Here's the book:
https://store.thebaffler.com/products/commodify-your-dissent
One of his examples is that music and clothing companies realized there was a market for things like T-Shirts with Anarchy symbols on them. This stuff didn't exist at scale in the 1970's, you needed to know someone with a silk screen, or live in a city like Chicago or San Fran that had the first wave of non-conformists. But 30 years later you could walk into a mall and come out looking like you had a personality even though you just bought it.
What's really funny, watch "Dogtown and Z-boys", a movie about the rise of skateboarding with lots of footage from the 1970's. The first "tricks" they do will make you say, "What? Where's the trick? He just bounced on his board", and then compare it with today's batshit insane achievements. Skateboarding was peak commodified in the late 1980's (Thrasher magazine helped) early 1990's, but in the 1960's it was ... a simpler time and the outcasts looked like normal kids having fun compared to today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogtown_and_Z-Boys
You can see how something goes from a "weird kid activity" to "every kid does it".
Like green mohawks on toddlers in the early 2000's. Edgy in 1970's, preschool in 2010.
Man, I'm showing my age. :|
That's the natural state of innocence - their reference frame is how the experience feels (I'm going fast and almost falling over!). When the scene takes over, the reference point shifts to how it looks - the raw experience is overtaken in importance by progress and status and comparison.
I accept this valid criticism of "posers" but I'd like to add that there's a strange loop here. It feels alien to me, but lots of people I know like to watch videos of themselves doing things (e.g. choreographed dances). It certainly does help to see how to improve, but also they get satisfaction from seeing themselves do the thing.
When I make things, I often spend time confirming the work is done. And seeing what I actually made.
It is part of the psychological experience of making things for me.
Look at you get satisfaction from recording in language observation of human agency.
And now within subcultures are sub-subcultures. Within skateboarding, everyone hangs with each other but at the same time, your Baker kids aren’t your Creature kids and they aren’t your Andy Anderson/Rodney Mullen kids.
Some people may join a subculture to be “non-conformists” but most people pick up things because they like it. Sometimes what you like isn’t something everyone else likes and a subculture is born.
There are still millions of these pockets of subcultures that are completely invisible to most people on the outside.
Zines and DIY screen printing are still very much alive. If you live in a big city, check out some small local punk venues if you want to re-connect (or connect if you want to check it out). And of course, you can always start skating again (but maybe wear gear the first day).
If someone's expectation is that a green Mohawk means someone is throwing off the cultural legacy and expectations handed down to them, then yeah, a toddler with a Mohawk is pretty ironic. If someone just thinks is a haircut that looks cool, obviously not.
If someone thinks or remembers when Mohawk had that meaning, they might read into the fact of it being changing to a simple mainstream aesthetic cosmetic option.
No one agrees, of course. In any case, for me, it's not something I'd force on my kid. Sort of goes against the spirit.
Toddlers want things and they don't want other things. Their parents don't permit much agency, because.
I'm probably agreeing with you but I wasn't sure of your implication.
I actually agree with your point, but there's a really solid devil's advocate side to take against it, too.
Just sayin'.
sure, and anarchy means total chaos and no organization at all. who says that punks can't discuss or give a fuck, lol.
"It's not just commodification. If you were a punk in the 80s with a green mohawk, you might find it cute to put one on your kid in the 2000s. I have long hair, my son has long hair. This isn't a commodification of a culture, it's me, like every parent ever, using my culture to inform how I raise my kids. What am I going to do? Not dress and present my kid how I want to and how I identify?"
He is literally defending his decisions to "dress and present" his kid against my comment about commodification, as if I'm attacking his decisions. He didn't even understand my point: in the 1970's you would have been ostracized (or arrested) for having a green mohawk. In the 2010's, kindergarten teachers ooh-and-ahh over it.
That's the DIRECT result of the commodification: it became mainstream because people spend decades diffusing it into normality. He totally missed the point, and then got defensive.
Actually, in the context of today's internet discourse, the reply is defensively invoking both the "appropriation" and "not-all-men" tone in the same reply. Impressive.
Kind of like bluejeans. You can buy them predistressed but the wear patterns are different than if you made them yourself. Maybe most people can’t tell but the true in group of the subculture can.
The people that lived it often can't buy the nicest gear and stuff, or if they did it's because it involved real sacrifice and dedication. Historically, they fucking made it themselves because it wasn't something you even COULD buy if you wanted to. So seeing some rich kid duplicate your drip overnight just because they can rubs people the wrong way. And I kind of get it: it's counterfeit. Its the same disdain people have for anything not made by a real artist but passed off like it is. They show up with all the nicest shit duplicating your real effort and struggle, but not having done the work.
A lot of those poor kids only have that thing in their life and the crowd dedicated to it because their homelife sucks.
