Central Park, pt. 1
Psychogeographic maps can’t be made in a tin foil-covered room
Previously: At the New York Renaissance Festival, Deshawn (aka Mapmaker) meets St Lenny of the Heathens. St Lenny offers him an amulet with the demand that Deshawn open his mind to St Lenny’s desire: to see him “become great beyond [his] pea-sized imagination.”
○ Opening Era: Spring, 2026, Manhattan
Deshawn entered Central Park as the sun hit its zenith. He paused for a moment, hands around his backpack straps, and closed his eyes to find the signal again. There. He pushed his glasses up his nose to stare in the direction where the signal was strongest. Sheep Meadow. Of course. He unzipped his backpack and took out a notebook and Japanese 0.5mm mechanical pencil.
Besides the subways (which he found too overwhelming) Sheep Meadow was one of the parts of Manhattan where you’d find the greatest diversity of New Yorkers. It was one center of the vast cultural Venn diagram. Deshawn’s fingers tightened around the metal spirals of the notebook in his hand. It was going to be a productive day.
Deshawn didn’t need to “accept a quest,” or to “become great,” or to be the “chosen one,” even if these phrases had relentlessly circulated through his mind like a tornado since the Renaissance Faire. He’d decided that he only need to do one thing: to finally get outside and to make his maps. Psychogeographic maps can’t be made in a tin foil-covered room. They need to be made out in the world. Even if the world was crazier than a subway car on Halloween.
So Deshawn walked across the lawn, occasionally closing his eyes, looking for a place at the center of many mental currents. The hub. He knew he’d found it when the confusion and vertigo hit. Hubs were spots where the vague silhouettes of worldviews collided. For a moment he experienced the oneness of all things. Then he fell into a rage against a rival sports team. Then there was terror at the recent soars and plummets of the stock market. This last one helped Deshawn locate himself again: he didn’t own any stocks.
Deshawn blinked his eyes open.
To his left, there were a group of young people. He recognized them, through visual and mental senses, as occupying the intersection between hipsters and hippies. (Pure, unblended hippies were a relatively rare but growing contingent in NYC.) One of them was hula-hooping on the grass in jean shorts and a bikini top. The others sat on a blanket with tie dye swirls. They wore nose-rings and bright colors. They passed around marijuana cigarette, which – Deshawn remembered – they would probably call a spliff.
“Want a hit?” one of them asked.
Deshawn pretended not to hear.
He continued on, only to have two men in black suits, white shirts, and different colored yarmulkes approach him. Orthodox, he pattern-matched. “Excuse me, are you Jewish?” one asked.
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure? No Ethiopian ancestors? Beta Israel?”
“Only on my dad’s side,” he said, continuing to walk.
“Ah! I knew it! I could feel it! But mother, no? Are you sure?” asked the man, following.
“I don’t know where her ancestors are from, but I’m not associated with a religion or ethnicity. Good luck, uh, finding someone else,” he said.
“OK. L’hitraot. Have a good day, my friend.”
People were always trying to involve you in Their Thing these days, but he wasn’t interested in having a Thing. Well, besides his maps.
He kept moving across the grass.
Deshawn had walked through Sheep Meadow a bunch before the Opening. It was a good place to study groups of people. But then he stopped. There were the weeks of pure crazy when he stayed away – the spontaneous riots, psychological meltdowns, dancing plagues, stuff like that. Not to mention all that crazy stuff more recently at the RenFaire, which he tried not to think about. Afterward, his mom had gone from trying to get him out of the apartment to banning him from leaving it (except for school, which had finally started again). She’d kill him deader than a cockroach if she knew he was in Central Park.
But the truth was, it wasn’t that dangerous. The memeplexes in the city had more or less settled into a…what was that fancy word…an ecology. It was probably the influence of the overall NYC memeplex itself, which was really into diversity-maxxing.
The overall chaos also went down as most people adapted to their new sense. People in general were already experts at ignoring similar sensations, like their own gut feelings. And New Yorkers in particular had to be experts at numbing the noise from other senses. Why not their new psychic one too?
Abruptly, Deshawn closed his eyes again. The place he now stood was different. No single cultural current dominated. But a lot of them were still accessible. He’d found what he called the balance point of the hub. It was slightly southwest of Sheep Meadow’s center, near the shade of some trees.
He looked around.
Interestingly, daytime Sheep Meadow was pretty similar to how it had been in the old days. Still Deshawn spied a few differences across the lawn: First of all, groups were more spread out now. They also wore much clearer identities than before.
Like, for instance, the sports guys over there weren’t wearing just t-shirts – they were totally decked out in shiny jerseys, and they tossed their football with too much intensity, in Deshawn’s opinion. Yeah, pretty much all the groups had gotten way more intense. Probably they did this to filter out all the mental noise from surrounding groups. Just a guess – Deshawn had never been a part of any groups.
