It’s an interesting article, I couldn’t help but think of how “Pirate Speak” really comes from Robert Newton’s acting in a famous Disney movie. So while it predates big tech’s debasement of culture it’s still a “top down” artifact, in a way. I guess you could say it came from a creative decision of an artist (Newton adapting his native accent) and initially caught on for good fun rather than for profit. So far less cynical than the radioactive shit getting pumped out now, if for no other reason than in the 1950s Disney hadn’t figured that shit out yet.
Similar top-down cultural phenomenon dictated by corpos is concept of “personal carbon footprint” - as a means of shifting blame and focus from them to individuals. This is almost conspiracy level unbelievable when heard for the first time, but true nonetheless.
Honestly this is one of the ones I’m most sick of. Yes, everyone can do their part, but we aren’t even close to scraping the surface of the massive amounts of CO2 corpos are dumping comparatively.
yep, the concept of a “personal carbon footprint” was literally invented by an advertising agency working for British Petroleum https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook
I love this “Cultural malware” as a name for things like these.
Yup. Black Friday and Amazon’s Prime Day are complete bullshit. I found out early when I saw a monitor I was tracking raise in price drastically then ‘drop’ to a sale price for Black Friday. When people wisened up to that companies started playing the ‘model number’ game, where they release the same TV or device but with a different model number to specifically skew prices and act like you’re getting a deal. It’s probably one of the best examples of late stage capitalism I’ve seen.
I’m increasingly convinced that there is no ‘we’. Rather, ‘we’ increasingly experience the world as isolated and alienated people who are mostly stuck in urban environments dominated by physical corporate and state interfaces (billboards, store-fronts, infrastructure etc) whilst also being stuck behind computers and smartphones dominated by Big Tech, which tries to feed us that illusion that the Internet is a ‘global village’.
I ended up getting some ssds last black Friday, but only because they were 20% cheaper than they’d been all year. Now the prices are even higher, so I don’t feel like I bought at the wrong time
Only sheeple shop on Black Friday. An astute and correct observation.
Note the author doesn’t use the word sheeple, but “black-friday” and “cyber-monday” he argues are top-down orders to the masses to consume, and he is absolutely correct.
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