Most the skaters I grew up with that were really good were that way because they suffered. They were out skating after-school because there was no family dinner and warm welcome waiting for them at home. We were our own family and support. When a friend of mine handed me down a box of old gear so I could put together a new-to-me board , that saved me months of struggling to come up with the cash to replace a board that got stolen.
And honestly the skaters kids were the most welcoming group I ever saw. They took in all the otherwise rejects of society. But no one likes a poser.
True.
> ...really good were that way because they suffered. ... But no one likes a poser.
Yup. Stolen valor.
That's the overstatement of the century. In group / out group always has gatekeepers by definition.
Not sure where you grew up, but I sold skateboards at a bike & ski store for a while in the early 80's and skaters were absolute dicks about their self-enforced hierarchy. Skater culture claims to be inclusive but holy fuck that's a lie if you accidentally buy equipment just a tiny bit above your skill level.
I got to see this first hand: as the point of retail sale for their replacement parts, they confided in me because they needed to buy things from me, so they would tell me who the posers were and rip on them mercilessly. Just like any other ingroup.
please actually read my comment next time.
Is that not what makes them the true in-group? Especially the first two words. You can be "in" and not be a jerk, even eager to bring others in. In fact I'd recommend it.
Likewise with drinking. There are subsets of drinkers. The ones passing 40s around in a public park aren’t who you see in the ad material. The alcohol industry lobbyists would rather this subset not be highlighted at all in fact because it paints the rest of the industry as unsavory.
Heart in the right spot. Execution has room to improve.
Nowhere in time has freedom of speech been enshrined and creation been easier. But we just can't seem to take advantage of all the freedom and tools that we have at our disposal.
Humans (with rare exceptions) are happiest when operating in groups.
In what way? Seriously.
Leading up to and during the Covid pandemic he recorded a large number of videos on recording craft and techniques for free viewing.
Died young, but of course…
> So my only strong belief is that you should think of style first and foremost as social language, not purely as artistic expression. Aesthetics are rooted in culture—punk, skate, prep, workwear, etc. Identify a cultural language that resonates with you.
So yes, to borrow the example of the GP, you had to know someone with the proper equipment to silk-screen an anarchist shirt, which necessarily meant the only way you could really get one was that way. Now, you can have dozens of them, in innumerable colors, styles, and designs. And I mean, I think it's fair to say that the old folks back in the day would've happily bought that shirt too rather than going into a buddy's workplace after hours and doing it themselves.
I don't think the criticism "you aren't a real X you just bought it" really holds water. I'm sure the wide availability of these things necessarily makes things easier for that no-doubt real slice of owners who have no idea what that A means or why it matters to a community of people, but at the same time, it also makes it tremendously easier for all those in that community to dress how they want to dress, to perform their identity in social spaces, which in turn allows them to find one another more easily.
Like I say this as a brain-rotted boy from the suburbs of the cultural wasteland of the early 2,000's: I had no identity in school, and that is a problem people. I have experienced firsthand the broad rejection you feel when you do not fit into any given social group, and don't know how to join one. Would a fashion sense have spared me that? I don't know, I had a myriad of other issues going on. But when I read Derek's writing about how clothes function as a language that we can communicate with one another without words, and form communities based on shared values? I hurt for my former self. I wish someone had helped me back then so I could fit in more. Maybe my loner, extremely contrarian self would've found companionship and not have had such a rough go until I was in my mid-twenties and started actually figuring out who the hell I was.
Seems like some sort of gatekeeping and old-man shaking his fist at youth to me. The overwhelming majority of people skateboarding today are regular kids and young adults who are just in it to have fun. If their techniques are more advanced, its probably because technology has improved and also because they're emulating the things they see professional or otherwise experienced skaters do, but what's the problem with that? They're still having fun, aren't they? That's the point of it all, isn't it?
And buying a shirt means you don't have personality? Is personality all about happening to know a guy who does custom T-shirt printing? What makes one more authentic than the other? Seems like nonsense.
You have it backwards. The shirt is neither necessary nor sufficient. sporkydistance was dogging on poseurs. deadfread was explaining why a t-shirt was ever an indicator (and even when there's someone handmaking shirts for your thing they're taking as many sales as possible).
The shirt validating the identity is a wrong interpretation of what was written. But it's also a normal perspective these days, one core to social criticism this conversation is getting at.
The t-shirt didn't represent having a personality. It represented than 'I am around this community enough I have at least interacted with Bennie'. Someone wearing a Kmart t-shirt saying 'ah did you get that from Bennie' would be the exact cred/personality as having a Bennie shirt.
Not much news herw
Proclaiming "I believe in anarchy" is childish cute nowadays not because of an evil capitalist plot, but because it is out-of-place retro to a different time. Also it was always childish, but back then it was segregated only inside a community of adolescence, so no one noticed
Which describes a lot of things if you think about it.
