Nineteen.

When I went viral online, I wasn't unprepared.

When I applied to Yale Law School, my Yale 250 was underpinned by a personal anecdote from my accidental fifteen minutes of fame. In my case, "fame" is a stand-in for the brief notoriety I—or, rather, my creations—garnered across the internet between 2017 and 2018. I wrote, in 250 words, about becoming the incidental progenitor of an anti-capitalist meme genre as an extended metaphor for deliberate and political misinformation in the wake of the 2016 United States presidential legislation; I'm not being hyperbolic when I say that I was accused, on multiple occasions, of being a Russian agent of psychological operations. (Obviously, the accusations were false—I was clearly and quite honestly an American agent of psychological operations.)

I created the memes as my own way of venting into the void my frustrations with the world, eloquently summarized by the following quote. (I've attempted to source it and merely ended up at an Unused Icons Facebook post published on April 22, 2020.)

For a long time, I thought the Democrats were fighting valiantly but just overwhelmed by the oligarchy and the Republicans. Then I saw that the Democrats keep losing fights they should win and figured they must be just weak and ineffectual. Then I kept seeing them backing off without putting up a fight at all and decided they were gutless cowards. Finally I noticed that enough of them keep voting with the Republicans to always make sure the Republicans more or less win almost every fight, and that they keep starting from a Center position and bargaining to the Right, and eventually after enough of that it became impossible to ignore the only conclusion that actually fits the facts: The Democrats are not overmatched, they aren't weak, they aren't cowards…they're complicit.

Throughout the course of my life, I watched Americans vote against their own best interests. I watched politicians past their prime cling to power and/or trot out their cast of rotating villains, imperiling the populace under the guise of their omnipotence. I watched civil liberties be stripped away or pared back (an end to the constitutional right to abortion, the criminalization of and bounties placed upon transgender people), and I watched the people in power cede that very power to their lobbyist donors. United States President Jimmy Carter, in 2015, assessed that the vaunted American democracy is no more—it is now, in every respect, an oligarchy. So, when I undertook an unpaid internship as an unregistered foreign agent (for the sake of clarity and legality, this is being said in jest; I have never in my life been employed by any governmental agency, domestic or otherwise), I did so with the full intent of poking fun at "fake news."

Over 20% of Americans are illiterate. Not only do their mental facilities not include critical reasoning skills, one in five Americans cannot adequately parse written words. Over half of American adults have a literacy below sixth-grade level. This is, in part, by design: an uninformed population questions little and readily concedes power. But, I say that this is only "in part" to not absolve anyone of their complete and total abdication of intellectual curiosity. As human beings, creatures capable of rationality, to practice critical thought is not just a privilege, not just a right—it is an imperative.

I don't mean to get on my soapbox. I'm just explaining the logic and emotions underlying the memes I created, conveyed through absurdist pop culture humor because that's how I knew it would connect to my peers and because I was, at the time, a massive Mariah Carey fan. Moreover, as a Millennial who’d come of age with MySpace, Facebook, Tumblr, BuzzFeed, etc., I was acutely aware of how information travels. It was, therefore, natural that my interests converged; my outputs are, in hindsight, plenty self-explanatory. I paired Mariah Carey with Slavoj Žižek and Beyoncé with Chairman Mao because that's what I was listening to and reading at the time. Influenced by one of my best friends at the time, I was engaging with works by the likes of Jasbir Puar and David Eng, and coming into my own as an adult meant questioning everything, from the power that politicians and institutions alike wielded over me to the minutiae of my own everyday decision-making. I felt dissatisfied with the way that life was structured, or how it felt forcibly constrained into a parameter ring-fenced by material necessities—Dolly Parton's "9 to 5" remains evergreen—and so I exercised whatever limited agency I had to play with falsities through a satire of my own making: fake news, but my way.

In the end, I didn't go to law school. Despite all of my preparations, I was disillusioned. I observed, year after year, wide-eyed do-gooders enter law school only to be subsumed into the amorphous entity known as Big Law, because I knew that I too would have been one of them. I witnessed my friends accept Faustian bargains because they wanted to pay rent. I saw in reality, over and over, that it's impossible to reform a system from within. (It's a thought to be expounded another day, but I do firmly believe that the purpose of a system is what it does.) Although I would have benefited from the institutional capabilities afforded to an attorney, I, who once claimed to want to become the nation's first gay and Asian American Supreme Court Justice, no longer wanted to be a lawyer. Life had other plans for me.