Miami, both hands on the open driver's-side door of a rented Aston Martin DB12 the color of a swimming pool. He is wearing Minions-print pajama pants whose elastic has been folded down to expose two pairs of boxers, a holographic snapback that reads CRIME PAY$ thrifted from an inner-city Goodwill, a cropped tee shirt with the Captain America shield motif, a Goyard St. Louis tote slung from the wrist with the canvas faded and the handles overstretched into uneven loops, and white socks pulled up to mid-calf inside slip-on Gucci slides. He is looking down. The flash is on. Behind him a second man holds a lit lighter at arm's length to the camera for reasons internal to the composition. The caption is the diamond emoji six times. The post has forty-one thousand likes. He gives it a thumbs up and finishes the cereal. He does not know that the Aston Martin is on a four-hour package from a luxury-rental concierge in Brickell whose business model depends on this category of customer. The Minions pants were five dollars at a Ross the wearer has driven to twice this year specifically to obtain. The Goyard tote was bought in 2023 from a friend whose mother had stopped using it for groceries.
The layering of the shirt and the pants and the tote was practiced in a hotel mirror for sixteen minutes before the elevator. The wearer maintains a SoundCloud account on which he has released eighty-three songs in the last eighteen months, the most-streamed of which has twenty-three thousand plays and describes the wearer's purchase of a watch he has not in fact purchased. He is, in his own assessment, up. The upness is registered in the comments by approximately seven hundred replies of up bro and the prayer-hands emoji. His mother, in a three-bedroom house outside Tampa, has texted him call me at 10:06 the night before, and he has not yet returned her call. The Pac Sun Avant Garde, looking at the post, has registered a person in front of a car and the color blue. He has gone on.
The three posts are the same wager arranged at three distances from each other in time, each generation organized by the rejection of the one preceding. The mug arranged its room so the photograph would record a person living thoughtfully inside it. The chain arranged its post so the photograph would record a person too cool to be photographed; it did so by negating, item by item, what the mug had built. The car arranged its post so the photograph would record a person too unbothered to care what was photographed; it did so by negating, in turn, the chain.
Each movement enters the apparatus calling the previous one false, and exits it being called false by the next. Aura farming, a term imported from gaming and dispersed through TikTok in 2024,44 named the second move; the third has not yet been named, and is being practiced with the intensity of an art form whose practitioners are racing the naming45. Inside each generation an olympics of authenticity runs at full volume, with its own vocabulary for who did the thing first and who is biting whose swag and who the room is currently cooking. The vocabulary is unintelligible across generations and is the engine that drives one cohort to overthrow the next. Underneath the vocabulary there are two operations only: the minimalist withholds until nothing can be parsed and the maximalist deposits until nothing can be parsed. Restraint is presented as nothing-to-show; excess is presented as everything-at-once-and-therefore-nothing. Freud described, a century ago, two organizations of the body that learn to handle a substance that should not, by the body's lights, be handled at all: one that holds it in, one that lets it go.46 The grid is the substance now. The continuum from austerity to chaos has been folded back on itself and the two ends have met in the same room. The porcelain mug, which had occupied the middle of that continuum, has been left standing in a position no one is currently arguing about, which is the position from which the apparatus has, for the moment, moved on.
What the chain and the car share, across the volume difference, is the form of the image they produce: what was once called the poor image.47 Low-resolution, compressed, traveling fast across networks that did not pay it. The poor image was, in its first life, the leak, the surveillance still, the fourth-generation copy of a film passed between hands a customs officer never inspected. Its degradation proved its escape from the institutional channel that would have polished it. By the late twenty-tens the channel had closed: the camera in every pocket was producing images so smooth that the proof of escape had to be manufactured. The dirty lens, the underexposed frame, the flash at full intensity in a lit room, the screenshot of a video downloaded from one platform and re-uploaded to another. Each of these recovers, by hand, the degradation the camera has been engineered to remove. The poor image is now a costume the rich image puts on. The blurry photo wears it through deprivation; the Aston Martin wears it through flooding. The mug photograph is the thing both are running from. It went the other way, recovering the conventions of large-format domestic photography from a hundred years ago: the morning light, the paper-grain, the careful surface. The mug is the rich image at full volume, and the chain and the car are both performances of the poor image against it.