You'd think that e.g. dumpster-diving for food would be "unprofitable" and require "high degree of personal investment which can't be substituted with money", but freeganism already turned into aspirational hobby for many, and has its own little ecosystem of influencers selling books. It fits in nicely among its even more commercial cousins, like "minimalism", "healthy eating", "organic food", "zero waste", "frugal lifestyle", etc.; together, they form a larger "anti-consumerist"/"degrowth" market segment, which is happily growing as more people buy merch.
The irony. But as the old adage goes, the market can merchandise everything; it'll happily sell you a hi-vis vest, baclava, baseball bat and a chain you can use to cuff yourself to an utility pole as you camp in front of the supermarket to protest capitalism ruining the world.
I think GP meant something that takes a lot of your personal time to do, while staying unprofitable no matter the skill level. For example, ROM hacks and emulators: they're difficult and time-consuming to create, and they can't be monetized for legal reasons.
Yeah difficult to corporately commercialise, however they can be statusified.
The problem of a lot of subcultures is that they define themselves in large part by flashy externalities, and commodification is part of their DNA.
For example: You like an underground band's music, as you feel the message they broadcast through their music resonates with you, and you'd like to display your participation, so you buy their merch and go to their shows.
No matter how authentic they may seem, they've already sold themselves off as a commodity, and you've participated in the low effort transaction of buying a piece of identity, like you'd buy a share of a company's stock.
Now, if later the band gets popular, that share of identity gets diluted, and you get to be one of those annoying people who insist you like the band before they were cool.
Post your beat made on a $100 commodity synth, and everyone will be "Good effort.." no matter how good it is.
Writing on social media is a lifestyle activity. You'll see endless reels showing "My cute working space", which inevitably has trailing plants and a lovely perfectly arranged bookshelf, probably with fairy lights, and never looks like anyone's random messy office.
And so on.
These are both promotional activities that signify belonging to cultures that allow you to buy a lifestyle identity by spending money on the appropriate gang signs and uploading them to your chosen forums and accounts.
Original creativity and artistry are incidental to this. If someone doesn't show the gang signs and doesn't respect the standard tropes and genre signifiers, many consumers don't know what to do with them.
Well, if it's a CS-80, sign me up! Seriously though, the analog synthesizer renaissance has been very good to synth musicians, from Prophet and Oberheim reissues (and modern versions) to Behringer's clones to modular to inexpensive mini-synths, along with new keyboards reviving things like ribbon controllers and polyphonic aftertouch.
> Post your beat made on a $100 commodity synth, and everyone will be "Good effort.." no matter how good it is.
Lots of great (and sometimes very popular) music is made on free or inexpensive software synths, plugins and DAWs. Does anyone really care as long as the music is good?
If people like it, there's almost always someone packaging it and selling it. Now, I don't think that means you can't enjoy playing or listening to music. If someone stops listening or playing a genre of music because someone is commodifying it, that just means a big part of what they enjoyed was the idea of being underground, transgressive, or counter cultural for its own sake.
Also, some things can be more easily commodified without losing authenticity. Gutter punk music doesn't have the same impact when sung by a sold-out multi-millionaire. Inversely, it doesn't much matter how much money Yo-Yo ma has in the bank and that he's a guest at davos.
A bit unfair because bands are often not making any money on their merch or their shows. My experience is that they are pleased if they cover their incidental costs. They seem to get zero financial payoff for their time invested. They may get good non-financial benefits.
Not to say that dancing is not commodifiable. People make a living offering classes, outfits, shoes, and travels centered on specific dance genres. But as a participant, you can get pretty far for a lot less money than the price of the proverbial night on the town.
Commodification of a subculture is spoken about as if it is a binary a purity test but that isn't reflective of reality. You can pay $500 to watch some aged punk rockers perform in an arena, but that doesn't mean that there isn't an illegal Warehouse show going on at the same time in the same city.
For example, Frosted Flakes has "Tony the Tiger", but he is widely understood to be a fictional tiger, rather than an endorsement by a real human who got famous for wearing a tiger-suit.
It's the same reason Linux has had a limited success in other spaces (embedded, mobile, desktop) - as opposed to something like Windows, it's poorly engineered for the needs of these domains (lack of realtime, good IPC, binary compatibility, native audio, graphics capabilities etc.). If you think of early 2000s mobile hardware, which used to run a variety of mobile OSes, yet Linux was incapable of properly supporting this domain. All attempts to rally around Linux as a consumer OS in these domains failed, because it just wasn't really built for that. Yet Linux was powerful enough to suck the air out of the room and prevent the emergence of competitors.
(I don't really consider Android Linux.)
Why not? Obviously it's heavily modified, but it's not a hard fork: unless something's changed since I last checked, they re-apply their patches on top of upstream LTS releases -- so they very much depend on ongoing kernel development.
Cloud Services like AWS probably would not exist without the foundation that FOSS provided
That isn't to say the groups are mindless sheep or naturally resistant; just pointing out that the space does have some commercialization happening.
