Comrade Attenborough

that is exactly my point of view. if all people were given universal basic income, we could have tens of thousands of boring, tedious, dangerous, and long term harmful jobs done by robots, while humans are free to explore their passions without fear of poverty and homelessness.

in a good society, automation means a boom in the arts. language, painting, music, dance, writing, philosophy, architecture, etc. these are the sectors that advance tremendously during periods of human health and flourishing

Back in the 1960s, we were told that automation and rising productivity would mean shorter work weeks with higher pay. Instead we have multibillionaires, growing poverty, and crumbling infrastructure. The money is all there, it’s just being hoarded.

this is 100% why i never fucked with that “normcore” nonsense and why i’m still extremely self-conscious about what i wear and how my clothes fit, even after my weight loss. wearing “normal” clothes only becomes “fashion” when it’s on skinny attractive people and once it’s on a fat person it’s suddenly the trappings of the tacky and the unwashed poors. fuck out of here. you can make anything look good.

okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation. 

what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.

like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it

okay but like my thing about this is… who is actually eating at these places because shit like this? yeah it’s funny but i never go to wendy’s because a meme, if i go to wendy’s it’s because i want a gross burger and a frosty, same with taco bell and mcdonald’s and wherever the fuck.

i really think that you’re blowing this out of proportion and having very little faith in people’s ability to decide what they want for themselves. it’s just not that deep.

It’s not about the effectiveness of the ads in question, but their complete omnipresence in every aspect and moment of life, and how bizarre and sophisticated the mechanations of advertising have become. If people don’t call attention to these things, they become normal.

The effectiveness of marketing isnt one-to-one, like, “ad says burger is good, I think burger is good, I eat burger.” That was 50 years ago. Y'all, since then these multi-million dollar corporations have been hiring psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists to study how best to get under consumer skin and theyve figured out it’s not about making you WANT a burger,

It’s about creating a Brand Identity - an anthropomorphized personality that your brain fits into an established schema (system of thought) so it’s easier to just drop into the background of your everyday life. It’s not about making you want a burger, it’s about making it so, when you DO want a burger, the first place you think of is Wendy’s, because their ads have made you think about them five time already that day. And most importantly, it’s about making sure you dont realize how often they make you think about them, so you don’t resent how pervasive they’ve become. They do that by tricking your brain into thinking of them as just another human-like personality. Your Funny Meme Friend Wendy’s. Wine Aunt World Market. Woke Jock Nike. Even your Endearingly Unhip Uncle Geico.

(hey also if you want dozens of terrifying examples of what I mean, just type ‘brand identity schema’ into Google like I just did and take a gander at all those scholarly articles discussing how best to acquire consumers, like we’re a fucking commodity)

one time i said i didn’t like the wendys twitter and got called classist for hating retail employees 

this shit works. it makes people like Brands. gets under their skin and in to their minds. when i said i didnt like the wendys twitter i personally offended people that viewed wendys as a friend, that viewed the wendys social media manager as a friendly individual that they respected.

the wendys social media manager is not your friend. they don’t even really exist. there’s no one person that writes the tweets for wendys. there’s a team of 20 something year olds that casually observe the latest meme trends and crank out mspaint memes because they know they’ll get retweeted if the memes are relevant.

they trick you in to thinking that Wendys is a hip friendly young person, and they manipulate you in to thinking that disliking marketing is somehow a “problematic” “un-woke” thing to do. 

and it works. 

install ublock origin. on mobile, block every promoted tweet you see. don’t let them convince you that this shit is normal.

I just wanna say, not only was I extremely correct in my paranoid regarding these posts, but it’s actually gotten way fucking worse already

I’m just going to be blunt about it; America’s depression epidemic is a direct result of the all-encompassing alienation we experience under late stage capitalism, and now private interests are attempting to recuperate the general public’s feelings of hopelessness and despair into marketing material, the spectacle in effect recuperating our despair and making it appear that the powers that be are on our side. That we are being watched over by boardrooms with loving grace, despite the fact that they are part and parcel with the forces of economy that has driven so many people to not see any hope in their lives. By recuperating the public discourse about the root of endemic depression, the status quo is able to trivialize it and sterilize it before before safely incorporating it back into mainstream society. Not only are we unable to strike against our enemy, most of us can’t even see them for what they are, and the rest of us can’t even speak to the truth of what they are capable of.

Pay attention to little bizarre happenings like these, they betray the rest of the iceberg

Don’t just take it from me:

America’s depression epidemic is a direct result of the all-encompassing alienation we experience under late stage capitalism, and now private interests are attempting to recuperate the general public’s feelings of hopelessness and despair into marketing material, the spectacle in effect recuperating our despair and making it appear that the powers that be are on our side. That we are being watched over by boardrooms with loving grace, despite the fact that they are part and parcel with the forces of economy that has driven so many people to not see any hope in their lives. By recuperating the public discourse about the root of endemic depression, the status quo is able to trivialize it and sterilize it before before safely incorporating it back into mainstream society. Not only are we unable to strike against our enemy, most of us can’t even see them for what they are, and the rest of us can’t even speak to the truth of what they are capable of.

This is what I’ve been saying.

Capitalism crushes labor.

Private equity’s favorite shell game is to take over profitable businesses, sell off their assets, con banks into loaning them hundreds of millions of dollars, cash out in the form of bonuses and dividends, then let the businesses fail and default on their debts.

The result is the retail apocalypse, where predatory giants like Walmart and Amazon are able to topple their vulture-capitalist-weakened prey, creating a feedback loop that enriches the shareholder class and destroys American businesses, leaving workers high and dry.

The (current) poster child for this con game is Toys R Us, whose private equity owners borrowed more than $5 billion to buy the company (with a $400 million annual debt service plan). The new owners quickly took the company into bankruptcy, defaulting on that giant debt, after paying themselves $200 million (including tens of millions in performance bonuses to the C-suite in the same year the company declared bankruptcy).

Now the company has announced that it will also default on all severance payouts to the company’s 30,000 employees, including employees who worked at the company for decades, skipping Christmas and Thanksgiving with their families to staff the stores, now slated to get literally not one penny.

https://boingboing.net/2018/06/03/are-there-no-workhouses-6.html

Fuck vulture capitalists.