Gnostic Myths of Cringe/Swaggy Dualism
At my job, there are 13 security cameras that I've counted. They have gathered years of shocking and incriminating footage of me making pizza dough.
Still from "Surveillance (A Love Story)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIi6pOsyoNA, music video, Oct 2026
I recently found out that the cameras also record audio and keep a transcript of everything we say. My boss revealed this to me when he was recounting the story of firing the worst coworker I've ever had, who everyone hated working with because he was a neo nazi and kept bragging about how he carried a knife in his boot. With the audio recordings, management was able to confirm that not only was he spewing racist and homophobic slurs, which any employee who worked with him would have attested if they'd just talked to us, but also "talked about fisting way too much." Thank god our every word and movement is preserved.
I've had the idea for a while to bring in my own camera and film a music video from our security system's perspective. Originally, I planned to perform the song while climbing on top of the mixer and maybe getting inside the bowl. But even though it was 6am and I was the only one in the building, I felt so inhibited by the presence of the actual security cameras that all I felt able to do was vaguely mouth the words of the song while continuing to do my job efficiently. I think maybe the awkward tension of the footage I ended up with better reflects the paranoia of living in the panopticon than if the video had turned out cool. Sometimes, the only respite from mundane totalitarianism is adding a cool font in post.
"Surveillance (A Love Story)", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIi6pOsyoNA, music video, Oct 2026
I filmed this video on the clock with no budget and made $15.44 after taxes for my time. In it, I produce 1 batch of dough yielding roughly 32.5 18" dough balls, each of which will sell for an average of $35 per dough ball once converted into pizza, which by my understanding means this video generated a gross profit of $1,137.50. I know almost nothing about math or economics, but I'd say this was a very successful and lucrative project, just not for me.
Arcade sketch 1, 5.5x8.5", marker on paper, Oct 2026
I wrote the verse of the song last summer while I was reading The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. The chorus was originally part of a much longer song I recorded around 4 years ago with my friend Henry and never released. From my late teens through my early 20s, I was very interested in Gnosticism, and this was towards the end of that phase. I'd found the address online of a Gnostic congregation who met once a week about an hour bus ride from where I lived, and I decided to show up there for one of their services.
It turned out to be three late-middle-aged men meeting in an extremely elaborately decorated front room of someone's otherwise normal house. The bishop was in full regalia, surrounded by a gold throne and a bunch of religious artifacts. They initially seemed confused ("Are we listed on MapQuest?") and a bit skeptical that I wasn't there to make fun of them, but once we bonded over some forbidden scriptures we all thought were cool, they seemed happy to have me there. Before he began speaking, the bishop tried to set up a camcorder to livestream to service to a member who couldn't make it. I attempted to provide Gnostic tech support, but the setup clearly was not gonna work. However, the bishop continued to treat the malfuctioning, disconnected camera as a person throughout the service, blessing it and giving it the various rites. I thought this was a really interesting visual and wrote the song about it.
Aside from the sacred annointing of the camcorder, the service was similar in structure to the Catholic masses I grew up with. Afterwards, they invited me to Fire on the Mountain to get wings. In retrospect, I think what felt so motivating about the experience wasn't Gnosticism, but the opportunity to spend an afternoon with strangers who were different from me. I'm as tantalized by the promise of arcane knowledge as the next guy, and I appreciate a religion so encouraging of critical thought, but the Gnostic worldview, where material existence is an evil illusion to be transcended, doesn't really resonate with me anymore.
Arcade sketch 2, 5.5x8.5", marker on paper, Oct 2026
I've been thinking about dualistic perspectives like this in the context of media criticism recently. When I hear people over ~45 critiquing culture (music, movies, memes, tattoos, etc.) created by people my age and younger, most seem to either see it as entirely ironic, and therefore depressing and evident of societal collapse, or entirely sincere, and therefore uncool. This feels like a fundamental misunderstanding between Gen X, who were young adults in the 90s, and their Gen Z / younger Millenial children.
Gen X rebelled against the conformist, consumerist values of their parents' generation with irony and apathy. This sense of irony allowed them to acknowledge the manipulative tactics of advertising and the absurd cruelty of global capitalism while still enjoying the comforts it brought and absolving themselves of any complicity. But apathy is not a revolutionary force. I've worked for a lot of people in this age group, and I've found that the ones with access to enough wealth to start a business in Portland are some of the most ideologically confused people I've ever met in my life. Their line between "selling out" and "being authentic" seems to just mean choosing a small business over a major company, the takeaway being that capitalism is perfectly functional on a small scale, if only the greedy corporations would quit ruining everything.
A lot of popular 90s movies (The Matrix, Fight Club, The Truman Show etc.) seem inspired by Gnostic themes, where behind the mundane surface of American capitalism, there is a seperate, secret, true reality. I can see how shady governments and corporations can make it feel this way, but if anything, fictions like these just serve to feed black-and-white conspiratorial thinking while distracting from the glaringly obvious problem of power and wealth inequality.