FFS, the "Hacker" in "Hacker News" is based on a venture capitalist co-opting a rebellious term to convince a bunch of impressionable youths that they can have this alluring label and that the cool kids software club is actually working for his vc firm.
All the subculture has been thoroughly power-washed out of any commercial useful corner of their online communities. You can encounter more pressure to be a milquetoast office-job persona in the open source space than your actual office job.
We're in so deep you can't even see how deep we're in.
Ok, I didn't see the forest for the trees there, which is quite funny. But I still get together with friends to build stuff for the sake of it, without any intention of commercializing the things we build, and there is still a very large corpus of FOSS software being maintained by people simply because they think it is cool, or because they are idealists who want free software to be free.
Corporate brands sell everything from footwear and clothing to water filters and backpacks targeted directly at that "Wildness Survival" subculture. In fact, "Wildness Survival" is actually one of the most profitable subcultures at the moment.
There isn't really an incentive to pay to watch top performers in the arts demonstrate technique beyond a handful of people wanting DVDs. There's zero stakes because you aren't competing against another person to be "the best". BUT, the physically can also be a turn off to many people. The joke I was taught was "to make a small fortune, start with a large one and open a dojo".
The martial art business model therefore is pretty small scale - kids classes, seminar fees, clothing and equipment sales, that's about it. But none of those things are really going to make you super wealthy because the non-competing aspect removes a lot of that business-oriented focus.
That's big industry
and while im sure the Whipped Cream Canister Companies (home kitchen use only) etc would rather come out and advertize normally, commerce is still happening
> You mean the ones banned by most social media, hard to find on google and even harder to find in real-life?
Yup. This dire dialogue (THANKS!) invoked a forgotten childhood "recording": Grandpa <3 ... Lowland Scot. Stingy with words. Mostly expletive's aimed at "Pink Pawed Eed-Jits". The rare exceptions were so routine I forgot.
So like it's now I hear Grandpa's forthright & shameless bellow:
A Jock Tamson's Bairns
Ah!
110+ minutes after shoving "A Jock Tamson's Bairns" up the tailpipe of several major 'SERP'
Results *DID* happen. Kindly forbear, posting those to the original submission may generate more curiosity
*A Jock Tamson's Bairns*
Run, Forrest RUN
Maybe the chapo trap house people or Adam Friedland or other socialism adjacent people fit the bill a little bit as well, but they seem more in line with the types that are ultimately corporately unpalatable, like you mention.
Punk's not dead; it just deserves to die.
Cake really nailed it with Rock-'n'-roll Lifestyle tho.
aaaaa-gaaaain????
I'm not a fan if present-ish day sci-fi though, reality is depressing enough as it is.
If you read it today, it seems trite, like Snow Crash. If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing. Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992. These books were decades ahead of their time.
Neuromancer is more like PKDick, in that they are adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side, and it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero). That can be boring to someone expecting lots of "pew-pew-pew I hacked the mainframe". Snow Crash also didn't really age well in terms of dorkiness (cyberdogs breaking the sound barrier, nukes attached to a biker-thugs brain, gangs in cyberspace ?!?!?, etc.), but at the time we were all floored by the new concepts.
Cyberpunk in general inherits from noir.
I'm not sure I agree with this. I love the sprawl trilogy, but my feeling has always been that the entire plots are excuses for the big set piece events. The characters exist so that he can write vivid scenes and try to paint a picture, everything between is just so they get to the right places for him to do that.
> it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero).
I don't think there's were any character overlaps between Neuromancer and Count Zero, are there? Mona Lisa Overdrive certainly does.
Contrast with Asimov, who's books were carried by ideas but had a very tedious style.
If you read Neuromancer in 1984, it was mind-blowing.
Same thing with Snow Crash in 1992
So do you like, only enjoy art produced in the last N years?Or art that was produced more than N years ago but didn't produce any imitators that retroactively diminished the original for you?
I guess I'm not enjoying things right. I read Snow Crash in the 2000s (and LOTR in the 90s) and enjoyed the hell out of them even though they were "outdated" and had inspired countless derivative works in the ensuing decades. In fact, I had a good time playing Ms. Pac Man just last weekend.
When I read Snow Crash it definitely felt like the product of an earlier decade but I didn't hold that against it. I like understanding the context in which a piece was made.
If you don't, that's okay and you're certainly not alone. Feels like you're missing out on some good stuff though. Possibly a lot of good stuff. Possibly the vast majority of human artistic output.
Hardly. Most human artistic output does not create its own genre and spawn a host of imitators.
Classics are coordination points but generally less fun. "Seinfeld is unfunny" is real, you're genuinely better off watching something more recent if you just want to enjoy yourself.
Arthurian dragons have largely been the same beasts for, oh, 1000 years.
3d internet chat rooms in Snow Crash have been tried and are ... lame.
I appreciate you thinking critically, but your arguments aren't very strong.
