Dead Drive #2: "Power Users" of Yelp.com Held Their Poop in their Butts as Kids Because it Gave them Pleasure.

And, honey? They almost definitely still do. Old writing meets new. Footnotes for us DFW occultists.

I know y’all see that MsPaint spray-tool brown, and piercing on the logo.

A part two of a series! Who would have thought. The series, ofc, where, having discovered hundreds of pieces of unsolicited writing never 2 be opened again, I just hit the Pub button here, as an exposure therapy to get over the Pub button.

See this comment lest you continue, unprefacedly for what 20 year old musings are to come.

I was giggling at this one from almost nearly perfectly 11 years ago. A waif of a 22 year old off the Kosciuszko J-train stop with murderous (LITERALLY) thoughts about interactions with Yelpers who would interrupt my approach, like “Hi, how are—”, “SO, WE WERE GUNNA AGSHUALLY YELP THIS? SO JUST SO YOU KNOW?”.

And, to any waiters reading this, a “tip”.¹ ² ³

Anyway, here’s the piece, with present commentary .⁴

just in case y’all missed this Digital Art

Neo-Entitlement

Gilles Deleuze⁵ referred to a dog's yelping as "the shame of the animal kingdom.” And at first you’re like, what that doesn’t make any sense, wtf is he talking about (don’t bother if you’re thinking about it). But I present, it's not difficult to see why, should one consider the similarities and vestigial organs that domestic dogs, Canis lupus familiaris domesticus, share with the users of yelp.com. These self-named Yelpers, akin to children (in more ways than one) desperately attempting to assigning themselves a nickname, have the following attributes: often gluten-intolerant, have voices reminiscent of Victoria Jackson, consume small 8 oz. Poland Spring water bottles, over MANY sips, and lament the gentrification (pronounced \jen-trə-fə-ˈkā-shən\) of their neighborhoods, from the sidewalks of exorbitantly priced restaurants located in the base of their luxury buildings within otherwise dilapidated areas. Like domesticated dogs⁶, they are, in a way, [The] Man's best friend, serving—though unwittingly—as agents within a participatory panopticon, where citizens inadvertently perform governmental surveillance through user-generated mobile content, such as geo-tagging and detailed reporting. Note that Yelp is not the sole platform for crude gastronomic opinions; others include Blackboard Eats, Seamless, and Zagat, all frequently used together in a complex process of culinary fetishization (akin to Oedipal Edible Arrangement.)

Gilles Deleuze calls a dog's yelping "the shame of the animal kingdom" and, well, it isn't hard to imagine when one looks at the similarities and vestigial organs that Canis lupus familiaris domesticus (a.k.a dogs) are progenitors of the users of yelp.com. Self-coined Yelpers, à la the kid who would say themselves monikers when no one else does. Yelpers are also The Gluten-Intolerant, have voices like Victoria Jackson, drink those tiny 8 oz. Poland Springs water bottles, and complain about the gentrification (pronouncing it \jen-trə-fə-ˈkāāāāā-shən\) of their respective neighborhoods, in voices so dB-ity, down there, outside of prohibitively expensive restaurants in the ground floor of their helipad buildings in totally fine before them neighborhoods, so that it travels upward to those looking out the window with them with derision, passersby, other non-couple-TWO-people-pairings at the restaurant (“RIGHTT, you’re so right”), indeed their yelps (ha-ha, get-it) (SHAME) can be detected by geese from Calgary on their way to Costa-Rica.

They too like domesticated dogs are [The] Man's best friend being—albeit unknowingly—special agents of the participatory panopticon i.e. where citizens do the government's job for them, perhaps best carried out by user-generated mobile content (think geo-tagging, surveilling one another, reporting their findings in minute detail.)⁷ And N.B. btw: Yelp is not the only website of vulgar prandial-opinion, players also include Blackboard eats, Seamless Consumption, Zagat, oft used in conjunction in the multi-faceted effort of food-fetichization.

Oedipal Arrangements, anyone? OK, Intrusion from 11 years in the future, I DEFINITELY made that up out of my own dome, and I concede maybe concomitantly as others did, as agrarian societies did after Bering land bridge closed, thus creating the New World and Old, but, now it’s very dude who takes mushrooms 3x and profunditily attempts to make wordplay reveal Dao koans.