What none of the three is, however, is a photograph by someone who is not trying to be photographed. That photograph still exists; it lives in the camera roll of a person whose phone is four years old, whose lens is smudged, and who has not learned to turn the flash off.
The threshold of the contest falls each season faster than the apparatus can fall with it. Last year the photograph could be slightly composed; this year it has to look as though the phone took it by accident; next year, perhaps, the phone will have to actually have taken it by accident, and the user will be reduced to walking around hoping for the right slip of the thumb. At the limit of the practice is the account with no posts at all, only a profile picture, the user having concluded that any image will betray him. The first grid had, at minimum, the consolation of being looked at as aspirational. The latest ones have only the dread of being caught in last month's posture, and the cycle has shortened to the point where last month was last week, and where the figure who held it correctly has already aged out of his own coolness.
There is a difference between art that imitates the cause of a feeling and art that imitates its effect: the former is harder, the latter is easier, and the easier is what most of the world wants because the easier requires nothing of the looker. The mug had pre-loaded the response thoughtful; the chain had pre-loaded aura; the car had pre-loaded up. The Pac Sun Avant Garde has pre-loaded nothing.
The cultural apparatus has been hunting for the capacity to encounter an object without first routing the encounter through a question about what the object will say about its owner. The Pac Sun Avant Garde is one of the few people in the contemporary mythos who is enjoying himself without supervision.48
A visitor to San Diego, staying in the Gaslamp District for a work trip, crosses paths with him in a Ralphs parking lot. She is from Brooklyn. She works as an editorial assistant, freshly graduated from Parsons. She has come down for a shoot. She sees him loading Frosted Mini Wheats into the trunk of the Yaris and thinks, that guy is the whole thing. She takes a flash photo with her digicam from a discreet distance and posts it to her Close Friends story with the words "Pac Sun Avant Garde" written in the white default typeface. Her friends send it around and it is reposted to a popular meme account. A stylist screenshots it. Within forty-eight hours a mood board circulates among the stylists of three editorial productions. Within three weeks a mid-tier American brand has quietly re-run a cloth-hooded denim jacket in a slightly lower-saturation blue. Within eight months the look is in the windows. A trend account posts a compilation. The compilation is set to a song from 2011. The compilation is captioned with a name for the look that did not exist yesterday. He does not know any of this has happened. He has gone back to 7-Eleven for more milk. He gets a Slurpee while he's there.
A partial inventory of the objects he encounters throughout the day. A bottle of Irish Spring 5-in-1 men's soap. The perforated silver foil over the top of a Yoplait, Boston Cream. A bottle of V8 Splash. A Bic Round Stic ballpoint from a multipack of ten. A Glade PlugIn refill in Hawaiian Breeze. The promotional desk calendar from a regional auto-glass company, three months out of date, pinned to the corkboard. A sleeve of saltines from a soup ordered at Souplantation in 2019. A Brawny paper towel against the cheek after a sneeze. The digital photo frame from his mother, gifted in 2014, cycling the same forty JPEGs she loaded onto the SD card the night she gave it to him, including three that are sideways. A bottle of Bath & Body Works hand sanitizer clipped to a navy blue REI backpack zipper. The laminated menu at IHOP, slightly sticky. The lid of an I Can't Believe It's Not Butter tub, washed and repurposed since 2021 for leftover rice. A TJ Maxx gift card in his wallet with a pale magnetic strip. A pair of brandless earbuds purchased at a rest-stop convenience store eight years ago on the drive to Santa Cruz, currently playing a YouTube playlist titled 2017 BEST Tropical House Summer 12 HOUR MIX, which has been the background of his workout for an indeterminate period of months.
