I know I bump heads with some types of people here because of my unorthodox views that some might go as far as to call heterodox, but even if you’re the most by-the-book follower of Marx and Lenin, I hope you can hear me out here:
I’m definitely not alone in thinking that the Situationists were on to something, respect for them seems wide across the entire spectrum of leftism. It’s just a shame that the idea of detournment was more or less constrained to the realm of literal conventonal forms of art. What WSB has been doing with Gamestop can fit quite easily into being understood as a detournment of Hedge Funds, Speculation, and the Stock Market in general. This “Prank” has seemingly shaken more common everyday people of the legitimacy of the stock market and perhaps their faith in capitalism itself. Compare the effectivenes of that with something like Occupy Wallstreet.
People hate being told what to think. Even if its absolutely true, they’ll be resistant to it. On the other hand, if people think that they came to a belief with profound implications all on their own, they will champion that belief with unshakable passion, particularly if they think they are unique in having “figured it out”. See Qanon and their cult-like thinking that has hardly any basis in reality. In 2021 its not enough just to tell people that capitalism riddled with contradictions and iherently unstable. You need to pull back the sheet and let people make that realization with their own eyes.
I’ve been thinking of other forms of action this could take, and honestly I haven’t been able to come up with much, but I’d hope that other people who are more creative than me might have better ideas. One idea is to create a social network, something like facebok or twitter or the like, but have the users get a percentage cut of the returns whenever their personal data in particular is used as part of a sale. This would even be gamified, to encourage users to add more personal information to get more cash. This is probably the only way to get people to sign up to a new service en masse due to the current monopolization of the market. It’d also lay bare the fundamentals of the industry as the other big players attempt to react with their products. My only other idea is kind of stupid and I think has been tried before without much success. But the basic idea would be to start a consulting firm that presents itself as getting a leg up on the competitor without quite using the term “corporate sabotage”, but the interesting bit is that it would be accomplished by attempting to unionize that competitor’s workplace. So instead of the board deciding to hire a union busting firm for their business, they would hire a union-organizing firm to essentially salt their competitors or otherwise agitate for a union drive.
edit: Reposting in this sub since we're trying to keep WSB stuff from clogging up main. GIven a bit more time to think about my idea, I think it can be summed up like this: Capitalism as a system is very prone to positive-feedback loops, actions which by their nature cause themselves to be amplified, like feedback on a microphone, rapidly gaining in strength and drowning out most other things (Posittive in this context means reinforcing itself, as opposed to negative feedback loops which are a form of self-regulation). It just so happens that most of these are alerady set up to benefit the rich. I think it would be fruitful to discuss the eaiest way to fudge the system into forming a positive feedback loop that supports workers.
"r/wsb are situationists" is exactly the kind of high-brow hot-take I unironically come to this site for. Thank you, kind comrade! :chavez-salute:
I think this is a brilliant observation! Materialist detournment maybe.
I had an idea maybe a year ago about creating an application where you can issue your own digital sovereign currency, like any nation with their own currency currently does. Be your own congress! Appropriate your own funds! Brrrr your own dang money printer!!
I'm kind of skeptical of the idea of detournment in this regard. Like you can easily end up reproducing ruling ideology regardless by participating in it, even though you are explicitly pointing out its contradictions, the disconnect being already accounted for. Consider the people on this very board, that are trying to profit from this mess yet are keenly aware that the stock market is a rigged game. Aren't people acting as if the market is working exactly as it presents itself as? As a means of generating revenue for the smart people, the people that deserve to be wealthy?
The same goes twice over for the people on the WallStreetBets sub. They've developed this fight-the-power aesthetic over the years precisely because they knew that the market is rigged. Hell, they managed to do a short squeeze because they know HOW the market was rigged. Maybe the naive people who were under the mistaken impression that the market reflects the economy will be woo'd by our beautiful leftist rhetoric, but also maybe they're going to be looking to exploit the knowledge of the market being rigged to participate in the rigged market, essentially act like nothing is wrong, even though everything is wrong, because this is the only means to enrich oneself. Welcome to cynical reason and the totalitarian laughter.
