The Speer Panel
Open bar courtesy of the German consulate
When I get to the gallery Rattlesnake and Swiss Cheese are in the middle of a conversation with the poet and salonnière Lena, who had invited me to the event. They’re all wearing nametags with blue stickers on them, which marks them as artists, as opposed to the tech and finance people also at this event. And then there’s the German cultural attaché in New York and some other uniformed Germans from the consulate, and evidently those guys tapped Lena to host this thing. These machinations of power are lubricated by stylish and photogenic hipster party girls. I greet her and thank her for inviting me and the dudes dap me up and then I get a glass of wine from the open bar and come back to the trio a minute later.
“Are you coming on to me?” Lena asks Rattlesnake.
“No, no, of course not, I would never do that,” he says, grinning, obviously coming on to her.
“Good. You better not be. That would be very bad.”
They talk a little bit more before Lena dismisses herself to prepare for the event, which will be starting momentarily.
“Dude, she was totally flirting,” Rattlesnake says once Lena is out of earshot, “don’t you think? She was totally into it. She would never say that if she wasn’t flirting.”
“Totally bro, you got this,” says Swiss Cheese. I only caught the end so I can’t tell for sure. Could be flirting, could be his erotomanic delusions.
Rattlesnake resembles this other guy who appears recently in this Substack, Padrote Drogado, enough that they could be said to be doppelgängers—similar faces and height, same shaggy dark hair. (I happen to be obsessed with the idea that all these New York characters have Latin doppelgängers.) But Padrote is a Chilango Whitexican petty aristocrat with a toddler and a wife who probably buys Red Scare merch, and Rattlesnake is a lumpen high-school dropout who grew up in the Lower East Side, and he says he’s been in and out of jail for robbery and vagrancy and forging checks and that he can’t go back to France because he deserted from the Foreign Legion. Rattlesnake tells me that he has an IQ of 152 and that the Protestant Reformation was the worst event in the history of the world. I think both Padrote and Rattlesnake would call themselves “Nietzscheans.”
“She’s got a boyfriend, I think. Or at least she did last time we saw her,” Swiss Cheese says.
“He’s lame, his art sucks, I’m a way better artist and I totally mog him. I’m a shark and I have no scruples but I would never fuck a girl with a boyfriend if the dude was my boy. But he’s not my boy, so it’s fair game.”
Rattlesnake told me recently he’s been fucking some Dominican chick who has a boyfriend and lives with the dude and his parents, so Rattlesnake takes this girl back to his tiny room in Bed Stuy where they fuck on his bed that can hardly support the weight of one person, so it constantly breaks and he has to keep fixing it.
We sit down in one of the 30 or so folding chairs in the middle of the gallery. Projected on the blank walls around us are these generative AI art videos that are supposed to demonstrate the aesthetic potency of this new technology. Behind us is the open bar and in front of us is a discussion panel moderated by Lena and including the German cultural attaché and some of his wonkiest countrymen—a bunch of tech people, and some tech people that pose as artists, and the guest of honor, Albert Speer, who is Hitler’s “Generalbauinspektor für die Reichshauptstadt” and tasked with an enormous renovation of Berlin that’s supposed to outdo Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in its monumental scale. They’re going to transform Berlin into the innovation hub “Welthauptstadt Germania,” and they’re going to make use of AI technology to do it.
After Lena introduces Speer and the rest of the panel, the walls light up with images of Welthauptstadt Germania, the gargantuan Volkshalle rising out of the infinite boulevards like an enormous new moon, or like the titular planet in the final moments of Melancholia, triumphal arches that dwarf the clouds, a business district of skyscrapers that reach the stratosphere, a city for giants, the new heroic race of statuesque tyrannosaur humans. We see these monochromatic marble and cement renderings explode into color—yes, this city will have a “free-spirited” side, we’re reassured. Like the arches and boulevards, the new Aryan race will have raves of unimaginable scope, venues that can fit a hundred thousand Burning Mans.
After the psychedelic audiovisual art installation advertisement for Welthauptstadt Germania, Lena leads the panel in answering questions from the audience. Most of the discussion is like Philosophy 101 questions about technology and transhumanism. For example: Does AI have a soul?