The mode in which he meets these objects is the oldest psychological mode there is, the mode of the surface and the hand. The mug warm in the palm, the foil yielding to the thumb, the cellophane crinkling against the saltine. A floor of sensation underneath the symbolic life, registering, before any caption arrives to interpret it, that the day is happening and the body is in it. The mode is not extinct. It runs underneath the symbolic life of every adult and provides what psychoanalysis has called the rhythmicity of being. When it is intact, the world feels textured. When it has been severed from the symbolic life above it, the world begins to feel like representation. The contemporary apparatus has performed the severing at scale. The Pac Sun Avant Garde has been spared.
The internet has begun, in the last several years, to describe this condition, when it notices it, as autistic49. I'm so autistic about this band. Autistic obsession with the sound design of one specific video game from 2003. He gives autistic energy. The word, in this register, has been pried loose from the diagnostic category and is now used for a person who appears unmediated, who likes a thing without first calculating what the liking will signify, who fails to perform the ambient irony the platform requires. The substitution is diagnostic of the population making it. A culture that has converted every act of attention into a performance of taste develops a predictable need of a category for non-performed attention, and the closest pre-existing word was the one for people whose attention was assumed not to be performed. The reach for the condition is now visible across the apparatus and is the unifying motion behind both of its poles. The minimalist reaches for it through withdrawal: the cropped body, the deleted post, the audio in a language the user does not speak. The maximalist reaches for it through regression: the pajama pants, the cartoon character chosen because the visible unembarrassed attachment to a children's image will read, on the feed, as a refusal to be embarrassed, and the refusal to be embarrassed is the costume of the condition the wearer has not been able to find any other way to wear. The maximalist is the one closer to him. The whole apparatus of the third movement is an attempt to occupy normie consumption: the Hot Pocket, the Ross basketball shorts, the gas-station snapback, and to wear them at a frequency that registers as transgression. The Pac Sun Avant Garde is wearing them at the frequency they were manufactured at. Both routes pass through the body at the same depth: the surface, the hand, the thing held without commentary. Neither route arrives. The diagnosis is wanted; the floor is not.
The Pac Sun Avant Garde cannot use any platform correctly. He presses buttons the way an infant presses a colorful toy, for the feedback of the press itself. The like button gets pressed because his thumb hovered near it and the press produced a satisfying response. The share function gets deployed after he noticed it existed and wondered what it would do. He posts at random hours, replies to weeks-old content without embarrassment, deploys the poll feature and the emoji slider and the question box with the experimental curiosity of someone who finds them genuinely fun. His own posts, when they appear, arrive either captionless or with the zero degree of literal description. Sunset. Burrito. Occasionally, the text bearing absolutely no relation to the image it anchors. The sequence of photos: years of complete desertification (nearly 2 years between photos), followed by a rapid sequence all on the same afternoon. There are thirty three photographs in total. The posts collect between four and nine likes. Two of those likes are from his uncle and a bot. The platform designers, believing they were building instruments of curated self-presentation, have built him a playground.
Every platform has evolved a social grammar so elaborate it now requires anthropologists. The timed like: immediate signals enthusiasm, several hours later signals calculated indifference, several days later signals digital archaeology. The strategic story view: in the first fifteen minutes shows interest, deliberately deferred until afternoon projects casual detachment. The serial like: three posts in a row suggests romantic pursuit, a like on a post from five years ago suggests surveillance. The difference between a reply and a quote-tweet. The distinction between a sticker and an emoji. The hierarchy of communication escalation, from public comment to DM to text message to voice note to video call, in which each step signals an increase in intimacy. The knowledge that a 3 AM text lands differently than a noon text. The follower-to-following ratio that must be maintained on the correct side of one. The arithmetic by which a person becomes, at some moving and ever-earlier age, the person whom younger users will refer to in the diminutive reserved for someone's older male relative — a threshold once located somewhere in the late thirties and now drifting into the mid twenties, the drift itself being one of the things the user is supposed to track.50 Mastery of platform-specific linguistic register: Twitter's quippy brevity, Reddit's citation-heavy argumentation, LinkedIn's earnest professional passive voice, TikTok's fluency in eight overlapping youth dialects at once.
