Dispatch One
Souvenir From the Ninth Circle: The Vacuum of Value
March 15, 2025
A sea of flimsy plastic spinal keychains perches atop a screen-printed tablecloth with the logo printed egregiously downward. The fatiguing repetition between unnamable presences rang with the same friendly tone: “It’s a great advertising idea for a chiropractor, right?” The phrase was said once before ossifying into a dull slogan for the day. Each narcoleptic smile and vacant-eyed passerby offered the same robotic praise or mirthless laugh. This was the commodification of junk, a waste of money in a soulless experience designed to drive business in. Spinal keychains, stress balls, pens, and the occasional toenail clipper have one thing in common: a logo for the respective business giving them away in exchange for a gesture of “community engagement.”
The business booth workers are polished, scripted, and rehearsed. Each one offers yet another thing nobody needs, contributing to a pile of excuse cards that will litter the backseat of potential customer cars after they’ve gotten their steps in for the day. Andrew Jackson buys your way in to meander about, collecting every last thing you can grasp: the booth worker’s Sharpies, informational pamphlets, the Plinko disc palmed when no one’s looking. It’s a kleptomaniac’s paradise. Even the klepto understands this layer of hell is devoid of reason or value. $20.00 is a steep price for the quality of material given, and their sweaty hands grasp at anything of perceived value, even if it will rot in their car for months, never making it inside their dwelling.
Everybody is having fun. There’s a portable basketball hoop to shoot at for a chance to win a mass-produced t-shirt, candy at every other booth, drawings, and respective prizes for giving your government name away for free. It’s an auditory nightmare. The fat loss center across the way has to yell about their products to a woman living on a social security stipend since she forgot her hearing aids. It’s beyond soul-sucking; it’s numbing. It’s a capitalist pacifier to remind us that the masses will come if value is perceived, it does not have to be given.
As a business representative engulfed in the isolating absurdity of capitalist performance, the only solution is non-participation. Dullification names the thought-numbing pacifism encouraged by late capitalism. It is the unconscious internalization of symbols, their acquisition becoming a proxy for identity, commodifying the user’s soul. It is the kleptomaniac’s insatiable urge to acquire relics stored from this faithless communion, the reminder of compulsory presence over a connection, fickleness over fondness. Its antithesis remains the singular clarity of absurdist catharsis, the subjective refusal of performance. The harbinger of connection is lost, replaced by hollow platitudes, and sought by the directionless masses. With eight billion people on Earth, solitude is biologically impossible. And yet, even meaningless connection, void as it is, remains soul-gratingly active.
In this quest for meaningful participation, I, the booth worker, ignore the stress balls, pens, and keychains and beeline for the blood donation tent. The owner, cheerful despite his profession, wore his “Texas tuxedo” proudly and smiled with genuine enthusiasm as he stood beside me. The screening questions were successfully submitted, my hemoglobin was monitored, and the lack of needle scarring was checked appropriately. With a smile that met his eyes and a gentleness of voice, he asked, “Did you know that only 3% of our population donates blood?” The question was jarring, rattling me from recognizing the Aristotelian ethos at play.
His warmth surprised me and offered a pleasantness to ground into where connection and meaning married beyond the wasteland of capital consumption. It wasn’t until I was presented with two choices regarding my donation that mirrored a staunch reminder– there is no ethical philanthropy under capitalism. The first option is a cheap Gildan t-shirt with a mass-produced signal of my moral righteousness. That, I decided, was far too abhorrent given that goodness requires no signal, no reminder of its act. To do so is to affirm the imperative that coercion, in any form, constitutes corruption. The second option, seemingly the moral high ground, would be to donate the cost of the t-shirt to an underdeveloped country for blood supplies. At face value, it appears quietly good. It lacks the neon sign of self-importance and serves. Wrong. This quiet act of goodness, of generosity lacking reputational self-inflation, is the island bought on this year’s tax write-offs.
This choice, framed as altruism, was a logistical funnel. One bolstered my ego; the other amplified some unseen entity’s quarterly report. Integrity paralysis has taken root, not out of indecision but the illusion of autonomous choice. In retrospect, I should have opted for the damn shirt. Its life, even if spent on my floorboard, would have been mine. The kleptos certainly got that right. Even blood, still warm, without a logo, yet briefly mine, was rebranded to be transactionally tabulated. My name was then clinically appended to the list of 3% donors in our area, and my identity dwindled into metrics masked as “community engagement.” Despite leaving the makeshift privacy tent a pint lighter, the devastation of it weighed heavier. I was complicit inside an inescapable system designed to make even the most altruistic of choices wear a badge of capitalist honor. This schema, this contrast between consumption and giving, is another corruptible form of rebranding. The only responses to cosplay escapism remain– dullification or unsustainable refusal.