You see a small man on a rather tightly laid out stage, surrounded by plastic potted plants and pale blue and white walls that he is barely shorter than. His shirt is salmon pink, his sandals are fake leather brown, his pants are Dad-jean-adjacent, and he's so excited to be here. What he lays out is a product that seems beyond belief, and he presents it with the calm buoyancy of a discount Steve Jobs as the pastel yellow and pink lights behind him frame his face. He tells you that he has found a way to upload you, your entire conscious being, into a computer so you can truly live forever, never having to leave your family and loved ones behind. This copy will be exactly like you in every way, and it can be yours for just a few small payments. His name is Alan Resnick, and he will save you from your own destruction.
	Released five years ago at the end of 2013, Live Forever as You Are Now stands as not just the funniest and most subtly moving piece of media in Adult Swim's catalog, but perhaps the definitive work of Alan Resnick (the creator, not the character), one of contemporary comedy and horror's true geniuses. Rising from the modern tradition of absurdity best known through Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, Resnick pushes that sensibility into odd, uncomfortable areas, and in doing so makes text what Tim and Eric made as afterthought, or as just part of the form: the confronting of the grotesque parts of modern capitalist life. Combining the disquieting horrific normalcy of This House Has People In It, the social commentary of Unedited Footage of a Bear, and the performance oddity and offbeat timing of his Alantutorial series, Live Forever as You Are Now corrals Resnick's strengths into one funny, off-kilter, haunting package that ends up explicating a particular moment in time.
	That moment- the one we are still in- is the death throes of capitalism as promise of prosperity, the unmasking of the gears that turn underneath the invisible ideology that has pretended for so long that it was bedrock truth. It is the free market morphed into not just a system of exchange, but a system of being, a structure that undergirds every moment of our lives. The technology Resnick (the character, not the creator) claims to have access to is nothing less than the full market capitalization of the individual human soul. It presents itself as dream tech, but underpinning that dream are the unsettling implications his sloppy presentation can't help but highlight, the ways in which the promises we receive are more than empty marketing bluster- they're skin grafts on the decaying body of modern society. Live Forever as You Are Now is one of the finest satires and expressions of Neoliberalism precisely because it expresses how this ideology is communicated to us in the internet age.
	Although a complete discussion of what exactly neoliberalism is could take dozens and dozens of books, our working definition is something like this: Neoliberalism is the ideology that says every human interaction functions as a capitalist market exchange, and therefore all conscious human life is best understood as the interactions of rational individual actors within a market system. Or, as Margaret Thatcher once succinctly and noxiously put it: “There is no such thing as society”. The individual does not have duties to the world outside themselves- to society- beyond those that are also beneficial to the individual themselves, precisely because there is no society, simply individual rational beings. Rising from the fringes through that diptych of 80's demonic evil, Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the neoliberal is ideologically wedded to capitalism because it thinks every human action- from interpersonal relationships to family to religion to ideology to entertainment to work to, yes, economic engagement- operates like the free market.
	As an extreme example, the neoliberal might look at a mother feeding her child and see a rational actor- the mother- choosing to exchange her work right now in raising this other soon-to-be rational actor in order to receive both personal emotional satisfaction in the moment and a measure of security in her old age when the child, indebted by this exchange, is required to pay back this debt by caring for her. The word “debt” here is not metaphoric, really- under this ideology, this truly functions as an economic debt. Many of the words we take as metaphors also become literal under this belief system- Peter Coffin, on both his YouTube page and in his book Custom Reality and You, routinely looks at the phrase “social capital” as having this literal meaning under modern capitalism- your social capital is treated and functions as if it were actual capital, that being (very roughly) the use of ownership over the means of production of wealth to create further wealth through the circulation of the same. In short, neoliberalism takes the old liberal way of looking at capitalism- as an economic system of rational action between individuals- and extends it to every freely willed conscious action, regardless of system or context, because it is simply “the way things are”. Crucially, the Neoliberal sees this way of looking at things not as an ideology, but instead as simply “the facts”, data analysis and statistics pushed into mystical realms where somehow the simple existence of some numbers saying something happened is expected to logically find the reason that thing happened. The numbers aren't just the effect- they're the cause, no ideology required to explain it. This idea didn't come from nowhere- the person we have to thank is none other than the mother of objectivism herself.