Binging Hell of Presidents, Matt (the largest of the chapos, who should be able to eat the smaller ones) said something that resonated with me- the idea that our connection with class is so disassociated and immaterial that the only way we can express ourselves is through consumption.
I realised he was 100% right, but sadly realised I couldn't figure out alternatives. Is there any answer apart from getting off our damn iphone? (it's community connection right? But we still have to consume food and culture to do so...- or am I taking it too literally?)
You're basically asking how to get the people from WALL-E to stand up out of their chairs and start walking around and interacting with each other. And the sad fact is they probably won't until their ship crashes. You can help by holding a mirror up to them and showing them their own pathetic selfishness, but most people will just smash the mirror.
Christman’s take on consumption is right on. Which when explained is easy to understand.
Think about what the average office workers talk about. What shows they’re “binge-watching” (when tf did that become a thing? I guess when Netflix made sure that they’d hook everyone in by immediately playing the next episode as soon as the credits started rolling), the results of last night’s local and national sports games, etc.
And then backyard get togethers, what do old friends and family talk about? Acquisitions, how much this cost, what a good deal they got on that, etc. All materialistic in nature.
Everyone’s frame of reference is consumer goods, MSM “reporting” (hence water cooler talk about Russia, China, etc), sports, cars, getting bargains on consumer goods, what routes they travel to work, empty bragging about their kids, adopting whatever the next media/consumer trends are with regard to food/fashion/etc.
Look at the Reddit content for local cities/towns. Mostly little self-absorbed yuppies rating their subpar or mediocre restaurants as if it’s of paramount importance.
And all of this exists and perpetuates at the cost of any class solidarity ever developing.
As that old age goes: the difference between the Irish (or whatever non-American you prefer) worker and the American one is, when they’re both standing looking at the boss’s mansion on the hill, the American says “someday I’m going to have one myself” while the Irish one says “someday I’m gonna get that bastard.”
It’s rare when one can have an open and honest conversation about how fucked over we’ve all been by health insurance companies with an eye toward doing something collectively. Which most times is sadly met by that modern, surrender but assumed faux profundity that often is intended to end conversations, “it is what it is.”
Makes me slide into misanthropy.
Gotta form a book club just to meet a few comrades. Because I know they’re out there.
when tf did that become a thing? I guess when Netflix made sure that they’d hook everyone in by immediately playing the next episode as soon as the credits started rolling
Minor point but binge watching predates Netflix auto play. Once you had TV show piracy, DVRs, and availability of whole shows on DVD (couldn't really do this on VHS), binge watching naturally emerged. I had plenty of friends who were binge watching LOST back in like 2006.
There's only two way to make friendship in the modern world:
- Be forcibly put into a limited environment for an extended period of time where you have no choice but to form bond with other (family, school, etc)*
- Have a common interest. Which nowadays means you like consuming the same commodity, or have the same hobby... that you likely only be able to engage through consumption
So, yeah.
*you could say that this is how 90% friendships work since the dawn of humanity
Be forcibly put into a limited environment for an extended period of time where you have no choice but to form bond with other
yeah and it's very difficult to find anything like that now.
It's not about consumption strictly limited to the food/shopping sense, but also in the media we consume: think of how we bond over this or that TV show, what we binged on Netflix, the "communities" we build around this or that streamer, YouTuber or popular subscription-based succdem podcast :thinkin-lenin:
Now compare that to our relationships based on anything else that happens in the real world - our place of work, our communities, family. Even hobbies can be consumption-based because they may entail a barrier to entry that is dependent on buying certain products and that in turn recontextualises belonging to that community based on the terms of the capitalists offering that point of entry.
I don't have any useful answers to that problem; I'm as atomized as anybody else is.
I think there is something to the point of :graeber: somewhere: not everything is meaningless consumption. Say you bought a guitar and learning to play instrument. Is this meaningless consumption? I would argue it’s absolutely is not, so saying consumption bad is kinda very radical, monk-like position. Consumption as in meaningless trinkets that you use 1 hour a year is different from consuming creative tools.
