my roommate rants about surveillance capitalism while I clean the fridge

produce & panopticons | flash fiction

Mar 31, 2025

The fridge is open. I stand in the freon tundra, my head full of lobsters—they never stop growing…they molt and molt and molt until they become too much of themselves and die. The fridge is too much of itself, too much of us, and we’re dying. The piss yellow light chokes once then holds steady, humming its brassy tone as I survey our rot: a lemon puckered up like a dying star, a spinach bag full of slimy mulch, a salsa jar with a dignified blue wig—

“Did you know Google can predict your death with 95% accuracy?”

I start with the salsa. It puts up a fight, held in place by something sticky—honey, or syrup or soda from a forgotten midnight Hiroshima. There’s something about the jar’s wig. It’s nobility, it’s Fuck You aura, the way it thumbs its nose at decomposition by playing dress-up—something that flushes my cheeks with guilt as it hits the Hefty.

“They can tell you’re depressed by how you move your mouse…”

He’s at the counter spreading peanut butter on a slice of Wonder Bread. He’s in his boxers, shifting his weight heel to heel brimming with the pigheadedness of an unskippable ad. As usual, he didn’t bother letting the Jif warm up and now each stroke causes the white fluff to become torn and mangled.

I grab a ziplock of something pale. Rice? No...too chunky. Potatoes? I pinch the bag. It gives like PlayDough.

“…if you type slower than usual they’ll start feeding you self-help podcasts and iron supplements…”

Are my hands gossip hounds? Does the white mush know I’m on Prozac? Did the way I pinched the not-rice-maybe-potatoes tell it I’m still in love with my ex? Does it know about that panicked week in high school when I thought I was gay? Maybe this is why hand-shaking is the first thing we do when we meet someone. Maybe handshakes are habits born into the zeitgeist to feed our hands’ hunger for scuttlebutt, an ur-level "Hello" where both shakers walk away plump with the other's unconscious. Farfetched, I know, but it would explain why no one looks me in the eye when they meet me.

“…and your phone? That fucker’s basically a surveillance device you’re stupid enough to pay for…”

I wipe my hands on my jeans. They brush against my phone—the obedient little rectangle kissing my thigh, listening, taking notes, selling me out to some headset-wearing schmuck. Who cares? Why should I care? I’m not interesting. Therefore, my phone is not dangerous, not as dangerous as the fridge. My phone lets me order Thai and dog kibble and talk to my mom, but the fridge? The fridge deludes me into thinking my sell-by can be adjourned and that I have infinite time to "glow up" into my "best self."

“…Fitbits…Apple Watches…all that shit—they get your heart rate, your sleep cycle, stress levels…ever notice how, like, after a shitty night’s sleep you all of a sudden get pummeled with ads for weighted blankets?”

A container of hummus blinks with its half-torn lid. I wonder if it’s been listening too, learning my patterns of neglect, counting the times I open the door with good intentions and just stand and stare and thrum my fingers against the handle before defaulting to Americone Dream and Doritos. Maybe if I slurped the oily film off its surface it would give me my stats: “You abandoned me 176 days ago, you have eaten two (2) vegetables in that time, and I am now home to fifteen (15) different families of bacteria, that is a new personal best, congratulations!”

“If they control the information we see, the news, the ads, the algos…like, how much of our personality is even, like…ours?”

I find an old apple in the drawer, soft to the touch. It caves slightly when I press my thumb into it—just enough to remind me it used to be alive. Rot is a kind of memory. We remember what we’re supposed to be when we collapse into ourselves. The baby carrots have shriveled into a bag of Saint's fingers. Past-me put them here. They were for being better. Past-me believed I would be that guy who meal preps and snacks on raw veggies and exhibits monk-like control over everything dietary. I don’t remember. Should I want that now? Maybe I’m supposed to be someone who has goals, who has vision. Someone who doesn’t let food decay into oblivion. Someone who gets raw carrots stuck in his teeth and doesn’t spend thirty-three minutes watching a video essay on the life and death of GrumpyCat.

“ …like…are we just something they made?”

I close the fridge. The engine’s hum vibrates the linoleum, steady, patient. I look at my roommate as I tie off the reeking Hefty—he’s itching his crotch and chewing with his mouth open, perfuming the room with peanuts.

I walk out, thinking of peanut butter, how it doesn’t need a fridge, how it will survive the apocalypse and call the last person on earth to its bosom to pry open its redhead with weatherworn hands and suck brown goop off their fingers. The last thing they'll taste before they die will be peanut butter. I, too, want my last bite to be something beautiful, something familiar. Something cheap and indestructible. Something that has been through every epoch of my life, from the crustless sandwiches of childhood to the desperate 2 am spoonfuls of my twenties.

I toss the Hefty into the dumpster and look up at the sky, wondering if the satellites know this and if I should steel myself for a barrage of Skippy ads—the black sky where someone somewhere is logging the exact number of steps I’ve taken.