While Trotskyism and permanent revolution are flawed ideologies that should be opposed by any rational Marxists, our comrade has a great analysis on the bread and circuses employed in a capitalist society to tranquilize the workers and masses in an industrialized society. This is in no way shape or form an advocacy of Trotskyism.
“Capital does not like the working man to think and is afraid….It has therefore adopted measures. … It has put up automats in each station and has filled them with disgusting candied gum. With an automatic movement of the hand the people extract from these automats pieces of sweetish gum, and they grind it with the automatic chewing of their jaws… . It looks like a religious rite, like some silent prayer to God-Capital.“
Haha leftist communist KFC man says bubble gum machine bad. Except, this same phenomenom can be seen within parasocial relationships practiced between the proletariat and figures such as instagram influencers, twitch streamers, youtubers, and aspects of pop culture. It is remarkable how coping mechanisms such as gaming and participation of social media can be seen as a modern kafkaesque religious ritual.
ERIDAN (Eri King & Daniel Greer), Thank You For Shopping With Us, embroidered on 72"x72" plastic shower curtain, installation view at Hunter MFA Studios (Manhattan), 2016
I’ve spent most of the last decade examining reality to better understand the problems we face. I couldn’t handle the pain of this world. I couldn’t believe the atrocities. And I wanted to do something about it all, but it was overwhelming. The current remedies didn’t feel good enough. So I searched for the deepest causes and most holistic solutions I could find.
Whether for my own personal problems, or those of the collective, I could only find one single recurring cause.
Here’s one way to explain it…
To be in your positive natural state (flow, alignment, unconditional love, inner peace, awakened, etc) is to be in tune with your inner being, satisfied from within, and radiating your inner beingness outward like a light. You are creative, powerful, inspired, confident, authentic, highly intuitive, and free from external influence.
To be in a negative state (fear, disconnection, lack, etc) is to be identified with the external, seeking to draw fulfillment from the physical world inward, like a vacuum. You are dissatisfied, reactive, uncertain, disempowered, easy to influence or exploit, and maybe even parasitic or controlling at times. This state is harmful to yourself and others.
All of the problems our world faces are due to the normalization of this negative polarity state and the resulting behaviour.
We are born positive, but are usually then taught to suppress it—to calm down, watch TV, ignore our inspiration, conform, seek material gain/worldly success, and submit to authority. We are traumatized by this and other life events, which creates further disconnection, and we don’t understand the consequence of the inner shift that’s taking place.
I used to live in a very dark and disconnected place. After I found a way out, I made it my life to help others do the same.
If we can collectively shift into a positive default polarity, everything will change. To overflow with inspiration and love becomes the norm. Loneliness and greed disappears. Toxic systems and structures will no longer function. We’ll no longer feel compelled to take from others or the earth to feed our lack. We’ll have no reason to compromise our values to get ahead. We’ll be content and free.
I realize it’s a big dream, but after coming to this conclusion I can’t choose another path. I hope you’ll give it some thought.
I’ve spent most of the last decade examining reality to better understand the problems we face. I couldn’t handle the pain of this world. I couldn’t believe the atrocities. And I wanted to do something about it all, but it was overwhelming. The current remedies didn’t feel good enough. So I searched for the deepest causes and most holistic solutions I could find.
Whether for my own personal problems, or those of the collective, I could only find one single recurring cause.
Here’s one way to explain it…
To be in your positive natural state (flow, alignment, unconditional love, inner peace, awakened, etc) is to be in tune with your inner being, satisfied from within, and radiating your inner beingness outward like a light. You are creative, powerful, inspired, confident, authentic, highly intuitive, and free from external influence.
To be in a negative state (fear, disconnection, lack, etc) is to be identified with the external, seeking to draw fulfillment from the physical world inward, like a vacuum. You are dissatisfied, reactive, uncertain, disempowered, easy to influence or exploit, and maybe even parasitic or controlling at times. This state is harmful to yourself and others.
All of the problems our world faces are due to the normalization of this negative polarity state and the resulting behaviour.
We are born positive, but are usually then taught to suppress it—to calm down, watch TV, ignore our inspiration, conform, seek material gain/worldly success, and submit to authority. We are traumatized by this and other life events, which creates further disconnection, and we don’t understand the consequence of the inner shift that’s taking place.
I used to live in a very dark and disconnected place. After I found a way out, I made it my life to help others do the same.
If we can collectively shift into a positive default polarity, everything will change. To overflow with inspiration and love becomes the norm. Loneliness and greed disappears. Toxic systems and structures will no longer function. We’ll no longer feel compelled to take from others or the earth to feed our lack. We’ll have no reason to compromise our values to get ahead. We’ll be content and free.
I realize it’s a big dream, but after coming to this conclusion I can’t choose another path. I hope you’ll give it some thought.
(It’s okay guys, I finally found my white shirt. It’s 100% definitely not my dad’s business shirt. Can I please join the minimalist club now?) Have you heard of the minimalist look, or should I say…aesthetic? Well, apparently it’s a thing now. I was recently chatting with a few friends and one of them commented that they had seen my blog but that I just didn’t look like a minimalist, and being…
“Even if the outward and visible manifestations of class were not as conspicuous as they do in fact remain, it would still be quite unwarranted to interpret this as evidence of the erosion, let alone the dissolution, of class divisions which are firmly rooted in the system of ownership of advanced capitalist societies. To achieve their dissolution or even their serious erosion would take rather more than working-class access to refrigerators, television sets, cars… and more even than death taxes, progressive taxation, and a host of other measures denounced and deplored by the rich as ruinous and crippling, yet which have had no radical impact upon economic inequality–not very surprisingly since this system of ownership operates on the principle that ‘to him who hath shall be given,’ and provides ample opportunities for wealth to beget more wealth.”