I am with you, yet I think that some antifa protests and protests in general are mainly performative towards the in group group and are as such consumption albeit in the hull of a seemingly collective creation. However it is really unclear to me which ones are consumptive and which aren't - and if that is a good term anyhow.
But how often do you just buy a guitar? Everything comes with add ons and upgrades that are all in their own right rent seeking services themselves. Like if I bought a guitar presumably google will know and will change my ad content which will then shove services like a tuning app or some dumb website called thinkly that’s supposed to teach you guitar in 100 days and all of these are paid services or worse free with a deluge of ads for other shitty services. We’ve commodified not just the item but the experience of using the item which in turn alienates us from the joy of using said item. And it’s hard not to give into that shit because it’s purpose built to tap into some dopamine signal center in the back of your brain. I’m learning German on duolingo more as an act of boredom and because I wanted a fun new game than any attempt at genuine self-betterment regardless of what I tell myself. We’re deep in the shit man. At this point capitalism has had the time to deterritorialize and commodify virtually everything (or destroyed it if it couldn’t) and is now just eating new cultural outputs as they come into existence. The capitalist realism is hard to escape because everything we encounter is dripping wet with the ideological logic of capitalism
“Consuming” guitar lessons is in itself a start of creative activity. Sure everything costs money, and some :porky-happy: profits from it, instead of petit-bougie tutor you get some app or school with ceo, but the act of learning and interacting creatively with the world doesn’t change :shrug-outta-hecks:
Learning language out of boredom is also not consumption, cmon, it’s learning You can’t consume(tm) a learned skill, you learn, you rewire your brain, you act in learning.
But like there's a difference between paying a recurring app fee versus buying a used text book and possessing it in perpetuity.
I think it’s a distinguishing line of alienation wherein I am alienated from my own learning because it is controlled by a capitalist and sold to me as a commodity rather than existing as an action that I control and pursue to my own interest’s extent. Because yes I am learning, but it doesn’t feel like I own that knowledge on some level and I know that because I’ve done this loop where I’ll pick up a new skill as a hobby for a period of time and then walk away from it for the next thing feeling like I haven’t actually embodied any of the gained knowledge. Sure I know a bit of guitar and have picked up a decent amount of German and Spanish but because these things feel transactional I don’t feel ownership over them which is to say I don’t recognize them as skill sets I actually have. Idk there’s a point here I’m trying to make but I’m not finding quite the right wording for it. Something along the lines of the ‘great reset’ nonsense where we no longer own anything we just rent it but it’s for aspects of our personality and mind. The capitalist realism of feeling like you’re just renting out your own experiences from the people that actually own them rather than feeling ownership yourself. It’s a very disempowering place to be but I think that mindset is what’s actually at the core of consumerist ideology
Maybe you think if skills are not usable in a job they are not real :puzzled: idk, i don’t fell this way, I like knowing useless shit that brings me some joy
What I see more often is not buying 1 guitar but constantly shopping for new guitars that supposedly fill some niche. Then buying 500 pedals to get the perfect tone.
It's easier to get endorphins from purchases (which feel like an accomplishment) rather than actually learning, building skill and achieving accomplishment. It's a mental 🪤 to waste our hard earned money on products.
You really don't need much to survive and be happy. For the vast majority of history, people possessed almost nothing on comparison to our 1st world expectations.
Agree wholeheartedly with your sentiment but c'mon... my pedals all do something different.... :kitty-cri-screm:
If you just buy a guitar and get good enough to play songs and sing along and you never have a desire to sell or commodify your talents, then hell yeah. You’ve consumed a single thing one time and that act of consumption was a net good.
The reality is that this is not how most people consume guitars. You get a guitar and you’re going to want a strap and picks and maybe an acoustic pickup or a cable and an amp. And people are advertised new guitars and encourages to browse catalogues of hundreds of guitars. And people will build pedalboards or buy plugins or buy parts to do mods. And if you follow any bands those bands will start plugging their own side projects with custom guitars or amps or whatever.