Meanwhile, in front of Deshawn, geeks in full cosplay were playing Dungeons and Dragons. (He’d be very sure to keep them at a distance.) Elsewhere, he could see and feel businesspeople taking lunch breaks, fitness fanatics doing jump-squats, normies playing with their children, and a couple of dark-haired women tanning in the sun. Who were they? He supposed they must be beautiful, but beautiful women rarely sunbathed in New York anymore, unless they were happy to receive the sex-dreams of anyone within sight…and sometimes beyond sight. But these women weren’t from New York. French? Hm. Something European. Deshawn closed his eyes again. No, they felt more Italian. With a couple minutes of concentration, he could probably figure out whether they were from northern or southern Italy. But that’s not what he was here for today.
Suddenly one of the Italian women got up. “Làsseme pèrde!” she yelled at no one in particular, thrusting off her sunglasses. She looked around for the person having dirty thoughts about her. “Fuck off! Leave us alone!”
It was none of Deshawn’s business.
Deshawn sat down. He took off his backpack. He put his notebook over his crossed legs and opened it to a blank page of dotted graph paper.
Each time Deshawn found a hub, he liked to start from scratch. He’d try to throw out everything he knew about the memetic landscape. This made it possible to find new connections and correct old ones.
Deshawn clicked his mechanical pencil a couple of times and then stared blankly into space. He imagined himself as an owl, flying high above the grass, able to see the entire landscape of human culture. After a few breaths, his mind filled with music. There was guitar he recognized as folk. But also synths. But it wasn’t exactly Sufjan Stevens-style folktronica. It was closer to EDM. He jotted down electrofolk. Then there was an image. It was vague. A singer. He or she wore a glow-in-the-dark checkered shirt. And lit-up sunglasses. That was kind of cool.
But then there was something even cooler: Behind the singer, a backdrop appeared. Futuristic buildings streaked with trees and vines. Solarpunk! Solarpunk was an art movement. He wrote it down: solarpunk. Then he drew a line between electrofolk and solarpunk.
Deshawn raised his brow. Well that was novel. He could have clapped. There was nothing better than making a new connection. He looked around the lawn in case he could identify the source of overlap between the two memeplexes. No luck.
The electrofolk solarpunks could be anywhere in the city. Maybe all the way out by the Gowanus canal, a hotbed for hip trends these days. Maybe a group of them had met last night, for instance at a venue like The Bell House. Maybe they had been enthusiastic enough to increase there – what was the term –…their influence?…to the point where the echo they produced could bounce through mindspace across physical space and time, hopping between brains until arriving here in Central Park. Oh, fidelity. That was the term.
Deshawn and the others on his Discord were having to invent new lingo for this type of stuff. Fidelity: the degree of exactness with which mental content is copied or reproduced. For all he knew, one of the Italian women was acting as a repeater for the electrofolk solarpunks without knowing it, some part of her brain participating in the mental cloud compute network that all of humanity now shared.
More likely though one of the hipster-hippies had been a carrier. Oh, actually, that could be a genuine connection. He closed his eyes again to see what information he could glean.
“Excuse me.”
Deshawn opened his eyes. Yoga pants, make-up, headband, brown hair pulled back into a pony tail – millennial normie professional.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
Deshawn wasn’t very good at understanding individual people, but this woman was obviously uncomfortable. He looked down at his notebook. “I’m…making maps of the memetic landscape. What are you doing?” Was that a polite question to ask back? Deshawn winced.
“I was practicing mindfulness. I’m sitting on that blanket over there.”
Her blanket was creaselessly laid to Deshawn’s left. He hadn’t noticed her there. “OK,” he said.
“The thing you’re doing is kind of distracting.”
“Oh. Sorry, I can mo—“
“What did you say you were doing?”
“I make maps of culture space.” Something was wrong about this situation. He peered at her headband. It wasn’t made of cloth. It was made of plastic and metal.
“Maps of culture space,” she repeated. “Is that, like, a school project?”
“No, it’s just something I do.”
“You mean for work? Aren’t you a little young to be working?” She smiled. Was that a normal smile?
“Uh, no. It’s sorta just like my thing,” he said.
“So, like, a hobby?”
He was learning enough about social interaction lately to know that people don’t normally ask fast-paced questions like this. “No, it’s my main thing. I play guitar as a hobby though.”
There was a pause, like the woman had a loading bar that needed to complete. She kept making movements like she was about to leave, but then she stayed in place, as if she wasn’t allowed to leave until she finished the interaction.
Deshawn tried his best to not get filled with her vibe while she stood there. But of course he tended to get filled with everyone’s vibe. (That was the best technical term the Mapmakers Discord had come up with: vibe. Better than the proposed alternative: aura.) Her vibe was real funny. Just being around her made him feel like he was on numb-ers. But that was paradoxical, because he wouldn’t have gotten invaded by her vibe if he’d really been on numbers.
Was this woman with anyone? Deshawn looked around. He didn’t see or feel anyone else like her nearby.
“‘Maps of culture space,’ huh? Sounds fancy.” She smiled again. “So who do you do that for?”
“Myself, mostly. But I put them up on a blog sometimes.”
At the word blog her eyes lit up. “Sorry, where are my manners? Asking you so many questions without introducing myself. I’m Jen.” She said, placing a hand over her heart.
“Hey. Deshawn.”