Gen Z responds to previous generations' irony with ambiguity. Dualisms of irony/sincerity, certainty/uncertainty, authenticity/artifice, are no longer mutually exclusive (and never were - was grunge's style not integral to its substance?); ideally, they are held in as much tension as possible. This is understandably very confusing to someone who grew up with their tastes shaped by curated televsion networks and magazines rather than the internet and social media algorithms, where content creators are rewarded for their engagement regardless of whether the attention recieved is positive or negative. Criticizing modern media by pre-internet standards is like pulling up at a club you used to like in 1997, realizing it has since been demolished and turned into a strip mall, and concluding from this that nobody parties anymore.
Tostitos cheese dip cup in the grass, marker and colored pencil on paper, Oct 2026
There is a misconception that if only we could return to the early web, before the all the capitalism and surveillance and stuff got too out of hand, everything would be fine again. What started as a conversation about the lost potential of the early net has inevitably become a nostalgic rebranding of the same worsening crisis. The early internet couldn't have become anything other than what it is today, because the only real goal of all companies, then and now, is to make money.
Because of this, I have been feeling an increasing moral obligation to make my website look less like cute old web nostalgia and more like the homepage for an esoteric AI pharmecutical company. (I still can't bring myself to get rid of the 2px black borders around everything for a more modern streamlined tech style yet.)
maxwickstrom.com, website, Oct 2026
My friend Alice formats Illustrator files for a sticker production company, which means I get access to rare insider knowledge regarding the sticker desires of Portland. A confusing number of businesses will use AI to generate shitty illegible nonsense logos for their company instead of paying a designer, but then pay a lot of money to get sheets of extremely high-quality stickers printed of these hideous designs. I searched "business logo" in duckduckgo images and found an infinite supply of similar uncanny logos. They are an unnerving funhouse reflection of tech graphic design of the 2010s. I downloaded a random selection of them to repurpose for my homepage, along with one of the first search results for "heaven." The image is tacky, watermarked, and obviously AI-generated, but I can't help but find it aesthetically beautiful.
Tech companies sell the fantasy of a frictionless existence, where you can go a whole day without ever having to risk the inconvenience and potential misunderstanding of interacting with another person. Never again will you have to walk to the grocery store, or endure the boredom and exertion of manual labor, or ask a stranger for directions. Paradoxically, this physical privacy comes at the cost of pretty much every other form of privacy. The powerlessness we feel has made us addicted to certainty, and this addiction is easily exploited by the companies promising to record and quantify every moment of our existence.
Arcade sketch 3, 5.5x8.5", marker on paper, Oct 2026
At the beginning of the month, I watered one of my plants too much and it overflowed. My laptop sat in the pool of water overnight and the battery got completely cooked. While I was waiting to figure out how to recover the files on my SSD, I made this drawing of the autopsy.
Wet Hot Laptop, 11x8.5", marker, pen, and colored pencil on paper, Oct 2026
And finally, this is a very rough mix of a song I'm working on right now.
• "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" by David Foster Wallace (essay, 1993)
• 404 Media post on Flock's AI surveillance network (article, 2026)
• "Boomer Brain Rot Started Long Before Facebook", Panic World episode (podcast, 2026)
• "Nostalgia for the Present" from Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Frederic Jameson (book chapter, 1991)
"It was always clear that the terror of such near futures [in 20th century science fiction] - like the analogous terror of an older naturalism - was class based and deeply rooted in class comfort and privilige. The older naturalism let us briefly experience the life and the life world of the various underclasses, only to return with relief to our own living rooms and armchairs: the good resolutions it may also have encouraged were always, then, a form of philanthropy. In the same way, yesterday's terror of the overcrowded conurbations of the immediate future could just as easily be read as a pretext for complacency with our own historical present, in which we do not yet have to live like that. In both cases, at any rate, the fear is that of proletarianization, of slipping down the ladder, of losing a comfort and set of privileges which we tend to increasingly think of in spatial terms: privacy, empty rooms, silence, walling other people out, protection against crowds and other bodies." (Jameson, 1991)
1. "Headliner" - Pretty Sick
2. "Lightsaber // Savior" - Yung Lean
3. "Ni Dieu ni maître" - Léo Ferré
4. "i love drugs ft. lil scarab" - l a d [link]
5. "walked in" - oaf1 [link]
6. "Blue Flame" - Lil B
7. "creep 4 yr bones" - laura les
8. "Mrs. Diller" - Stray Trolleys [link]
9. "DROWN U (telebasher)" - 8485
10. "Bill Gates" - Key Glock
11. "Tender Blue" - Everything But The Girl
12. "In Da Party" - smokedope2016
13. "White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter (Danny Crush Remix + Slowed)" - Lana Del Rey / Danny Crush [link]
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