George Tsakraklides || Capitalism is revered by its own victims because it is a master of deception, pretending to celebrate the individual through the very activities that ultimately undermine all individuality: consumption, occupation, recreation. Each of these activities comes with its own sales margin, ROI, profit forecast and, most importantly, terms of service. If you play by the rules, you can be free. The rules? Just make sure you follow the recipe provided, eat the disgusting slop generously thrown at you, and pay compliments to the chef all day.
The fine print in the contract capitalism made with society was too nuanced for people to understand: we give you an infinitely wide boulevard of products, but a shoulder-wide, dark and slippery alley on the path to participatory democracy. We give you entertainment that is so colourful and mesmerizing, you will find politics abysmally boring. We inundate you with propaganda so convincing, you become convinced that genocide is a form of self-defence.
The deal with consumatrons has always been very simple: we give you access to products, and in return, you shut the fuck up: surrendering all your freedoms, the ones that actually matter (yes, those ones, the ones that you don’t even know you should have), all the while as an oligarch gets his first trillion.
The American teenager is often touted in history books as the first occurrence of true freedom in the West: financial freedom, sexual freedom, ideological freedom. But this “freedom” would never have been possible if these teenagers weren’t spending their money on movies, soda pop and gasoline. They were already slaves, distracted by ice cream as their own government pillaged the globe using the tax revenue from ice cream, condoms and bubble gum to build missiles. They were never free, and they have never been. They were objects of exploitation, no different from cows in an industrial farm.
We were all progressively groomed by a necrocapitalist system that showered us with bigger and bigger gifts each time it wanted to distract us from yet another genocide. We were never “consumers”. We were monetized cattle given ultra strength narcotics so that we mistake rape for pleasure each time the system violated us. We became willing prostitutes to our own “unfreedom”, but there is a much bigger story, and a lesson, behind all of this: one of growth, and power. Necrocapitalism is always generous when there is ample growth and abundance, because the more gifts it hands out, the bigger the returns it receives. Once growth goes into reverse, the mask falls and the hungry beast begins to eat its children.
Having deceived generations of humans into believing in the abundance of a consumatronic society, the Unhappiness Machine will divert its attention from catering to humans, to catering to oligarchs and data centres. This is now the priority, as resources diminish on a collapsing climate. Will the consumatrons revolt? No. They are still expecting the handouts, the abundance, the prosperity.
If it was “real” so far, why would it stop now? When consumatronic slavery has been sold to you as your “path to freedom” over successive generations, why on this scorched Earth would you revolt? The oligarchy are banking not on our Stockholm syndrome, but on something far worse: our stupidity. Because we don’t even know that we are slaves. Slavery no longer requires chains. It only requires consumers convinced that they are free.
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