🔭 The Rules Essay

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The first rule of satire club is you are not Chuck Palahniuk.

The second rule of satire club is you are not Chuck Palahniuk.

Low-hanging fruit — prison hooch fodder — and I know better. I'd go full St. Augustine and beat myself up about it, but I just started binging Mil Muertes' Lucha Underground Championship reign and there's only so much time.

Incidentally, Palahniuk's hey-Columbia-University-don't-steal-this-book on writing, “Consider This,” is bursting with tips. And, like Joseph Campbell's spoilers and Kurt Vonnegut's blackboard doodles, it strips centuries of stories down to scaffolding. (I edited out the Latinate, but look up the etymology of dilapidated.)

We need structure. If only to have something to push back against.

My inner contrarian has been in the driver's seat since the day I watched my father watching “Taxi” reruns and noticed he only laughed along with the laugh track. Nope, no thank you. I was already on metaphysical edge after watching “Batman Returns” in the theater that year. Right side, middle row, I realized my POV wouldn't be part of my memory unless I really focused. Even now, I can feel the pilly seat fabric, the tacky arm rests, and the looming, Godzilla-sized Michelle Pfeiffer with thimble claws. You know, the kind of things normal, well-adjusted eight-year-olds fixate on. (Childhood trauma? Sure, but maybe some latter-day Merry Pranksters or government agency laced the popcorn. Or the Pop Qwiz nuclear mystery kernels at home.)

I worry about my daughter. As a digital native — her third word was “iPad” — she's internalizing all sorts of frameworks. When she was eight, she'd stop playing mid-sentence, stare into the middle distance, and say “Like, Subscribe, and Comment below.” Way creepier than seeing ghosts or remembering past lives.

She'll be a tween soon and social media looms large. So far, she's only lying about her age to bypass EULAs and Roblox features. Sooner or later, she'll have direct access to TikTok brainrot. You know, instead of watching hammy reaction videos to it on YouTube.

Le sigh. I'm a literal ocean away, so I have to trust Disney to… 

Wait, what? Other countries' governments are actually working on this?

Australia, the down underdog — the birthplace of Crocodile Dundee, Nick Cave, and nightmarishly genitalled kangaroos — passed the world's strictest regulations last November. By December 2025, under-sixteens won't be able to access social media and under-eighteens won't be able to access adult websites. In theory. And let's assume “adult websites” means porn and not Peter Singer and Kasia de Lazari-Radek's “Lives Well Lived” podcast. (They just had on Slavoj Žižek and, hey, homie finally found love.)

Tech companies have been running age verification trials and a report was due this month, though it's been punted to July. They're lucky the government of Australia is a big softy. Not like my sixth-grade teacher. A due date is a due date — sick days and unforeseen complications be damned. It's about accountability.

Anyway, we're talking about kids, so you can't collect data. (Unless it's for targeted ads for reskinned Snake apps and knockoff LEGOs.) Barring official documents, the cheapest way to do age verification might be facial recognition software and A.I., which we all know to be infallible. Unless you're a kid in Japan using masks to buy alcohol and cigarettes from vending machines.

Now we're at an impasse. I have notes about the two-decade-late rollout of REAL ID in the States and how police can and have ignored it anyway, as well as a rant about how the new pope lost me a DraftKings parlay bet about the Jesuits and a new Investiture Controversy. But I've talked myself into a corner. Rules as written, I should eighty-six these darlings and throw in another “Fight Club” reference, but, fuck it.

Following the rules often does more harm than good. My childhood therapist? Per SOP, she ratted me out to my parents and made it impossible to trust mental health professionals ever again. The po-po? My elementary school D.A.R.E. officer taught curriculum that included how to smoke pot out of an apple and make a crack pipe out of a light bulb and straw.

And then there's my dad.

He had a huge collection of pirated VHS tapes. He recorded shelves of movies for my sister and me but, apparently, ran out of blank cassettes. I remember stopping a tape of “Zeus and Roxanne.” The cutesy 90s animal movie had ended and the credits fizzled into a medieval-themed flick with complicated clothes that required lots of doffing and people squeezing each other and putting their mouths on — oh no, my little sis is watching! I stopped the tape and hid it where she could never find it. In my room. Where I had a TV and a VCR.  And well-worn copies of “The Little Mermaid” and “My Girl.”

That's right, Marvel owes my old man a Disney backed-up-toilet-cruise-load of money for inventing must-see post-credit scenes.

And, if this is your first time at satire club, for the love of The Algorithm, stop shopping, doomscrolling, and gooning on your phone and wrestle your kids away from the internet.

Wait, was Jordan Peterson right?