Sausage is pretty creepy. A casing hiding ground up who-knows-what, it is the abstraction of animal bits into a savory blob, a self-contained mystery. Global governance is, too: redacted texts on communiques; black ops teams in unmarked helicopters circling the world; tanker trains carrying unknown fluids guarded by armed mercenaries. Officials will ban the tuna from tuna sandwiches and expect us to call it a tuna sandwich all the same. All is uncertainty, all dissolves the right of any claim to truth.

This episode of Will Benedict’s and Steffen Jørgensen’s The Restaurant, “No More Tuna In The Tuna Sandwiches,” is porcine anti-ASMR. Chez Shit sits at the end of the end of the world. The search screens and montages and layers of YouTube videos and oral memories of TV shows that flood this episode flash like all human life before our collective video-addicted eyes. This restaurant, this lone tower, largely abandoned and struggling out of encroaching jungle, will soon—like giant sloths, like humans—become just an artifact, an archaeological curiosity for species still unknown. Maybe men were a mistake. The genetically-remembered images of our millenia of biological experience have brought us to this moment of crisis. So much evolution in threatening plains and forests to what? To sit in front of screens all day? Like domestication shrunk so many creatures, like the now diminutized cow, have we too diminished ourselves? We’ve had a long run as civilized predators; perhaps we will again become prey.