Also, I'm not gatekeeping, I suggesting why a person might not have liked something. There's a concept called "novelty", meaning "newness". The first time you encounter something it is exciting. If you spent the first 15 years of your life using an iPhone, then read an Asimov novel that introduced satellites, you'd be like "So what?" See? When Asimove wrote about satellite communication, IT DIDN'T EXIST yet. But when you read his book, it was old-hat to you, so you probably might not like his books.
That's all I'm saying. I'm not trying to tell you how to enjoy things. Chill dude, you'll live longer.
And you can't tell me you don't shiver if someone says "I'm sure he'll listen to reason.."
I often say that genres are what happens when mediocre artists latch on to something fresh someone created, and to me it's only worth spending time with the originators. Though I understand lots of people like that something that engrossed them can be sought further in a genre.
And that's pretty much how I felt about reading Neuromancer. I like cyberpunk so I want the real thing, not the emulation. Neuromancer and Ghost in the Shell are so much better than Matrix. And I love the Matrix.
I acknowledge that a lot of the media I consume ends up being just part of a genre, and that I often don't even know the originals and only have access to simulacra.
But when I think about what I wanna read next, what albums to buy records of and so on, I prefer to go as far upstream as I can or know about.
But, some things are clearly... more distinct from their forebearers than others.
I subscribe to the Asimov's sci-fi short story magazine (I highly recommend it!) and yeah, I have to skip every story that starts with "the world was devastated by climate change 20-50 years ago, here's how we're surviving now above the flooded remains of our world." I just can't take it.
I have read a lot of blogs and articles from authors and agents about thematic checklists for publishing.
On the flip side, immigration makes up the vast majority of content creation, and the leading edge were using these premises 20-30 years ago when they were more novel
Scariest shit I've ever read, worse than any horror novel. Thankfully it's just a dumb story and the science of it is really dubious.
Like, sure, because you grew up on music that wouldn't have existed without them. You heard them thousands of times already in tribute from younger bands you like.
Context matters. There are cultural classics you just cannot understand without having lived in the times.
> it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine
So you've read works that build on Necromancer earlier. Care to share some of those books/authors and concepts?
One common barrier to suspension of disbelief is the Fermi Problem. A great deal of space opera just ignores it, but once you take the argument seriously it ruins much of the world building.
If I want to ignore rationality of the world design and just read human achievement porn I'll head over to r/HFY.
Ignoring the Fermi Argument is an internal inconsistency. The world just doesn't work on its own terms.
I'm curious... if you're willing to say, when did you first read Neuromancer? And had you read a lot of other cyberpunk themed media beforehand?
but that's probably because it introduced so many concepts that others went on to refine.
Yeah, if you'd already been exposed to a lot of the core ideas / themes from other more contemporary works, I can see how that might take away a bit from the Neuromancer experience.
To give a counterpoint... I first read Neuromancer about 1993 / 1994 or somewhere in that range. And I believe it was the first cyberpunk novel I'd read. I think maybe the only other media from the cyberpunk genre that I'd been exposed to then was the "Max Headroom" tv show. Anyway... Neuromancer absolutely blew my mind and I was instantly hooked. To this day it's one of my favorite novels, and I've re-read it several subsequent times. And will almost certainly read it again (and again...) I can't get enough of it.
Of course it's hard to say exactly why our respective reactions to it are so different. There are a lot of variables. But I think your notion from above has a lot of merit to it. If one experiences a derivative (or many derivatives) of something before the original, does the original them come to feel like a cheap copy?
I've had that experience with cover versions of songs before. That is, times when I heard and loved a cover, and then only later heard the original. And in many (maybe all) of those cases, I still preferred the cover over the original.
In terms of influence I suppose I'm mostly thinking of movies and shows such as the Matrix, but I also read so many short stories involving VR and techno-dystopias it's hard to pinpoint. Snowcrash is certainly up there (yes I tried to read Snowcrash first, having done no research, and liked it even less). Having played every Shadowrun game doesn't help (the universe is in a lot of ways "just" fantasy Neuromancer).
All that being said, Neuromancer doesn't read like a cheap copy either. More like I've been riding bicycles all my life and someone presented me with a penny farthing. I appreciate the innovation, it's just not particularly mind-blowing anymore.
—Joyce Messier in Disco Elysium
Probably inspired by Mark Fisher:
"The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum, where you see objects torn from their lifeworlds and assembled as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism in itself."
You might take a collection of dried leaves and put them on display and call it a “tree museum”, but your visitors aren’t going to get a good appreciation for what trees are like just by looking at their dead refuse
These objects were once alive - they were parts of active interactions. Now they are dead and ossified.
This is the difference between your album CDs when you actually listened to them, and then when you put them on a display case on the wall.
Mark Fisher is just an idiot like the bullshit jobs guy, who doesn't respect anyone he doesn't personally know and thinks they're all faking doing real work.