And yet maybe to better sketch a diagram of the Yelper's dark heart one should listen to Lacan and Return to Freud. 70 years ago he said, in effect, "you know that person who is orderly, parsimonious, and obstinate, (an ass-hole) all at the same time? Well, they're dominated by those personality traits because when they were kids they had a penchant for retaining their feces because they derived a subsidiary pleasure from defecating, and if they didn't end up gay, they sublimated this desire into becoming middle-managers with an exacting obsession about describing their intake (and, by inference, output) of their dining experiences. And like, of course, (Lacan continues) while there isn't anything wrong per se with having sexually sublimated one's very extraordinary erotogenicity of anal zone—indeed, this is what sublimation is for—they tend to be pretty anal-retentive… you catch that, ANAL-RETENTIVE, RETAINING THE…Usually, there are mere cracks in the façade, but at home it’s another story, uploading data of their prolix digestive observations and interoceptions to the webbing of the world wide [Ok, again, intrusion, not my best, but also cute, and how did tf did I know about interoception]. Not to mention you can also just skip all the meta anal-food-pleasure stuff and see people reviewing, say, Gotham Gastroenterology, similarly to Gotham Gastropub, amirite? 

Disavowal's the name of Yelpers' favorite game, and I wonder if restaurants, in addition to posting their Sanitation Department Grade, had to post, say, Nietzsche's argument of Eternal Return, or Peter Singer's baby in a puddle thought experiment, if they'd continue to be patronized or the money would be instead funneled into Children's International… ⁸

But then even more heinous than their TMI is that they in effect/curate affective (slave) labor of service industry workers, ceaselessly surveilling the serfdom, and compromise new businesses’ investments that've yet the chance to perfect their concept or those who refuse to be extorted by yelp.com. 

2. Russel Simmons (not that one) 

Russel Simmons, key player in Yelp and also don of the informal Paypal Mafia⁹ (not joking here) who, at the wag of a--presumably--chode-finger extorts thousands of small businesses, and does so not in the much more straight-forward (and let's face it respectable) way of tommygun totin’ itayans, but in the more insidious, invisible way outlined by neo-Marxist Italian theorists (Agamben, Adorno, Berardi... stuff like bio-power and the creepy like¹⁰) in the well documented process of coming to a business, offering the opportunity to pay a $300 marketing fee for Better Advertising, meaning mere visibility in a search-engine return, or offering to make negative reviews to have them desaparecer.

Easy to imagine that such disappearing acts predicated by not returning businesses in Yelp searches (which have become the Google of locating "Good" (read: officially sanctioned) places to eat), will only do what capitalism is best at doing, namely, locking in prosperous futures for those with preëxisting economic prosperity, and denying the future existence for those who refuse/can't pay for "marketing" fees. Meaning, that if a restaurant doesn’t want to pay for the specious marketing fee it will cease to be patronized is both the fault of consumers who can’t have an un-curated dining experience and the extortion practices of Yelp. 

All of which mirrors of course the tightening of the neoliberal gibbet, and considering the fact that in the deposition of the alleged Boston Bomber the destruction of a few nearby Dunkin' Donuts was right on up there with mass-murder, it isn't hard to imagine high retribution for penning a false (maybe even felonious) Yelp review. Corporations do have souls after all. [Whip cracks]

Yelpability might soon extend even to individual human subjectivities, aurora borealis ("wasn't pretty enough, wanted more purples and greens"), or even individual bowel movements considering the website’s ghastly inertia. That said, the horrors of Yelp reviews in restaurants alone extend both from one to five stars, considering that those with 5s are lauding the excellent servitude of other thinking breathing ppl and swinish-indulgence ("they even had troughs of free slop intricately funneled from the grease-pans through a central hole in the kitchen floor!!!") and one stars predicated upon venting spleen about having had the opportunity to pay others to wait on you and consume fatuities that were imperfectly orchestrated. 