“Deshawn,” she said, as if recording the name. “I bet your blog has a lot of followers. I work at a social media company, so that’s all I think about.” She let out a short laugh that sounded fake. It felt like she was trying to have this still be a normal conversation. “We work with bloggers. I’m head of talent.”
“Head of talent?”
“It’s just a fancy way of saying ‘HR.’ How many followers do you have?”
“I’m not sure how many followers I have.”
The woman named Jen shifted her weight back and forth. Deshawn had the feeling that she couldn’t leave until she verified the category he belonged in. But he kept not fitting into any of them.
This was a weird situation. He should probably leave…but maps were spinning in his head as he stole another glance at the woman. Millennial normie professional. He was missing something! A normie wouldn’t be wearing a weird headband like that – which he was pretty sure was the brainwave-reading kind, but more sleek than any he had seen. Even more, her normie cultural programs should have stopped her from asking all these probing questions. Maybe it was competing with her East Coast progressive programming? A lot of East Coast progressives these days feel obligated to take young people seriously.
He felt into her vibe. No. She was an extension of something else. She was part of some new or remixed memeplex that was close enough on the map to normie to co-exist with it, but powerful enough to override its norms.
Now that was interesting.
What was this thing using her for? It seemed to be irritated by Deshawn’s categorylessness. It wanted to make him legible so that it could…know how to interact with him? No, it wanted to make him legible so it could…see how he could be useful.
An image drifted into his mind, forming itself detail by detail, as if someone was whispering into his ear to narrate it: a warehouse, inside it an industrial press, people being crushed by it until flat, the press lifting, only a thin tablet computer remains, on the screen is a spreadsheet listing all of their attributes – they have been turned into data. As usual Deshawn tried to shush this new stream in his head, which had been there ever since the Ren Faire.
“So…like…you just do this blog for yourself,” the woman said, interrupting his thought process. “For your own wellness,” Jen said, saying wellness like a keyword pronounced for a customer service phone-bot.
“Uh…” He never thought about whether he made maps for his own…wellness. “Yeah. I do it for wellness.”
“Got it. So cool. That’s why I do mindfulness, and wear this funny thing,” she said, gesturing at her headband. ”It helps me center myself, especially at work. Helps with the stress, you know?”
Deshawn didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about Jen’s life except for what he could infer from a set of identifiers.
But probably she was more than identifiers right? Were people anything more than the intersection of identities? Of course they weren’t. AI was increasingly able to predict human behavior using a wider range of classifiers than ever before. Eventually – in theory at least – AI should be able to classify all human behavior, right?
Wait a minute. Deshawn noticed that the flavor of his thoughts were wrong. It was the same flavor as Jen’s vibe. It was as if Deshawn had become the industrial press, turning Jen into data.
Jen looked at him expectantly.
Suddenly he was moved to stare straight at this woman. It wasn’t like him to stare, but now he stared – not just at Jen’s clothes or the way she did her dark hair. He stared at something that felt more Jen than the way she swayed in place, or her round cheeks, or the way her eyes seemed to alternate quickly between shininess and dullness.
Yes, look, the new stream inside him said, actually see.
He couldn’t say what it was he was staring at, because it was not something that fell on his memetic map. He stared between the labels, between the patterns of culture that shaped her outward behavior. He stared at…what? Her person-ness? Was that a thing? Whatever it was, it was kind. She was a kind person.
Jen took a step back.
“Sorry, I don’t really know what I was doing there.”
“Oh,” she seemed to search for else something to say. “What do you mean?” she asked, as if nothing had happened.
Then, out of nowhere, something new crossed his mind’s eye. It was bright, vibrant, swirling – both organic and synthetic simultaneously.
Jen sensed it too. Agitation broke across her face. “Sorry to bother you. Deshawn, right? I need to get back to work.”
“Oh. …See you later.” he said, even though he probably wouldn’t see her later.
Deshawn made a mental note to find out more about the memeplex that Jen represented. He had the sense of encountering only a minor limb of something compellingly big. Huge, even. And whatever it was, it was allergic to this new swirling vibe.
Jen left, revealing the source of it: A new group had sat down on the lawn under the shade of a nearby tree between the nerds and the hippy-hipsters. (You could learn a lot from where the groups chose to sit.) Members of this new group wore…weird outfits. Each one wildly different. Yet it was like their clothing was in a conversation. Their mouths, on the other hand, were silent. Why were they closing their eyes? Maybe they were also doing “mindfulness?”
A girl with reddish-blonde hair crossed her legs and laid back; she wore an outfit that wove together Art Deco with some kind of yak herder style he’d only glimpsed once in a Tik Tok from Mongolia. Something near her lip shined. A stud. Next to her was an Asian guy – Chinese? – wearing a full-bleed nebula-print hoodie and shorts combo.
And then there was an Indian guy dressed in a floral Victorian vest with nothing but chest hair underneath. He wore shorts with an eye-boggling black-and-white optical illusion pattern, and––
Oh, he’s staring straight at me, realized Deshawn.
Next release: Deshawn meets TPONY.
Beautiful 🤩