Adrian Gray

“I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“For Zelma it was less about expression and more about reply. She couldn't tune out the exhortations but neither could she allow them simply to pass through her unchecked and uninterrogated. She had to respond and yet the responses that were expected of her work proscribed. It wasn't enough, she often said, to discuss these things online. To do so, she felt, was to accept the space she had been allotted. She wanted argument and debate to unfold in the same location it was initiated. When an advert invaded her mental and visual space, she invaded its physical and aesthetic space right back. In our rush to the web, she said, we had ceded ground in the physical world. As a result, ever more overt expressions went unnoticed and unchallenged. What once would have found itself defaced was now, instead, photographed and shared online for critique. But its form, its face, remained unaltered, untarnished, clean. (p.128)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“Margot felt self-conscious, timid. She had a fear running into people when she was unwashed. She seemed particularly worried about the people who worked on the estate, most of whom were men, most of whom, I tried to explain, were filthy in their own ways - smeared with grease and dust, or spattered with spray paint and oil. I tried pointing out to her the unfairness of this divide, the way some kinds of dirt were associated with honest, masculine labour, while others were associated with malaise or inertia. She understood this, warmed to it as an idea, but whenever the moment came to leave, she found it some excuse to stay. (p.198)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease

“I began to feel as if we were merging with one another. The process was more than simply emotional. It was biological, systemic. Each of our bodies was a biosphere, slick with bacterial and insect life. Reteamed, and what we teamed with brought us closer not only to each other, but to the ecosystem we inhabited, fed off, and nourished. Bacteria bred in the ooze of our waste, our discarded food remains and puddled shit, then travelled onto us and between us, carried not only on the thickened air, but by the fleas and lice that hopped and crawled from one body to another. There was no difference, I began to think, between the puddles on the floor and the streaks of filth on my skin and the acne that erupted on Margot’s face. It was all just life, matter, the biome. We were leaking out into the world, and the pooled primordial essence of the world was soaking back into us in turn. (p.235)”
― Sam Byers, Come Join Our Disease