Where’s the zero-star rating? Those who are Big Upset ALWAYS invoke, as if they thought of it, “IF I COULD GIVE IT 0 STARS I WOULD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”. But then, actually, where is it? Bartleby the Scrivener’s “I’d rather not” ? The original Arab concept of Zero from sifr (emptiness), around which the 0 is drawn? and what better rating option could help balance the buxom top-heaviness of Yelp? Concern about the implications of writing false Yelp reviews such as this Dostoyevskian pastiche might be answered with a simple Inshallah! God will it!

Would that all restaurants are reduced to an entropic three-star, un-telling, un-becoming rating, and then maybe, exhausted and starving after e-leafing through 45 pages of restaurants all confusingly the same while their partner (almost always cisgender) does a version of same on Rotten tomato best of lists, the weary, yelping (SHAME!) even, at this point, dog-tired Yelper will elect a bodegabagel (instead of watermelon brined, laser-cut, bespokenly foamed quail eggs sculpted by the Chef who recently opened that one place _________________ and was on the team that opened _________________ ::.22 shot explodes into temple::), actually supporting small business, giving potential life to an as yet embryonic quail, and making the restaurant industry (read: place of traditional-prandial-commodification) a little less "vibrant" and a little more precarious like the lives of their employees. [O I went full Julia Brockovich… it’s almost as if, I had had it working in restaurants. This was the last year of me waiting tables, after which I got copyediting job, and then software engineering jobs, two industries that are totally devoid of dealing with people like this everyday and that make you wonder how you got SO blessed to work with——]

3. Burger Boutique 

Ironically, perhaps more evil than both Yelp and by extrapolation Yelpers is the restaurant industry itself. I wonder if it isn't restaurateurs piloting white, windowless vans across the Mexican border, stowing upwards of ten souls indentured to servitude in their kitchens? Maybe restaurant food is not up to Elite palettes because the person cooking it is on the tail end of a 77 hour work whose wages will total less than the price of the group’s meal (not to mention who are in a constant state of anxiety w/r/t the deportation shivers.) And maybe the fries were delayed because the very, very-sous chef, rushing to complete an order time, splashed hot oil on his face, instantly melting it, and afraid to go to the doctor’s and being found out (or more likely, simply unable to afford it), the very next day appearing with a baseball-cap whose bill was donned exceedingly low over his visage so as to cast a shadow which the blue kitchen lights revealed was a Melted Face. Morgan, the owner, gave him the day off though! Maybe even two, I don’t remember the act was so Chirst-like and gracious my memory fails me. ¹¹

And who knows maybe Bloomberg--or for that matter Christie Medvedevovitch Quinn--would appreciate some extra tax $ from undocumented workers or the money otherwise funneled into a raucous non-hedonistic bwunch, or for that matter actually being leached from Hard Working Taxpayers’ pockets, as evidenced by Amanda “The Skinniest Bitch” J’s review of the Fort Greene’s Community Outreach’s 1 star: wasn't informed that she couldn't used her Expedited Food Card to purchase alcohol. ¹²

Restaurants and their restaurant-eurs are even heavier-handed pimps [from 2024, “sex traffickers”] of affective labor than Yelpers, too, what with their ceaseless modulation of The Mood, via imperceptible lighting changes [2024: one guy would do these changes in the most atomic bomb disengaging way, that it was embarrassing to be around. Then one night he called all the staff together, the same night where I’d found a drug baggie of coke in the bathroom, which was quickly, safely, for security purposes, was sequestered into my apron [lmaoooo] “I have lost something, and I can’t say what it is, but if you see it please give it to me, and I think you will know what it is when you see it”], and plus their dumbass moderation of employee movements ("the spoon must be at a 45 degree angle on the soup dish when set down, or else"), attire ("one drop of wine on your blindingly white apron and yr outta here!!!!"), and encouragement of the devious—and downright scary when ya ponder i—"Customer (read: oppressor both within the establishment and without) is Always Right" mentality. 

