Mariana Mazzucato has written a mouthful of bupkiss, masquerading the mass hallucination of a good capitalism as an extension of socialism, co-opting the notion of taking back the means of production while missing the mark that the means of production was always our own minds. Susceptibility to marketing is nothing to be proud about. Edward Bernays, forefather of the modern concepts of marketing demographics and public relations, would in his later years quietly work for the federal government, where he transformed the concepts into the profiling used by law enforcement to this day and likely beyond.
From the same box-full of permissible lines of thinking, maybe praising billionaire “change-agents” for the .00001% philanthropy they exchange for tax write-offs, publicity and vainglory is really stupid when the rest of their pilfered resources are causing the problems. Would a logical society not criminalize billionaires for depriving the economy of such dramatically life-enduring revenue streams? Who can even joke that this government is not systematically in favor of monopolization? If a flatmate hides all the food, they are asses. Whether for business or pleasure, should a relationship never be equal parts give and take it is at once both one-sided and short-lived. A party never reciprocating is generally regarded as villainous. Are people just that silently frightened of authorities wielded by the wealthiest? Then why on Earth exchange liberties and the reins of self-control for baubles, for entertaining drivel or pleasurable wording? Capitalism is by no means a self-perpetuating thing. As with any religion it is completely dependent on being the recipient of the most adamant beliefs of those wishing to escape any sense of responsibility.
Following the brief prohibition era, the largest bootleggers wound up in Washington. Sex work, the oldest trade in recorded history and illegal unless given freely, will be decriminalized in the states when it gets taxed out the wazoo for commoners, with regulations in place assuring larger brands with political affiliations set industry standards, guaranteeing revenues fly above. Markets commodify by default, with goods and services having not been produced to meet existing demand in decades. Our system entails demand being manufactured to meet pre-ordained goods and services, limiting both options and profiteers. It’s Capitalism, bloated and top-heavy and rolling backwards down the proverbial hill, for it cannot sustain even the semblance of balance in perpetuity. When the slightest hint at profit is uncovered, our pro-monopoly system guarantees that only limited parties might see it. Wealth is a finite thing, and when it flows predominately in one direction the rest of society will invariably find itself with nothing left but to burn. “Let them eat cake” is not a singular quote from a half-remembered time in a distant land, it is an ongoing ideology. We the people seemingly exist to make money for land-owners and employers and to pay taxes to the government’s business interests, like organic batteries drained to depletion. Homeless are criminalized and demonized simply because they have not the means to float the con-artists above. Our rights are words and words are wind.
I think Boris Johnson’s inclusion of leaving property rights to the Brooklyn Bridge with the EU was quite generous. Personally, I feel Brexit instigators took the piss and lemming’d off a cliff with it. But the fucked up part of the whole ordeal, and maybe it’s easier to see being far removed, is that leaving or remaining amounts to billionaire outsiders profiteering resources they do not own. Remaining further empowers unelected EU officials and leaving empowers asswipes like JP Morgan to occupy themselves with “fixing” the NHS. The problem faced by the UK is matched stateside, the dire need to reconsider governance from the ground up, with backdoors for neither church or industry. Governmental positions whether elected or appointed should absolutely not be taken sight unseen as invitations to strike profit. Government is about managing existing resources for its constituents, not about profiting anybody, or for the few to weaponize it against the many. And while money/power are finite, the same does not apply to liberty. There’s enough to go around provided it’s not withheld alongside said money/power by the entitled few, these privileged, self-serving con-artists awarded celebrity status.
The candidating game is always a rerun.
Joe Bernstein notes “Mark Zuckerberg just publicly retrofit the reason for founding Facebook from a tool that could rate the attractiveness of female college students to an attempt to right the wrongs of the leadup to the Iraq War.” Of course, marketing and social optics were literally invented in the USA, because nobody here wants truth. Twitter as well is owned and operated by greedy simpletons who allow financial prospects to make all their decisions for them. While this platform receives sizable funding from self-proclaimed royals who famously/regularly behead their own peoples for the crimes of feminism and journalism, I think any grasp of virtues was the first thing Jack Dorsey exchanged for magic beans. We mere mortals know the score.
Soraya Roberts has written a sumptuous dish, detailing how social media is designed for emotion rather than dialogues. To me, these socials are repetition and reaction. The old adage of opinions being like assholes because everyone has one is erroneous, because actual opinions are rare among this sizable crowd to so easily go lost inside. It’s all a merger, of popularity contests with guided discourses. In my time editing media blogs I saw how, when a story got broken by a smaller platform, larger platforms would not touch it, as it contradicted their dominance to be scooped by a no name. So most smaller platforms would mimic the larger, thinking that was their purpose, that if they agreed with the larger voices then somehow it meant the larger voices were agreeing with them. But it’s never reciprocal. I think not only are our emotions what’s lured, but our positive emotions, and explicitly targeted for whatever then-dominant ideal or brand or centerpiece to whichever cult of personality. Its competing interests be darned. Which implies that ultimately, social media is nothing but social marketing.
Andrew Marantz has declared that Mark Zuckerberg doesn’t get what free speech is all about, but Marantz himself doesn’t get it either. Nobody wants free expression, they want ideas which offend them personally to be blockaded and the issue is that they are in complete and total denial about it being any manner of contradiction. The public, too dense to note safe spaces are merely rebranded segregation, claims to not want thought police, but they clearly want subjectivity police. Who sets the standards will always be a war, because subjectivity is never as universal as the implications of free speech. The last several essays at my digs discuss the dangers of personalized perspectives enforced as mass consensus, which is tangibly a categorical supremacy. There’s no lesser evil with supremacists, especially when they all believe they act on good intentions. Nobody plans on being the villain. Hitler, Stalin and Trump use patriotism to hide behind, knowing their subjectivity is no foundation strong enough to perpetuate a society. Until healthy societies invariably find themselves rolling backwards down the non-proverbial hill, they are about self-sustenance and growth, not pushing people away, and not dividing themselves. They need the masses to believe in them, and at a self-defeating cost.
The secret to getting your name added to those governmental lists, maintained by spooks in suits, is simply to destroy fewer lives than has anyone in their employ ever.
The dangers posed by hacking were not revelatory 10 years ago, but reminders are always warranted and welcome. People still have smart phones, still make online purchases and still use Google products. My webmail/website are hosted securely on foreign servers for the time being, yet preaching outside my safety net is faster suicide. I mean, the PRISM files of the millions of docs leaked by Edward Snowden proved the idolized FAANG corporations are honey traps, entrapping users into abuse by governmental business interests, and going back to DARPA there’s no reason to believe the online world was ever any different. One of the more under-reported news bites of recent years was the Vault 7 release from Wikileaks, which among other items showed the CIA has had the means to falsify digital attribution for many years, the capabilities for framing anybody for anything. There’s nothing hackers anywhere might possibly do which captains of industry don’t already exploit. It’s documented fact that Neocon billionaire Robert Mercer and Neolib billionaire Mark Zuckerberg exploited for profit a military-grade weaponization of psychology to affect our elections, yet people still blame Russia, because marketing has preached to their choirs that truth is by any stretch a subjective experience.
Contrast this with Sigmund Freud’s nephew Edward Bernays, who, when the precursor to the internet was being invented by the Intelligence Community, was actively working for the feds, transforming his methods of influencing public behavior into the very profiling still in use by law enforcement agencies nationally. Weaponized psychology may be ignored, but it is hardly new. And the key way to avoid responsibility is to scapegoat.