He does none of this. He moves between private and public communication without awareness of implied escalation, maintains identical personas across platforms, and replies to rhetorical questions with literal answers. The symbolic order of online interaction dissolves in his presence into exploratory play, which is what an interface used to be before anyone got serious about it.
What is unnerving about the Pac Sun Avant Garde, to anyone fluent in the grammar, is that this same illegibility extends offline. He is not socially incompetent; he is socially functional with a fluency that bypasses the ranking system entirely.
Friday night, ten o'clock, the half-empty space of Spin Nightclub in San Diego is playing Alice DJ's Better Off Alone for the fourth time at their monthly Y2K Club Night, an event whose name is itself the literalism the irony requires and which has been running, on the third Friday of each month, since 2023. Fog machine bursts produce momentary atmosphere in the intervals of fluorescent clarity. The crowd is mostly office workers from nearby Sorrento Valley biotech firms, post-work happy hour bleeding into halfhearted dancing. Nobody who seriously identifies with electronic music culture would be caught here. He stands near the speakers. He likes when the fog hits him in the face. He likes the song the four times it plays. He had expected the Calvin Harris tracks that sometimes come on at the gym, and this is better than that.
Three months later, David Archuleta's comeback tour arrives at the North Island Credit Union Amphitheater. Tuesday night, eight o'clock. The American Idol runner-up performs to a venue at thirty percent capacity, his cultural relevance long since reduced to historical artifact. The crowd is mostly women in their early forties who voted for him during his season, their enthusiasm now layered with nostalgia and the conscious embrace of an outdated reference. The Pac Sun Avant Garde's own presence in the third row follows no such narrative. He bought the ticket because a flyer was lying on the sidewalk on his way to 24 Hour Fitness, and he had heard Crush before and thought it was a good song. He knows every word. He sings.
The Pac Sun Avant Garde takes his Saint Laurent wax denim-wearing art major roommate to Lazy Dog after a gallery opening. The roommate spent the gallery hour in conversation about the artist's relationship to post-internet image circulation, and is now sitting in a vinyl booth under a wall-mounted mountain bike and a chalkboard advertising the seasonal pretzel platter. He recommends the Angus Sliders. There is a moment where the roommate considers saying something antagonistic about the venue and then doesn't, because the air conditioning is comfortable and the sliders really are good.
The Pac Sun Avant Garde conducts first dates at the Cheesecake Factory because it happened to be visible from the parking lot and he remembered the ambience being fancy. The downtown speakeasy with its elaborate password entry and its eighteen-dollar cocktails registers at the same amplitude as the Applebee's off the I-5 with its laminated happy hour menu.The Starbucks inside Target that he initially patronized through locational convenience becomes a deliberate destination. After approximately fifty two consecutive daily visits to the store, he cultivates an enduring friendship with Jerry, the barista who knows his order: iced coffee with six pumps of vanilla syrup.
The Pac Sun Avant Garde is homosexual but not gay.
The distinction matters because attraction has, in the past twenty years, completed its conversion into a curatorial exercise. Desirability is now a function of demonstrated authority over cultural references. A dating profile is a meta-consumption document in which the arrangement of bands, films, books, foods, ironies, and platform-specific reference moves determines a position in the marketplace. The anima and the animus have migrated outward into curated feeds. To fall in love is to recognize, in another person's profile, a taxonomic position complementary to one's own. The lovers meet as curators, each seeing in the other the confirmation of their own classificatory authority, the proof that they have been naming the world correctly.
This playlist totally gets me. You captured my vibe perfectly. These are not descriptions of a partner, but reviews of their work. Love in 2026 is a recognition transaction between two people who have spent years arranging themselves into positions from which each can recognize the other's arrangement.