But maybe restaurants are blameless? Operating as they are under the even more Meta type of power that is Olive Garden commercials "when you're here, you're family"; the subsumption of the very concept of Family. In the end capitalism's the culprit again, but it seems like the disappearance of Yelp, being as it is a nexus of capitalist-entitled-elite evil, is a good place to start. [2024: Omg I just used capatlism so MANY TIMES WOWZERS]¹³

1. I wrought hell on the hold of their sphincthers’ consciously-autonomous-nervous-system-clenching-reflex, by, after they were done with their disclaimer, repeating in exact same tone, totally Prometheus style Fassbender, and sometimes I would literally do the robot via micro-gestures for added affect, the menus doing a perfect square, hips precipitously pitching forward 90 degrees to drop them on the table, or turn around and come back, to say, “HI, HOW ARE YOU TWO”. Leers melted. They had gotten the mythical no-nonsense part-time model 6’2” freelance writer gay waiter who doesn’t give a fuck should he lose his job yesterday. And guess what mamas? They tipped 30%. The more brusque I was with them the more they… shidded in their Depends? lmao idk… but you would see a certain pleasure of being chastised as if being transported back to the potty with exhausted parent all tears streaming, exhausted, and then were That’s So Ravened back to the restaurant and vaguely pulsing sea food on their plates, when they’d asked for a napkin and I’d just throw them on the table, sometimes the food, from my apron. You know what tho…

2. Perhaps they so find camaraderie with idgaf-gay (idgag?) waiters, notoriously 100% PEDOPHILES - my family (Flint, MI)… aren’t they, they’re…. amirite? anyway, who, too—gay men—it is known, have ANAL intercourse… and… enjoy (!) said reticular pressures and micro-retentions of voids being un-voided in a way, then refuFILLING (of said void) again, and again while the wife makes an ole crockpot casserole for 8th time this year, and the man turns to #SocialMedia to express deflected rage without being able to communicate it to said wife, omg, and, the reason why the flat-wearing Yelpistas are disarmed, of course, is because they’re all hopelessly basic and without a doubt wearing flats, they can’t override their allure to seem like a downtown sophisticate when presented with such a specimen and actually, since it’s footnote NUMBE TWO HAHA, I want to remark on how it’s always usually most likely TWO ladies, that is, uno, DOS/DVA/TVÅ/DEUX ladies, usually on a Friday or Saturday night, maybe they met on Yelp, maybe they’re all completely unaware of their desire to void all over one’st-another and you know what…

3. That reminds me of the EE Cummings Poème, sung by Björk, sonnets unrealities, the “one’st-another”, rhyming of course with “should TØUCH an-otherSsSs”, 0:20 for ye attentionally-addled ones:

4. ibid

5. Oh brother… I actually cannot with Deleuze… and… Guatarri? Must we always mention the two? “And they were roommates”. Yeah either way, cast them both out, if not already dust, but the two things I do like about their rhizomatic onanistic bullshit was the description of why paranoid ppl live in cities, and this quote. Oh, but that also reminds me, my first book of theirs was… say it with me… L’Anti-Œdipe! and the cover fits now more than ever, for the topic at hand:

6. ok I went ham

7. Omg, 11 years ago, that was pretty ahead of its time amirite? Esp given that I had only read maybe 300 pages of Foucault tops in me wee early twenties. MY HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED given that, hah, algorithms can now detect based of gyroscopic data when, say, idk, Yelpers are sitting on their toilets for extended periods of time in order to hit them with ads for Charmin Ultra-Heavy-Duty © Bear-Strength © Listerine-Odor-Eviscerating-Droplets ©© at their most-vulnerable, squatty-pottied © moments.

8. Omg x2, how innocent I was.

9. Omg x3, I’m going completely investigative vibes. Julia Roberts.

10. was waiting for this

11. My brother has recently became a “open borders, gotta close these things, there is a process” propagandized automaton has heard this story and nary an awe. Sigh.

12. Ok, ya girl was mad at the cackling masses. And maybe, see [11], still surely is. To bring up another early Fr*nch philosopher I hate, this must be the whole La nausée thing Sartre was talking about… hein?

13. Omg I totally didn’t expound upon the original psychoanalytic phases connection lol, but alas, I said I’d hit that P button at 2:00, and to avoid retaining said piece, I must evacuate… said piece…