…I knew when I saw it, this work was really thumping with something. And then, the week after the election, I saw the picture for the second time — and saw something that made the hair on my neck stand up. In the lower part of the picture, a Donald Trump for President cup. I wondered who else bought items near this one. I saw cups, Christmas cards, Ian Toll’s World War II book The Conquering Tide, a Star Wars game, books on biology and mathematics, toys, a stuffed monkey, boxing gloves, candy bars, a plastic fossil of a beetle, envelopes, a tie rack, a hairbrush, Trojan prophylactics. All the cryptologists and Egyptologists in the world wouldn’t be able to discern the political patterns of these physical hieroglyphics. But they are still there: Patterns not only of buying but deeper codes of voting maybe, class, age, gender, geography, race, religion, economics, educational level, sexuality. I yearned to see a preelection 12-month time-lapse film of Amazon: individual items and groupings going in and out of stock — appearing, ebbing, flowing, changing placement, reconfiguring, appearing elsewhere — and seeing if they corresponded to other constellations of goods. I imagine the colors of the shelves changing like an octopus skin altering to adapt new environments. It might show us the group mind and multiple patterns of hundreds of millions of people.
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