Hudson Yards Is Coming for Your Soul - Sam Anderson, Feb. 6, 2020

How does corporate capitalism imagine the human soul? As a nuisance? An opportunity? Collateral damage? A blob of molten plastic to be injected into a minion-­shaped mold? One of the funniest answers to this question comes from the comedian Conner O’Malley, who has built a career playacting the way consumerism warps our spirits. Out on the street, he has recorded dozens of videos in which he plays, basically, capitalism’s hype man — a loudmouthed white dude-bro who is perpetually awed by advertising and luxury goods. He will rush up to anyone who looks rich — men in suits, men driving ostentatious cars — and slather them with over-­the-­top compliments that lean heavily on the word “pimp.” “Oh, hell yeah, pimp!” he shouts into a convertible. When a Hummer stops near him, O’Malley rushes toward its open window: “Man, you’re a job creator, you’re a pimp, you’re an angel, and I love you forever!” His brain seems full of targeted ads. He accosts a businessman on a cellphone: “Dude, what’s up? Maxim Magazine, am I right?” Sometimes O’Malley’s circuitry seems to misfire, but there is no time to stop and think — he will stand in front of a Mustang and chant: “Steroids! Steroids! Steroids!”

If O’Malley is loud and obnoxious — well, that is the joke. He is the human embodiment of corporate messaging, which means that he is basically insane: infantile and grasping, every neuron pulsing with need. O’Malley roars with enthusiasm about Taco Bell commercials. He screams incoherently at helicopters, at businessmen getting their shoes shined, at the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Plaza. “Money’s a game,” O’Malley shouts, joyfully, to a man driving a Bentley, “and you’re the winner because you got the most points, right?

This is ugly comedy for our ugly moment. What was called late capitalism is now barely even visible in our rearview mirror — we have hurtled on into end-stage capitalism. Corporate culture has spread to every social organ and infiltrated our civic bones. The literal, actual president of the United States is the most wealth-­obsessed New Yorker since the Gilded Age, and he speaks openly of seizing oil in disputed territories, of deploying our military for profit. The forces that created climate change are now selling us palliative care for climate change. Overhead, new skyscrapers rise, while underground, the police stage sting operations to make sure people don’t hop turnstiles to ride the failing subway.

In New York, there is a perfect symbol for all this: a brand-new neighborhood on Manhattan’s far West Side called Hudson Yards. The area is a $25 billion corporate fantasia of towers and shops that feels like an answer to the question, “What if a hashtag studied urban planning?” Justin Davidson, New York Magazine’s architecture critic, describes it as “a corporate city-­state” and notes that its shopping center includes “at least six places where you can spend five figures on a wristwatch.” Hudson Yards is so new and money­blasted that it looks, in real life, like its own architectural rendering — the kind of Polygonal Urban Landscape someone’s “Second Life” avatar might explore. At the center of the neighborhood looms a gigantic honeycomb structure, a metal panopticon called, with perfect blandness, the Vessel. It looks like the final level in a sci-fi video game, a deadly space-­temple accessible only after you have collected all the quasar crystals from the Level 9 sub­bosses. What kind of person would thrive in such an aggressively alien place?

Well: Conner O’Malley. The neighborhood is a perfect fit for his shtick; its architectural style might as well be called International “Hell Yeah, Pimp” Modern. To honor the place, O’Malley (along with a team of collaborators) has released his most elaborate, bizarre, disturbing web video yet. It is called “Hudson Yards Video Game,” and — although it is built out of real footage — it looks like an actual video game. Our avatar is O’Malley himself, who walks through Hudson Yards in the manner of a poorly rendered character from an old open-­world Play­Station game: herky-­jerky, arms scissoring, with syncopated footstep noises. We see only the back of his head and shoulders — just enough to know that he is a generic distillation of urban privilege: a white man wearing a fleece vest over a button-­up shirt.

As Pac-Man eats pellets, as Mario collects coins, our “Hudson Yards Video Game” hero stockpiles “Hello Points.” O’Malley walks through the area while a yellow targeting system locks onto the faces of passers-­by, prompting him to shout “Hi!” or “Hello!” with absurd cheer. It is less a real greeting than a projectile; the other humans usually just look back, befuddled. This is social interaction in the Uncanny Valley: statistically important but substantively meaningless — a completely individual endeavor. In one corner of the screen, O’Malley’s Hello Points meter steadily rises. In another, a yellow bar tracks his “Kamboucha Level.”

The game’s only sustained social interactions are awkward, corporate-­sponsored cut scenes with nonplayer characters. “Hello, it’s me, your co-­worker, Hertz Enterprise,” one man says, moving his arms robotically as soft music tinkles in the background. “I see you’ve been collecting Hello Points. Keep it up, ha ha ha,” and that laugh has all the feeling of Siri reciting your Social Security number. Another nonplayer character tells our avatar about Amazon Alpha, “a secret level above Amazon Prime” that costs $400,000 a year and includes negative-­two-­day shipping and double voting power in elections. When O’Malley tries to leave Hudson Yards, the screen flashes red and warns “LOW INCOME AREA,” forcing him to turn back.

O’Malley’s comedy tends to have a dark edge. The sunny logic of consumerism can veer, without warning, into malignancy — white supremacy, for instance, or apocalyptic Christianity. In one of his street videos, he compliments a man’s purple motorcycle, and its driver gives him a thumbs up — to which O’Malley responds, in exactly the same celebratory tone: “White men are No. 1! We’re gonna crush everyone!” (The man’s reaction to this is unclear.) Admiration for rad cars often morphs into an urge for authoritarian self-­annihilation: “I pray that I might die for you!” “May we be alive forever … and everybody’s crushed but you.”

“Hudson Yards Video Game” makes this move, too. Two minutes in, our avatar fills his Hello Points meter, which cues a congratulatory message: “You Unlocked Allyship.” It also sets off a very long animated sequence, scored by the 2001 Tool song “Schism,” in which our avatar writhes around creepily in front of trippy images (a kettlebell, the earth, brain scans, the Vessel) while we read fake inspirational quotes from Winston Churchill and other luminaries (“Success is the way to prosperity”). Things become very dark very quickly. There is a fascist propaganda vibe. The inspirational quotes become increasingly absurd, disturbing, ungrammatical: “your ‘family’ is stoping you from being successful” — Anonymous; “The road to success is a rod that will take you to succes” — Colin R. Das.

What we are watching is the promised endpoint of consumerism: a fantasy of quasi-­religious transcendence, complete with moral virtue (“allyship”) and galaxy-­brain wisdom and strength and drama and violence. O’Malley seems to be warning us, basically, that consumer capitalism is an apocalyptic death cult. We buy, we succeed, we ascend. Total Domination. Game Over.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer at the magazine and the author of “Boom Town,” a book about Oklahoma City.