1. ⁠⁠⁠⁠I am 37 and most of the time I have to explain and justify my decision to work at McDonalds at 37 — including to my young coworkers and marxist and intellectual friends, all of whom seem dumbfounded. though the reason is simple: after being there for a few weeks out of need and getting to learn the everyday speech and modalities of my young coworkers, which were unique to me and seemed inherently critical in their own way, I arrived at the insight of conducting an ethnography of the ruins of capitalist modernity found in the workplaces and so-called ghettos of America and the world, where one finds the the sizzling fires of an ongoing war. I started seeing such an ethnography as a contribution to the dream project of Simone Weil and Walter Benjamin: to build a contemporary archive of the forms of resistance, suffering, and joy of the oppressed. I’ve learned many things working at mcdonalds at 37: to work here is to be thrown into the universal, into an ever-widening invisible landscape where millions, worldwide, obey the same orders and repeat the same tasks, confront the same hell. there is an unconscious solidarity created amongst the millions of McDonalds workers based on our shared conditions of work. the mechanical labor and the becoming one with the machine described by Marx’s Capital and William Gibson’s Neuromancer are all too real. after a certain point of being clocked-in, the self evaporates and one is fully immersed in the rhythm of the machine, one is fully immersed in the phenomenology of capitalist modernity in its pure form, our bodies turned into commodities for others to rule over and exploit. it’s enough to drive you crazy and then, at the end of it all, the shit wages and artificial scarcity— these shared conditions of work and life create an invisible link amongst us, one which we still can’t fully make sense of.