The Printer Doesn’t Come with Kate Upton

The internet is cruel in a very specific, low-grade way. It keeps showing you things that don’t exist in any form you can actually have. Not maliciously—it’s not trying to hurt you—it just has no concept of the distance between looking and having, because for the internet that distance is zero. You click, you see. The rest is your problem.

Kate Upton in Jenna Leigh Lingerie. That’s what today offered. Photographed in the particular way that makes everything seem lit from inside—skin, lace, the whole production operating at a frequency slightly above the real. The lingerie itself is purchasable, which the internet would like you to know. Fifty to eighty euros. Actual garments that will ship to your address. The internet is very proud of this.

But Kate does not come with the lingerie, which is where the whole system breaks down. You could, theoretically, print anything now—there’s a Futurama episode about this that I’d rather not think about too carefully, a man and a Lucy Liu robot and a lot of questions that resolve poorly. The point stands regardless. The object is available. The person wearing the object in the photograph is not an object, is not available, and exists at a remove from your Tuesday that no amount of overnight shipping can bridge.

This is what the internet actually is, when you strip away the utility: a vast, gorgeously curated demonstration of everything just beyond reach. We have wasted this day. We have wasted many days like it. The world, somehow, keeps going anyway.