“Maybe… hopefully,” says a Nazi Party official.
“Everything has a soul,” Lena adds.
“Dude she just winked at me. Did you see that?” Rattlesnake says to me. “I’m not imagining it, right? She’s totally into me.”
A girl wearing a glittering chain mesh hood and unnaturally blue contact lens eyes asks a questions about the popular fear of AI and how to deal with human bias making its way into the algorithms. Throughout the audience, people keep dropping their phones for some reason.
During this time, Swiss Cheese tells me that he and Rattlesnake are going to pick up some blow. But no one has cash on hand and neither of them can withdraw money from an ATM without doing this weird thing on Apple Pay where they’re like wiring each other money and then paying each other back and someone wires someone else 1 dollar and somehow out of that one of them will be able to withdraw 100 bucks from an ATM. They’re both going to get paid at the end of the week, so they’ll be rich then, but for now they’re basically broke. Ironically, Swiss Cheese’s day job is handling people’s taxes, and he says he loves it and that he gets high off it. Nothing gets you in a zen state quite like doing someone’s taxes. After they do the Apple Pay thing Rattlesnake gets up and goes to the ATM so that he can pay the dealer when they pull up in about 20 minutes.
After several unremarkable questions the panel gets to Dollboy. Dollboy is like a real deal fascist pervert/poet who drifts through life writing slop culture content for marginal right-wing publications and going to all the parties and having all these paranoid delusions and freakouts and getting into fights and kicked out of things and then charming his way back in and then getting kicked out again and so on. He’s handsome and in good shape which makes him more menacing than if he were a hideous chud. Dollboy stands up and says a prelude about his general sympathy toward the Party and the Führer and the existential dangers of Bolshevism (the essence of Bolshevism being the conniving women who police the jouissance of “weird guys” like himself), that’s all well and good, and with all that in mind, he says he couldn’t help but notice a certain arrogance about this “promethean sentiment” toward technology, and AI in particular, a sentiment that’s pervasive among this milieu, he confesses he’s a bit of an AI Luddite himself, he starts talking about the work of Heidegger, “Why must we be fatalist about this? How does the craftsman with his tools possibly compete with the sheer volume of AI?” So then Lena responds to him with the platitudes about AI as just another tool, a hammer can do a lot of things, it can create, it can destroy…
“Yes, but fentanyl cannot create, it only kills,” Dollboy insists.
“Well, fent can be a good time if you take the right amount,” she replies, and then they move on.
“Damn, she’s so hot,” Rattlesnake mutters. By now he has returned with the new bag.
“Dude, yes,” Swiss Cheese says, “I wish I could also date her.”
“Bro, I wish we could both date her at the same time.”
Afterwards I’m outside on the SoHo street with Rattlesnake and Swiss Cheese who are digging into the bag. They tell me about the night they got wasted and did stick-and-poke tattoos of each other’s names. Speer comes out and introduces himself and tells me that he’s a longtime reader of the Substack, he says that he likes it and that he thinks it’s best when I’m describing the world as it is and not preoccupied with “political editorializing” and calling people “the f-slur.” Sure, some of these characters are right-wing, but to call them literally fascist is a stretch. Usually it’s just guys being bros. The idea that there’s some big dark nefarious force involved in all this is overblown. He says that he was just in SF for a few weeks meeting people plugged in to that whole scene of “charter cities” and “network state” venture capitalist orbiters and some of them talked a lot about this salon culture stuff going on in New York. I ask him about some of the other sceney writers he reads and he starts listing names I won’t bore you with. He’s heard a tip that the Völkischer Beobachter is coming out with its own international “power list” of influential media and culture figures and that some of these were sure to be included in New York’s contribution.
Lena and Speer and the other Germans have plans to go to some honkytonk uptown. I don’t really feel like going, mostly because I have a lot of day-job work in the morning, and I’ll see them living out their Karl May fantasies on IG stories anyway. I ask Rattlesnake if he’s going to go so he can keep hitting on Lena. He says that he can’t because he has another girl coming over to his place later, so he and Swiss Cheese are taking a car back to Brooklyn.
Good