edit: maybe I will contextualize this a bit more in a new thread tomorrow, but I basically just convinced myself that participating in the stock exchange, as a means to further communism, is an exercise that undermines itself, and that probably applies to a whole lot other things as well. It just dawned on me the full implication of a system existing without people necessarily believing in it. Truly Kafka is the only one who has ever got it. it's going to be hard to convince me otherwise now
The purpose of it isn't necessarily to get people to abstain for participating in them. The same way that brining attention to US war crimes carried out with taxpayer money isn't neccesarily done with the immediate goal of having people refrain from paying their taxes to prevent such wars from having funding, or having all US soldiers decide to immediately go AWOL to halt imperialism. That's just not a reasonably realistic goal to have. The way I see it, the immediate goals of these kinds of actions would be to force Capital to respond to it with a way that overtly and undeniably contradicts the narrative they have spun about themselves, narratives that many still buy into. That's what I mean by "shake faith in". And this can have more material consequences in addition to growing sympathy for anticapitalist ideas. Like during a union drive, whether or not the employees see the inevitable union busting operations the management will carry out as genuine, or whether they dismiss it as the obvious farce it is, literally can be the difference between a successful campaign or a failure.
I guesss what I'm saying is that you're not necessarily trying to convince other people of the contradictions of capitalism, because if you're successful, they will observe the contradictions themselves with their own two eyes, and come to that conclusion on all their own. That experience is much stronger than reading any literature or theory or listening to any speech.
I know what you're saying, yes, but I'm not trying to argue about realistic goals right now. What I'm trying to get at is that everyone can be painfully aware how contradictory capitalism is and still not only participate in it, but actively further capitalism. And I'm not saying just some people being aware of it, I'm saying that literally everybody, as in 100% of the people in the world, can be aware of internal contradictions and still run with it. Essentially, capitalism itself absorbing its own contradictions, existing as a sort of zombie version of itself, only being kept alive because people act as if it was alive.
I guess what I'm trying to argue is that it's not enough that people know that capitalism is deeply contradictory, people need to start behaving as if capitalism is deeply contradictory, and thus it makes no sense to participate in it*. Through this logic, doing short squeezes is a bit counter-productive, especially if you aren't very surprised about market insiders actively denouncing it (of course they would denounce it!), discord banning WSB (of course they would ban WSB!), or RH halting trades of the shorted options, because this is understood as the logical reaction of exploiting a rigged market. It's part of what comes with the territory of outsmarting the big guy. The important takeaway is that capitalism will preserve this fantasy of another opportunity to outsmart the system presenting itself, but only if the current system is preserved with its own contradictions, because the alternative has no means nor comes with a justification for exploitation. Maybe at some point all avenues of exploiting a flawed system will be obviously (obvious for everyone) exhausted, leaving no choice but to abandon capitalism, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Also I'm not really doing moral judgements or whatever, essentially I'm trying to explain how capitalism preserves itself despite glaring contradictions. It just does! Like Apple stuff, it just werks.
*I am well aware of distancing ourselves individually from your own context is essentially impossible, but perhaps if everyone decides to divorce themselves of such a context...
i really like your premise. i am so thankful this movie was posted a while back on /c/movies because it gave me the funniest shit i've seen in a long long time and also a great example of some wild activist pranks.
most of these, and also this gme thing, are not possible going forward so yeah we need to come up with some fresh ideas.
Holy shit, that's for posting that, i'd been vaguely familiar with what they've done, but had no idea there was a movie or anything. I'm checking this out right now! That's definitely the kind of thing I'm talking about for sure. Forcing capital to come out there and do something like publically announce that they have no intention of having any responsibility or accountability for an industrail disaster they caused. i could see something similar working right now with companies who claim to care about their brave essential employees but then go ahead and force them to work in unsafe conditions without social distancing or proper protection.
edit: The more I watch and think about it, the more I realize just how brilliant it is to force a giant corporations hand into making a public announcement saying "Actually, no, we are not sorry for this horrible atrocity we're responsible for that has caused tons of suffering. You might have heard otherwise, but to clear the record, we don't give a fuck". That's seriously more powerful than I think a lot of people realize.
they have three movies actually! that seems to be the best but i watched the third one and it was good in a much more intimate and reflective way
Corey Pine had an idea similar to your second one. He talked about it on different TMBS episodes
User data from social media is... dodgy at best. There's research that suggests it doesn't really work. Just collecting and sorting it requires a tremendous amount of electricity, CPU time, and storage space -- that's on top of everything you need just to keep the site functioning. There's also the matter of morality. We are saturated in surveillance -- any social media that participates, no matter how well-intentioned, risks being usurped by capital and the state. I don't see ethical social media on a large scale as possible. Not without a socialist revolution first.
