Zach Blas’s exhibition Contra-Internet is a queer science fiction whose centerpiece, Jubilee 2033 (2017),fictionalizes the “end of the internet as we know it.” The story begins in the 1950s, when, having taken acid, libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand and two of her devotees, Alan Greenspan and Joan Mitchell, hallucinate an anime-interface AI named Azuma, who tells them that Silicon Valley has built a cult-like culture around Rand’s writings. Rand is eager to see the future, her ideas brought into being, but as Azuma leads the small group around the Bay Area they chance upon a ransacked Google headquarters, widespread mayhem, and a mutilated body whose ID badge reads “Peter Thiel.” Inside Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, now occupied by insurgents, the group encounters Nootropix (played by postgender performance artist Cassils). Nootropix is a contra-internet prophet, and their victory dance to Andrea Bocelli’s “Con te partirò” (Elon Musk’s favorite song) is the most earthshaking contrasexual manifesto since Lynda Benglis’s 1974 Artforum ad.

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