Is the internet a urinal? flushes the toilet on Silicon Valley. This lecture-performance flows through popular film, architecture, literature, and queer sex to consider the enduring Californian Ideology. Paying particular attention to waterworks in California, the fountain emerges as both a monument for false publics and a figure of information. In Silicon Valley, the fountain finds a philosophical form in the writings of Ayn Rand, as a symbol of radical individualism and extreme entrepreneurship. To stymie the gushing of such toxic liquidity, Duchamp’s strategy of the readymade is evoked, and Silicon Valley is re-conceived as a pissoir, a public cruising grounds for post-capitalist possibilities.

Is the internet a urinal? is a companion piece to Blas’s Silicon Traces trilogy, a series of moving image installations that contends with the beliefs, fantasies, and histories influential to Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. Material from this lecture-performance was adapted into the essay “Is the internet a urinal?”, published in the exhibition catalogue I Was Raised on the Internet, ed. Omar Kholeif, MCA Chicago (2018).