Of all the regions of contemporary intimacy in which this curatorial grammar has settled, none has become as densely furnished with categories as the one in which men pursue men. The grammar is older than the apps and survives the apps; the apps merely formalized it. Bear, otter, twink, jock, daddy, cub, wolf, top, bottom, vers, masc, fem, dom, sub, side. Each term is a position in a system that requires every other term to mean what it means. To answer the question what are you into is to enter a sentence the language has already begun without you. Its grammar admits fine permutation: a masc4masc bottom is not a vers top, and the difference is crucial to someone's evening. The categories are the available language, and most users arrive having already learned it. The Grindr grid is, among other things, a Linnaean exercise. No Fats, No Femmes. The cruelty is well-rehearsed and is sometimes mistaken for plain speech. It is in fact a maximally encoded utterance, fluent in two taxonomies at once.
What gay culture has elaborated is the most context-saturated regional dialect of desire any culture has yet produced. Every garment is reading. Every haircut is reading. The bar is reading the patron the moment the patron crosses the threshold; the patron is reading the bar back. A man enters a room and the room arranges him before he has spoken. The information density is so high that to move competently inside it is itself a kind of expertise. Aura is everywhere in this culture, manufactured continuously, because the culture's first labor has always been the production of distance where, anatomically, there is none. The boy across the bar likely has the same chromosomes as the body looking at him. Aura must therefore be supplied by the leather, by the harness, by the mustache, by the ten years older, the ten years younger, the more muscled, the less, the role one has chosen, the role one has refused. The category is the spell that separates the lover from the beloved enough for the beloved to be desired.
The Pac Sun Avant Garde walks into the room without the spell.
His attraction to men arrives through none of the channels the system has prepared, formed through the registration of a familiar physical presence. He likes broad shoulders, much like his own. He likes a forearm with a vein down it, and his own forearm has a vein down it. He likes himself enough that he likes, in the other man, what is closest to home. If asked to describe his type he would describe a specific person rather than a category.
The figure who experiences no lack cannot be organized by the apparatus that converts lack into desire. Desire, in the psychoanalytic account, is structured around the missing object: the breast that has been withdrawn, the wholeness that was forfeited at the threshold of language, the woman who is constructed as that-which-the-man-does-not-have and is therefore endlessly grasped at. The lexicon of straight masculine sexuality is often that of resource and scarcity, of the prize and the pursuit, of the Madonna who must remain elevated and the whore who has betrayed the elevation. When she appears without makeup, when she eats a full meal, when she is plainly a person, the desire collapses into its underlying disappointment. The aura is the distance. The distance is what permits the want.
The man across from the Pac Sun Avant Garde is a present body and the recognition is direct: I know what that is, I have one, I like mine, I like that. There is no pedestal from which the beloved can fall.
This is also why his presence on dating applications registers as static.51 His Grindr profile is identical to his Hinge profile. Neither contains posed photographs or strategic self-descriptions. The mandatory text fields hold whatever words emerged at the moment of account creation. He responds to whoever messages him first without triaging profiles for legibility. The obscene photograph that would have broadcast available for a very specific type of encounter to even the least fluent reader broadcasts nothing to him.
The Pac Sun Avant Garde is just not like the other boys.
There are no symbols to be decoded. There are presences to be met.
Aura, in the contemporary economy, is attentiveness directed at the big Other52, and the Tyranny of the Image53 has made it nearly impossible to direct attentiveness anywhere else. Love under this economy is the mutual confirmation of simultaneous attention to the image, which has long predated mass communication: the category, the type, the good, the moral, the man, the worthy. The gap between the immanent and the ideal is the gap that allows this version of desire to continue. The Pac Sun Avant Garde's desire is oceanic. It arrives continuously, the way the Pacific arrives, with no horizon line where it begins and no shore where it ends. The figure across from him has been in the same water the whole time.
Maybe there was never anything to curate. Maybe the thing the apparatus was protecting us from was a guy who was having a nice time.