Note that the other thing Fisher was known for is writing an essay about how Russell Brand is cool and people should stop caring that he's a rapist.
That even these artifacts that might have once been immensely important to the workings of a non-capitalist society, now exist dead, entombed within a capitalist construct - and as a sibling notes, as literally little pieces of capital.
Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it.
Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely.
If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties.
As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?
So if you break up the wealth concentration effect, you are reducing dissatisfaction overall, but you are also reducing the likelihood of any future alteration to any number of more minor dissatisfactions that seem characteristic of this system — e.g., the way it makes people's lives repetitive, predictable, robotic; the way it often preferentially rewards behaviors that service medium-term goals rather than ultra-short or ultra-long term goals; the way it reduces the dimensionality of the activities that are needed, from the average individual, and the way this reduction of dimensions along which one might be needed can make a person feel less like a person, etc.
I do not myself agree with anti-capitalists that all these patterns are best explained in terms of capital. You see similar tendencies correlated with, for example, most any attempt to scale culture. My point is just that the people who are trying to formulate the grandiose complaint are, deep down, generally not trying to designate as evil some single feature (even if they have latched onto that feature as being strategically their best line of attack); generally, I think, they are not saying, "Man, I see this nose everywhere and am sick of this nose," they are saying, "Why is it that people seem to be looking increasingly similar?" which sentiment (however flawed statistically) we expert statisticians might charitably translate as, "Why is it that there seems increasingly to be a single stable equilibrium for an increasing number of the increasingly divided planes of our diminishing existence?"
And maybe that last formulation is also empirically incorrect — but isn't there a general thrust in it that you recognize? "One default, one optimal path and anything I do to get out of it is either wasteful or imitated until it is the rule." Can you come up with a tax policy that will break up the concentration effect at that level? Maybe you can. Would it really break up the monoculture, or would it strengthen it? I don't know. I suppose reformers and revolutionaries have always diverged at this juncture.
> There is no longer any cultural center to even deviate from when everyone lives in a personalized media landscape.
I realized you hit the nail no the head. Everyone needs to feel special in their own little world. As far as I can tell this is not turning out to be a good thing. Humans are social creatures: we must learn to cohabitate without denigrating one another. The personalized media landscape has done nothing but lead to fracturing.
It's not replacing dumpster-diving, nor would I consider myself to be part of dumpster-diving subculture. I don't talk about it to my friends. It's just cheap food.
I've seen this catchphrase thrown around a lot online, but I've never seen anyone explain how consumption becomes any more ethical under any other system without leading to other systemic problems
"Consume less" seems to imply that any consumption is unethical by default. If that's the case, then the only way to consume ethically is by minimizing consumption
This seems like a reasonable stance, but it leads to other problems. Who gets to decide how much is enough?
If each individual decides for themselves, then we clearly have a problem because some people will never be satisfied. If everyone lets them continue, then they will hoard resources for themselves. This is sort of the situation we're already in
However, if we have the group (community, society, country, whatever) decide "how much is enough", then we have to have a group mechanism for making that decision, like a council, or government department
Then we need another group mechanism to enforce it, police, courts, etc. "Ethical consumption" becomes very authoritarian very quickly
If the idea is "We could have ethical consumption if people would just consume less" then you don't even have a starting point because "people will never just
So feel free to consume less if you think that's more ethical. That's what I try and do, myself. But I know that I cannot simply expect others to do the same, and I also don't really have any interest in policing how much others are allowed to have
Consumption under capitalism is therefore a problem, because it creates and reinforces rampant consumerism, which is destroying the habitat.
We will drive society all the way into the ground before we give that up. I understand that. But I will not contort my mind into convincing myself it is either natural or ok.
Right, no disagreement there
I am just not sure I agree that runaway consumption is a unique feature of capitalism in particular
I tend to think it's a function of population size and average standard of living expectations tending to increase over time
In that sense, capitalism is a decent system that does not inherently dictate whether consumption is ethical or not. You are free to (and should) make ethics part of the value. If you like what your neighbourhood bakery makes freshly, you buy from them and thus encourage and enable them to make more. You benefit, they benefit. They give you a good price, but you do not buy more than you need (how much bread would a healthy person eat anyway?) because your neighbours also enjoy it. If you determine that a company is unethical, you vote with your wallet and buy from another (and tell your friends). You do your best.
What breaks this overall pretty sound logic of “give value to people who create value to help them create more value” in practice is a bunch of not unrelared to each other things like bad actors, information asymmetry (usually in favour if producers; in extreme: lying), or poor mental well-being. These imperfections lead to regulation (not without its own can of worms) and open up avenues for, indeed, unethical consumption.
Incidentally, train fandom is definitely commodified, but I think not to the consternation or detriment of those into trains. I wonder why some subcultures are at odds with commercialization of their interests while others are at peace with it.
I did take some new people on cleaner, more mellow excursions, they absolutely loved it.
