Getting Space From Katy Perry

On not only going to space, but making space to take space

Ever since Katy Perry left the face of the Earth, my dear friend Yanni, who leaves me a lot of voice memos, has been ending each note with a sigh. “Oh well, it's a woman's world,” he says. It makes me snort every time. Since a trained robot has been listening to our conversations and translating them into content to line the walls of my particular rabbit hole, the algorithm has been feeding me an endless stream of Katy Perry. In the stream of my doom scroll, I am immersed in Katy Perry’s proclamation that you cannot know love until you have been to space. As I plug my mind into my evil mirror, eyes roll back to the siren song of Katy Perry rhapsodizing on string theory, astronomy, and astrology before proudly earning the title of astronaut. With each flick of my finger, Katy Perry reveals another bit of pre-scripted profundity, as if her bangs are but the curtains holding back the future of the planet, and also women in STEM. “Prove Katy Perry is not a robot,” I whisper to Yanni in a voice memo. “Prove it. You can’t.” And this before I saw the peak of Katy Perry content, in which she is on a panel, after yelling “taking up space” while floating in space, and says, as if it is a sentence that makes sense in or outside of our atmosphere, “This wasn’t about going to space, this was about making space.”

Katy Perry, Katy Perry, Katy Perry. The more you say it, the more the words lose meaning and trail off into emptiness as the evil entity animating all wealth. Katy Perry, Katy Perry, Katy Perry. The more you say it, the more it seems like Katy Perry going to space is not all that different from Coke sending a can in her place, and I have to say, as far as pop stars profiteering, I was much more emotionally invested in Britney Spears’s relationship with the joy of Pepsi Cola. In the endless loop of flashy illusions of success spliced with cute animal videos that is social media, few things have seemed less real to me than Katy Perry going to space. If Jeff Bezos had, in fact, kidnapped a pop star and paid them to say all of the things that Katy Perry has said about space in sort of real-life modernized Josie and the Pussycats, I think the hostage pop star would at least be offering a more playful sense of humanity.

I called Yanni the other day while cleaning, and we talked for a long while, as we often do, but this time, it was almost exclusively about Katy Perry. Yanni shared his theory that Katy Perry is one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse, as evidenced by the fact that a nun once fell dead in court over a lawsuit involving Katy Perry buying a convent, in addition to Katy Perry’s hit song “Dark Horse.” I could only respond with questions, like, “If Katy Perry never came back from space, do you think anyone would really care?” I began to worry that I was allowing Katy Perry’s trip space to catapult a suppressed hatred of women, and found solace in the fact that hating on Katy Perry had serendipitously increased my respect for the mega corporation known fondly as Taylor Swift. Finally, I determined that it was me who needed space, space from Katy Perry.

Instagram was deleted with the frantic jab of a finger, as it is every few weeks or so after I download it again. I will log on to message someone, and then I click open the scroll, seeing all the shiny smiling success, frowning as I waver in my sense of self, and being advertised burn-victim bandages that get rid of forehead wrinkles. Even though I’ve spent the past five years mostly off the internet, if I leave the app on my phone for too long, I feel the pull, and the scroll, and then I catch myself frozen there, neck crunched down, stomach puffed out, eyes glazed over as the robot reaches into my chest and steals my energy. We all know there are machines harvesting our consciousness for profit, though that may be a bit extreme, seeing as we did agree to the terms and conditions.

My robot is not well trained on me, not because he’s lazy, but because I don’t give him much to work with. I’m barely ever online now, and only ever for a particular reason. I went hard and fast with my internet addiction, and now all my receptors are burned off. I’m not entirely concerned about getting sucked back in. Logging back online the first time after five years without social media was like going to a casino where I had been repeatedly electrocuted by the slot machine. Going viral seems like winning the lottery, but it’s more like getting struck by lightning. There was a time, when I had half a million followers on Twitter, and I was glued to my phone for twelve to fifteen hours a day. I burnt out and logged off through the rise of TikTok and development of AI. I now spend more time meditating at sunrise and sunset than scrolling, but still, the algorithm gets its hooks in me. Whenever I get my face stuck on my phone, I feel my energy being drained out of my body, and I am struck by the great emptiness that was so quintessentially epitomized in my overexposure to Katy Perry in space.

The world could only watch as a billionaire paid for women in wetsuits to spend eleven minutes outside the atmosphere and call it feminism, when he could single-handedly afford to end the housing crisis down here on Earth. When Katy Perry talks about going to space as the ultimate expression of love, one wonders if that applies to the hundreds of thousands of people who cannot afford food and shelter, or merely the prospect of getting the hell out of here. Going to space is maybe the ultimate symbol of success, and yet it seems so fucking stupid and empty, because all of the symbols of success are ultimately that, so often in real life, and always on Instagram, where our lust for meaning, purpose, and aliveness is ground down into glitter, churned ceaselessly through the shiny, shimmering screens, where we scroll away our lifetimes to pay for Jeff Bezos’s rocket ride.

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As always, I’ll see you in the comments :)