In an accident of geography and history, Romania is home to one of the largest and most important old-growth forests left in the world. Its Carpathian mountain chain, which wraps like a seat belt across the country’s middle and upper shoulder, hosts at least half of Europe’s remaining old growth outside Scandinavia and around 70 percent of the continent’s virgin forest. It’s been referred to as the Amazon of Europe, a comparison apt and ominous in equal measure, because of the speed at which it, like the Amazon itself, is disappearing.
Most of Europe was rapidly deforested during the industrial era; less than 4 percent of EU forestland remains intact. Romania, far enough from the continent’s industrial centers and long a closed-off member of the Soviet bloc, remained a shining exception. During the country’s communist period, the government converted the forests to public ownership and kept them off global export markets, enshrining the forest management trends of an ancien regime. The result is that Romania retains some of the rare spruce, beech, and oak forests that qualify as old- or primary-growth, having never been excessively logged, altered by human activity, or artificially replanted.
But the fall of communism in 1989 dissolved one layer of protection for those forests, and the subsequent wave of privatization inaugurated widespread corruption. In 2007, Romania’s entry to the European Union created a massive, liberated market for the country’s cheap, abundant timber and the inexpensive labor required to extract it, conditions that encouraged Austrian timber companies and Swedish furniture firms to set up shop. Succeeding fractious, ineffectual regimes enacted further pro-market reforms and did little to curb corruption; in the final months of 2021, the country’s prime minister designate found himself unable to form a government at all. Add to that the astronomical growth of the fast furniture industry, which particularly relies on the spruce and beech that populate these forests, and the result has been a delirium of deforestation.
There’s one obvious, notable beneficiary of this situation: Ikea. The company is now the largest individual consumer of wood in the world, its appetite growing by two million trees a year. According to some estimates, it sources up to 10 percent of its wood from the relatively small country of Romania, and has long enjoyed relationships with mills and manufacturers in the region. In 2015, it began buying up forestland in bulk; within months it became, and remains, Romania’s largest private landowner.
Now more than ever, customers look for sustainability when shopping, despite the increase of damaging industries such as fast fashion, which are overproducing and polluting. This is because of the many benefits that sustainable shopping offers, including the lack of slave labour, fewer pollutants and of course, the use of organic and renewable materials.
Nearly a century ago, in 1925 to be precise, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig wrote an article for a Berlin newspaper titled “Making the World Uniform.” It began:
, : . , .
I know what Zweig meant. In the days when I traveled a great deal, often to supposedly remote places, my ambition was not to reach somewhere no human foot had trodden, but where Coca-Cola or Nescafé was not on sale. This was no easy matter, and I hear from time to time that even the peak of Mount Everest is now littered.
Zweig attributed the extinction of national and cultural differences in Europe to the rapid Americanization of the continent after the First World War: Perhaps Midwesternization, at least as far as aesthetics were concerned, would have been a better term for it. The domination of American fashions, in clothes, music, literature, architecture, was complete, according to Zweig. Europe has become a cultural colony of the United States, and it welcomed its own subjugation, insofar as such colonization brought material comfort and required meager intellectual effort of citizens.
“It is tempting to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.”
American or not, mass amusements now prevailed over more refined aristocratic or upper-middle-class ones so dear to Zweig. Football (soccer, not the American variety) became the measure of all things. Zweig’s theory was that the American civilization that conduced to material comfort and prosperity was so boring that it provoked, by reaction, sensation-seeking:
It is tempting, then, to suppose that there is increasing uniformity in the world. But as with so many things, it depends on which end of the telescope you look down.
When I see young people en masse, I think that they are all the same: They dress the same, their tastes are the same, their interests are the same, etc. And yet, when I speak to them individually, I find that there is the same irreducible individuality to each person. Human beings by their very nature are privileged, or condemned, to be unique.
We see the end-of-the-telescope phenomenon in Shakespeare. When he depicts the lower orders of society as a collective, he depicts them most unflatteringly; they are stupid, unthinking, brutish, and fickle. But when he depicts them as individuals, he has the utmost sympathy for them…
At the end of his article, Zweig tells all his readers who feel as he does that they cannot defeat modern trends, and therefore the best thing for them to do is to retire into a kind of inner immigration, cultivating their own interests quietly without stridently or uselessly condemning what in fact cannot be changed.
this is an insane way to talk about a predominantly singleplayer/co-op game, to be clear
Microtransactions and subscription based games have completely ruined video game analytics and given journalists even more brain rot than before
yeah
[Image caption for original post: article headline reading “Elden Ring Loses Almost 90% Of Its Concurrent Players On Steam”, with a subtitle reading “Elden Ring launched to a great start and has been going strong for a long time, but losing players over time is inevitable, it seems.”
For the-most-wonderfulest-thing’s addition: tags reading “Not everything is a forever game; the best games are often contained experiences; experiences that end and you can walk away from satisfied; the infinite-profit bullshit is antithetical to games as art and it really gets me angry.” End caption.]
This same willful ignorance of companies is also prevalent in consumers: unless ethical information is available at the point of purchase, it “feels better” to remain ignorant rather than seeking out the truth.