This is what makes capitalism so insidious, it coöpts our very reality. It is an amazingly persistent mind virus.
Subculture is an act of rebellion.
If you want to go down a big philosophical rabbit hole it is worth the read.
The only real subculture is addiction, those people literally die in that culture.
The biggest problem for me, is after the catastrophe, and collapse of everything, the survivors have "won the lottery". But the book never really explains how this future turned out 'good' for the survivors and not a 'mad max' like dystopia like every other post apocalypse story. If there was massive population decline, then how are they making all that technology? Is it all robots? Who built the robots?.
It was just a big leap from "huge global collapse and there are no people left" to "those that are left are really living it up in the abundance that is leftover".
Natural resources are still the primary constraint on human prosperity: food, energy, land, metals, ect. In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same, but they are working with only the best inputs. You might have the same number of fishermen per capita, but they are fishing the best 1% of fishing grounds without competition. If you drill for oil, it is now in the top 1% in terms of ease of extraction. If you build a dam for power, you have more site capacity per capita. If China had 1% the population, the three gorges dam would supply enough power for entire country two times over.
People learn about economies of scale and high school econ, but there are also ineconomies of scale. At some point there is no more efficiency and gain from increasing the size of your widget factory. However, it might be more expensive to import power and metal from further and further away
This is laughably naive. Not only would "innovation suffer", but it's pretty doubtful that current technology could be maintained with a population as small as that. Humans are a (weak) hivemind intelligence, and everything we have now is only capable with a population as high as we have it currently. Sure, there might be some inefficiency going on, but it's tens of percent, not hundreds of percent.
>In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same,
In a depopulated world, we don't have double digits of one-in-a-billion geniuses. We don't have 1% of the population doing agriculture work, because they can't spare 500,000 people to build and maintain agricultural mechanization. Because they can't do that, they'll actually need to employ even more people doing it with less automation and more manual labor. These things don't scale linearly. (Even if they somehow caught on that the ag mechanization paid dividends, their version of John Deere can't do the same thing because all of the other industries that make John Deere possible don't exist). Regressing back to lesser forms doesn't work, because back when John Deere was making 50,000 small tractors a year, there was demand for small tractors.
And that's before we even get to the part where if those 80 million have the same demographics that we have now, with an excess of old geezers...
I suspect strongly that if we could somehow go do the Star Trek thing and visit countless alien worlds that show a variety of (human-like) aliens, their technology level strongly correlates with their global population, and that in instances where global population somehow declined, so too did their ability to retain that technology.
Another way to think about it is the USA population is 3.5% of the world population and trade (both ways) makes up 20% of the USA GDP. If the rest of the world were walled off, we wouldn't go back to the stone age.
If everyone else in the world fell over dead and the resources were available, the US would be massively better off than now.
Sure, but with modern technology that they can't easily replace or repair. How long does the technology last? Is anything we make today made for longevity?
>I think you and the parent poster are underestimating the amount of redundancy
Redundancy is inefficient and costs money. We live in a world without warehouses, because just-in-time shipping is cheaper. We live in a world where every 6 months the soda can you get out of the vending machine has a little less aluminum in it than half a year ago because someone figured out how to shave a bit more off of that without it rupturing in transit. There's less redundancy in this world than you imagine, because reducing the redundancy cut costs and the stock price got a boost a few years ago. Why have spare parts on hand, when there will be even better parts manufactured next year?
>If the rest of the world were walled off, we wouldn't go back to the stone age.
Yeh, we would. It wouldn't happen instantly, but it would happen within decades. That would be true even if the population reduction were the only problem.
>If everyone else in the world fell over dead and the resources were available, the US would be massively better off than now.
People *are the resource*. Everything else is just rocks in the ground. You can have a million square miles of old growth forest, but it's not timber unless there are people who can do the lumberjack thing. You can have a trillion barrels of oil in the ground 200ft down, but it's not fuel and plastic unless there are people to pump it out and refine it. So on and so on. People were always the resource, and while not all people are effectively utilized all the time, the more you have the more resources you have. And there's this absurd network effect where two people are more than twice as useful as one person, and so on, so that when you have truly large numbers of people you have absurd amounts of resources.
Quite possibly, the only thing for which this effect isn't true is real estate. That's sort of a fixed supply.
The logs per person of one team with a million square miles to work with is more than 1000 teams working the same land.
They get to pick the very best.
When they have logging trucks and chainsaws and GPS. The logs per person of one team when they're using technology circa 1905 is modest, at best, the logs per person when they're using iron axes and shitty leather boots cobbled together is pathetic.
>They get to pick the very best.
Human nature gets in the way of that. They'll pick whoever couldn't schmooze enough to get a better job.
>>Human nature gets in the way of that. They'll pick whoever couldn't schmooze enough to get a better job.
You missed my intent. They get to pick the best trees. if there is one team instead of 100, they get to log giant old growth trees next to the lumber mill instead of driving 1000 miles to some crappy new growth Forrest.