And then once you get good you’re supposed to write songs or play in bands. You tell people you play guitar and they will ask, “do you have any stuff I can listen to?” or “maybe I could come watch you play sometime”. They expect you to produce things for them to consume. I play guitar as a form of meditation and telling people that I don’t release any of the music I write usually makes them confused.
I’m not saying people wanting to come watch a local band is bad. It’s cool. Support locals artists and all that. We live under capitalism and they need to live. But to say that buying a guitar is not meaningless consumption is beside the point. All of the bullshit consumption attaches itself to more meaningful consumption. The basic necessities to play some tunes are very meaningful. But there is so much bullshit piggybacking on that initial purchase that is heavily encouraged socially
Listening to music your friend or colleague plays is not consumption, at least not in the same way :ohnoes: there is no transaction, no profit, it’s just human solidarity :ohnoes:
I agree brain-poison of “how will you sell it/side-hustle it” is :disgost: tho
Listening to music your friend or colleague plays is not consumption, at least not in the same way :ohnoes: there is no transaction, no profit, it’s just human solidarity :ohnoes:
I know local music bookers who would disagree. Local musicians sharing stuff with friends and family is the core of their scene. They’re not sufficient to hold up the business, but they’re necessary. It’s a form of solidarity that has been commodified whether the people doing it realize it or not
All common spaces have been commercialized. If you're going to meet up with friends and don't want to pay, your choices are that one of your friends has a large enough place to host things, you go to one of a dwindling number of tiny parks that are mostly oriented at kids, or drive to a hiking trail. Otherwise your choices are malls (which are decreasing), movie theaters, bowling allies, bars, coffee shops, clubs, etc. A list of places you have to pay to exist in.
There's churches, but they have so many problems, especially in the US where the dominant religion is a bizarre evil version of Christianity.
I guess someone should start a chain of anarchist, communist, atheist churches.
I guess someone should start a chain of anarchist, communist, atheist churches
Yes yes yes yes yes. Could even just be secular rather than atheist. I know there are Christians in my area who can’t stand the way that churches around here act
This actually is a gold nugget of an idea.
Serves to both give disillusioned Christians a place where the true Socialist word of Jesus is spoken, and, serves mainly as a community center for radical folks to organize, socialize and build community bonds outside of the hideous commodified culture we’ve all been suffocating in.
Could really work.
There’s so many goddamn churches already all over the place, especially cities. What’s to stop us from starting our own Anarcho/Socialist ones? Pay no taxes and get city mandated No Parking in front. Off the curb we can run all kinds of Mutual Aid activities, free goods and services straight out into the street.
Making shit with other people helps. Coming up with stories, skits, or playing games, that kind of thing. There are lots of ways to interact with people mutually along non-market lines.
Something I just realized I find really frustrating about the world is that any kind of constructive collective undertaking is under the domain of capital, and any kind of artistic endeavour, as a hobby, tends to be individualized to a painful extreme. People don't get together and just make shit for fun any more, except maybe music. So much of our collective time is just consumption.
So Dungeons and Dragons is the only true form of socialization in this hellworld?
D&D is good, but also try:
- cooking with people
- writing to a pen pal in the People's Republic of China
- sex and maybe even kissing
- explore the trees with someone! if any are near
- reading the Iliad to each other
- scripting a game
The people I play DND with are g*mers so our sessions still involve talking about vidya consumption before and after the session
I mean, I’ll go against the grain here and say that I’m not so sure things were THAT different in the past. Like what do we think medieval peasants were all having deep philosophical conversations all the time? They still probably spent a lot of time going “oi de gout a new type of cheese down at ye olden tavrn’, tasted proper musky, comes from the land of the Danes!”
