So So Low. «RECUERDA QUE ES DE HUELVA» — remember this CD has to come back to mum. As of today, nothing has changed except for the income gap, an abyss of cheapskate writers falling perpetually through the Zero Hole. Most of them are also currently enslaved 24/7 by ungrateful employers named Zuckerberg, Bezos or Musk who keep fracking up their cuntent for free. 025 My years of professional journalistic deformation were shaped right before the invention of the infamous LOW COST culture, a groundbreaking, ruthless scheme designed to identify all the cheapskates in the world —in order to punish them for being so. It was the era when Ryanair’s staff would abuse you for being one of the many shameless passengers who chose humiliation instead of caring. Then came Zara, Amazon, IKEA and all the corpofucked, exploitative businesses that made you feel rich for buying cheap shit. The low cost invention was a freaking, datafracking operation intended to document and identify those living below or parallel to the ZERO mental income line. The director was a super low cost pioneer: she had eradicated the cost of everything except her salary, a pool of zeros that she would fill with cocaine, Norwegian wood and embroidered knickers while we (the free contributors) kept multiplying our labour per zero. The gap between her throne and our gutter must have infuriated Marx, another hero we all embarrassed like proper young idiots. Instead of mentioning any figure, the director said that HER magazine was a great platform and that HER contributors were the best, super talented, all destined to journalistic glory, including me, thanks to HER platform. Most of the time I spent enslaved by the platform I felt like Joaquin Blume, the tightest gymnast ever born in the Iberian-machopeninsula, a self-extended acrobat well capable of sustaining the crucified posture for hours, At least I didn’t pay to watch it. The downside is that I was not paid for writing the review either. (The private jet must wait, I told myself). I wrote a convoluted text filled with words like «hemorragia» and «crepúsculo». My heroes must have been disgusted. I would have fired myself if I were HER. I didn’t know that using those two words was all you needed to become a “culture” journalist. The director was delighted with the review. She said I was hired (for free), and asked if I was ready for the next assignment. She wanted me to interview a band called Asian Dub Foundation. I hadn’t learnt to say NO at that stage. I had read that Goethe only learnt to do so in his forties, although he probably never said yes to an unpaid gig. But then again I was twenty and an ignorant: I had no clue about whom ADF were when my mouth opened and said: “Maybe: is it a commissioned gig?” The director knew that maybe meant yes, ignored the question, looked at her many shelves crammed with CDs, and picked the debut album of the band. She asked me to listen to it. I said thank you. Then she said: It was the first lesson I learnt as a journalist: never give back your working materials, no matter how many greedy bossy vipers you have to deal with. I was dumbfounded, nonetheless. months, years…. I also felt like a nightmarish version of Tom Daley, a shaved up, underage body soundlessly spinning the air before realising that there is no swimming pool underneath the fucking platform. In the end Tom Daley never died and the platform worked to set me up with a job for a Franco’s nostalgic newspaper in Madrid a year and a half later. I was earning the lowest low-cost salary (a neat, perfect zero) when the paws of the far right showed their wonderful disposition to inoculate my pen with cash. Their platform was a national newspaper and a freedom of expression guillotine —except for our Friday magazine; a supplement whose existence went unnoticed for the CEO, one of the most sinister minds of the perpetuated Spanish Inquisition. Many Catalan friends stopped talking to me after I signed for the sons and brothers of the Spaniard dead dwarf. They had a point, although they ignored that the alleged leftist newspapers they read, like El País, El Mundo or La Vanguardia were the main sewers were critical thinking and independent journalism morbidly choked. I was young... [Crucified].
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