Their spot would be at least as good as the best location available the 100 teams.
As discussed elsewhere, I dont think you need 8 billion people to manufacture a modern chainsaw.
I think we are well into the linear and decreasing scale for most industries.
How many parallel factories do you think there are around the world building tractors. How many independent factories making cars and trucks?
Also, consider how much labor is spent on R&D, investment, and growth.
I think you are drifting back into innovation when you are talking about geniuses.
When they start falling apart, it all starts falling apart. We got a dry run of this in covid with chips. One small part of chip making, think some substrate, was in short supply, and shut down the automakers
And even the Hurricane that hit NC, took out one of the single factories making high end quartz for chips.
Let me ask you a question. How much efficiency do you think would be saved with zero population growth and zero innovation?
What percent of the world do you think works in Chip making? It is tiny.
During Covid the lack of even a few types of parts, derailed huge projects.
So you could have a project going in worth millions, with thousands of parts. But the whole thing gets delayed because of a single 100$ part that could not be sourced.
It really seemed stark how the global supply chain could just start crumbling. And I was extrapolating to people, if we aren't staffing, and those parts aren't being made, then the whole thing starts to collapse.
Needing a widget from China doesn't mean that it needs to come from a mega factory in China and can't be produced in a smaller one. All of China shutting down doesn't prove it can't be done smaller
Guess that is valid differentiation.
Then the only problem is time frame, rate of change.
Can the global supply chain, re-configure itself to only run factories where there is still enough population to staff.
It would take years to move factories to concentrate where there is still people.
And I'd say most disaster scenarios happen a lot faster. Then it's Mad Max again. But guess, even in Mad Max there was an oil refinery, they had a factory, and some cars running. But didn't look sustainable.
The fact that 10% population is viable doesn't mean all paths from A to B are valid. Some are catastrophic. That's the current challenge with birthrates. Even slow decreases over decades is a huge financial and productive problem.
Like falling out of an airplane. Ground level is perfectly safe. It is the transition that kills you.
The middle aged reflecting on their teenage "nonconformist" activities is just more conformism.
That’s why it’s sad to me every time a producer closes up shop.
—Joyce Messier, Disco Elysium
Gibson is a concrete example. He fashions critiques of capitalism in a book, the book is distilled into the aesthetics of cyberpunk, and the cyberpunk aesthetic is repackaged and resold to us.
There are many layers to this, but the most "practical" is that the very structures and language of the status quo very much threatens to infect and limit the scope and form of resistance.
This is literally the idea that NewSpeak took to the logical extreme.
Capitalism is perhaps uniquely infectious in how "simple" (and therefore flexible) its core tenets are.
The commodity in this case is real estate.
Places like Ordensburg Vogelsang, where they trained Nazi officers, explains how they cut themselves to look experienced in battle, among other things. The Wikipedia page doesn't do the place justice. It's terrifying to visit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordensburg_Vogelsang
Fascists have strong opinions on "correct" art:
Who will sponsor my green revolution?
Will you buy the rights to my class war?
Purchase the t-shirts and the audio version of the book
They took your anger and polished up
Then they sold it back to you
They took your anger and repackaged it
And there's nothing you can do
Put your name on my new army's designer uniforms
Rebellion and subversion will make your Rom-Com cool
You'll capture that "indie" feel that the kids are crazy for
They took your frustrations and dressed them up
Before a focus group
They painted your frustrations in earth tones colors
And there's nothing you can do
Country music used to be about music and not about the county
There once was a time when rap was dangerous
Now flag-waving idiots and millionaire illiterates dance across the screen
Johnny Cash died for you
This sense of outrage can be yours if the price is right
Galleries and Poetry readings Jingles and cartoons
This is the river in which we've learned to swim
Sub-culture vultures circle above
The great unread white and blue
And there's nothing you can do
Country music used to be about music and not about the county
There once was a time when rap was dangerous
Now flag-waving idiots and millionaire illiterates dance across the screen
Jam Master Jay died for you
C'mon Bourgeoisie and get behind me
Captains of industry I'm waiting for your calls
Operators are standing by so don't delay
Your parents are reading hipster lit
And they try to dress like you
They took your anger and repackaged it
And there's nothing you can do
Punks, Goths, and Rivetheads disappeared into the mall
Just like the yippies, and the beatniks, and freaks
This is the river in which we've learned to swim
And this is the river in which we will all drown
Just look at the anarchism symbol. It has been turned into a fashion element for edgy teenagers. Even a brand.
I do agree humans are generally obssessed with identity. In many cases this behavior is enabled via brands and fashion but it also happens with cultural and social constructs (eg: religion, ideologies, etc).
Except that the process has accelerated faster than even Moore's Law.
Maybe parts of queerspace will survive because we come up with new identities faster than they can be commodified?
It's going great.