Yeah it’s just exaggerated behavior that would otherwise be normal. It’s all they talk about. I’m not expecting deep philosophical conversations, but I barely know these people who I spend several hours a week with because they never talk about their lives
Hm, that’s weird, I got to know the people in mg DND group pretty well. Hell one became my gf
Damn that sounds nice. One of them is a friend from high school which is why they’re my crew (not to mention a party that can consistently meet each week is nothing to fuck with). I learned like a year in that one of them has a kid. And another bought a house and none of us heard anything about it until it’s be done for several months. That’s a pretty stressful process that I’d expect to hear about from a friend that I see that often. It’s real weird
Idk maybe they view the game as an escape and don’t wanna talk about stressful personal stuff?
One of the biggest hurdles is not existing with other real people in the real world. There has always been an element of mediation through consumption (feasts for example) but today that is driven to the extreme when we type at each other through magic boxes. We can rationalize this but I don't think our psyches are quite able to process it correctly. I know it's even harder now because of COVID but we do have to figure out how to exist with each other offline.
Going for walks in nature, cooking and sharing a meal with friends, doing exercise together, playing games/cards together. These aren't perfect, since a few of them still involve consuming, and they still take place in the larger context of capitalism/consumer culture. Going for a walk in nature likely means driving to a park and blocking off a few hours, similar to going to a movie. Hikes and landmarks are treated as something to view and get off ones bucket list.
But at least being aware of it and maybe even pushing away from it is a good start.
only way we can express ourselves is through consumption
I think he was referring to how the only avenues of political action that come to mind for the average imperial core citizen is changing their mode of consumption. Consciousness winnowed down to the individual level by the forces that be. Nothing more can be imagined because of the cynical pure ideology that is capitalist realism. So instead of coming together as a group to plan political action, or recognizing class consciousness, instead the cynical subject consumes "environmentally friendly" coke bottles instead of pepsi bottles. This is the only way we can express any sort of rage and dissatisfaction with capitalism absent of a serious political movement born out of class consciousness.
There are plenty of meaningful things to discuss provided your friends are not middle class normies.
This is incredible. I knew about a lot of this, but nothing this in depth
Is there any answer apart from getting off our damn iphone? (it’s community connection right? But we still have to consume food and culture to do so…- or am I taking it too literally?)
I have an effort post about this where I analyze some theory written by the founder of Buzzfeed. Here’s a TLDR along with some updates thoughts I’ve had since writing it.
Capital used to be content to automate basic mechanics of production (the base) to make labor more efficient. They’re reaching diminishing returns on this and are now automating the meta processes of production (the superstructure). This is part of what Paretti calls our accelerating visual culture. He cites MTV because this was written in the late 90’s, but we can see it’s acceleration in corporate social media’s advertising-surveillance empire. Aspects of finding target demographics and creating networks for information to flow through are all automated.
Production is able to be socialized and as that happens a byproduct of that is that the identities formed by this capital-infected culture are all preoccupied with consumption. The desires created by ads or by any media really must be about consuming things. The solution he proposes is to create media whose conjured images (the archetype of who you’re supposed to identify with while consuming the media) make you desire something other than consumption. He cites as successful examples:
- the queer movement
- He talks about its opportunity to either remain radical or become recuperated as the image of queer people existing becomes less shocking to the general public (remember, late 90’s)
- slacker culture
- He accurately predicts that this culture was anti consumption by happenstance rather than principle and could be easily coopted by capital, which it was
- modern art
- He talks a lot about taking corporate imagery and putting it in new contexts which rob it of its ability to glorify consumption. Basically I think he vaguely predicted vaporwave or meme culture
So building off of that, here’s the solution in a modern context. From an individual perspective, yeah, you put down your damn phone and go outside to do community stuff or whatever. It won’t affect change, but it may keep you sane. More of us are dealing with social media addiction than we would care to admit. In the macro, we can create community networks and counterpropaganda apparatus which spread radical identities and allow those community networks to take a foothold. A community of mutual aid work could be the basis of a more material relationship with class that is fulfilling in a way consumption is not
- the queer movement
Everything is consumption. You're consuming these photons right now! You think I'm being pedantic but you paid for these photons!
