Writer and artist Bill Willingham has abruptly opted to put his popular Fables IP into the Public Domain, citing that while the work has been creator-owned it is not creator-controlled. None of the comics media sites mentioning the story are clever enough to have thought to include this cover from 30 or so years ago, Willingham’s spoof of a cover by Jim Lee, himself the current top cow of DC Comics. The publisher evidently owns publishing and licensing rights for Fables explicitly by Willingham, although in recent years that has been interpreted by them as meaning ownership over the work itself. Egoists claim everything, but they never get irony. None would peg Willingham as the copyleft sort, but I applaud his tactics here.
I say, if you feel a corporation has the right to dick over someone’s livelihood because you disagree with their convictions, you are a tone-deaf asshat. Each and every division in human history, from momentary divisions in interpersonal relationships to more momentous social divisions, boil down to some ego being wrongfully justified, whether by itself or by passersby. Maybe church attendance here in the states is dwindling because religion and politics have become wholly synonymous, considering the extents at once painful and awkward for how partisanship is approached with religious fervor, and theology has become so very deeply political. Political icons, treated like spiritual leaders, and religious icons, regarded as governmental gatekeepers. I actually just caught the most recent Adam Curtis documentary series, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, and I imagine he’d agree. The closest thing to a platform which Capitalists have held, the root of their pathology going all the way back to their brand’s absolute reappropriation of the political and religious arena, is the insistence that whichever subsets of the greater population somehow warrant lesser rights, lesser resources and lesser opportunities than themselves. Likely only the blatancy of it all is what is newfound, and politics and religions have always functioned exclusively for servicing the most self-serving among them, but for such condemned subsets, this flies in the face of those famously constitutional and unalienable guarantees of life, liberty and pursuits of happiness. The mentality that those who think or feel differently than I do and who happen to live for any other purpose than aligning with my self-interest, must be made to suffer, is not democracy. It’s not even logical, or ethical. Curtis sagely observed how western democracies are no longer truly democratic, the change being a gradual shift but meeting completion some mere decades back. Because rather than voting for what best serves the whole, everyone votes for their own self-interest.
If responsibility is ever an existential threat to one’s well-being, then one’s well-being is likely an actual threat to others well and beyond simply threatening their pride or their comfort. But egoists today, and likely throughout all the yesterdays, avoid it as though it were the stuff of demons. While our culture is filled with people obsessively living beyond their means, confusing survival and success, those entitled pricks who require over a million in total assets and holdings are the ones who lack gumption. Those requiring others knowing less are monsters birthing every nightmarish unfolding upon the world.
The exertion of ego across others can only ever be permissible when safeguarding the lifeblood of persons forced into sacrificing for the success of others. Before Capitalists purchased Church and State, the ethical spectrum reached from making personal sacrifices for the survival of persons not ourselves, to necessitating others suffer consequence for anyone else’s esteem and luxury and sense of entitlement.
I keep returning to the idea that at their core, the digital socials are concerned with a DIY segregation, enabling users to never be met with anything unfamiliar or uncomfortable. And it’s proved so popular, that users wish to replace their physical gated communities with metaphysical gated communities, expecting the same enabling from schools and news media in real life of only ever meeting with what’s familiar and comfortable already. All of which stifles what evolution to come of firsthand experience and lessens what those self-contained might offer the world beyond their reach, as much as it blocks out the mass of reality outside the gates. When the most maleable among us are bringing their avatars and proxies away from keyboards, neither a more immersive online experience or a virtual reality is what the room is crying for. The one thing everyone in the English-speaking world seems to agree on is that the most offensive thing in all of culture is to not have one’s fantasies indulged, be they fantasies of goodness, of normalcy or of supremacy.