Month: March 2024

“Hey, this snake is eating my tail, too!”: American Faux-Capitalism & You

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PART ONE

If you’ve kept up with these radical ramblings for these past few weeks, you may have incorrectly arrived at the conclusion that my sole purpose in life is to dismantle the capitalist system like some kind of idiot child who missed the moral at the end of Aesop’s “Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky do Marx.”  

Let me be abundantly clear:  I am not here to tell you (or anyone else) that they cannot be capitalists.  I’m here to tell you that this isn’t capitalism.  

Alright, boys and girls, who can tell me where capitalism comes from?

And it isn’t when a mommy businessman and a daddy businessman hate each other very much and start rival businesses.  

The idea is (arguably) the brainchild of Adam Smith, who wrote, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” in 1776.  Perhaps it’s unsurprising, given the portentous year, that the new American Experiment would become enamored with the Scottish thinker who could rightly be called the precursor to all academic thought on the topic of economics.  The prevailing economic theories of his time were manifestly bad for human beings.  The first was Mercantilism, borne of the medieval guilds of tradesmen and dragged awkwardly into the era of the Enlightenment by wealth that was difficult to displace.  The other was the theory of “God’s Will” driving the distribution of that wealth.  While the second point is easier to dispute without deep thought, the former merits further clarification.  Mercantilism is the end result of the market unduly influencing the various columns of the estate.  More expansively (and courtesy of Wikimedia’s permissive use policies):

“Mercantilism is a nationalist economic policy that is designed to maximize the exports and minimize the imports for an economy. In other words, it seeks to maximize the accumulation of resources within the country and use those resources for one-sided trade.

The policy aims to reduce a possible current account deficit or reach a current account surplus, and it includes measures aimed at accumulating monetary reserves by a positive balance of trade, especially of finished goods. Historically, such policies might have contributed to war and motivated colonial expansion. Mercantilist theory varies in sophistication from one writer to another and has evolved over time.

Mercantilism promotes government regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting and bolstering state power at the expense of rival national powers.”

Most proud capitalists would beat their chests with pride to read that they proudly represent a modern system dedicated to dismantling these horrible government overreaches.  I’d be right there with you.  As a matter of fact, I am.  I’m actively upset by our modern economic policy which is the most mercantilist of any developed nation and which has supplanted “God’s Will” with a lazy mutant offspring of Social Darwinism as its backbone.  

Adam Smith’s positions can be aligned loosely around five “poles.”  These are the areas of the prevailing mercantilism which he believed to be most in need of correction.  They are:

  1. Economic inefficiency of mercantilism: Smith criticized the prevailing economic system of mercantilism, which emphasized state control, trade restrictions, and the accumulation of gold and silver. He argued that this system led to inefficiencies and hindered economic growth.
  2. Limited understanding of market dynamics: Before Smith, there was a lack of comprehensive understanding of how markets operate. Smith sought to explain how individuals acting in their own self-interest could lead to overall economic benefits for society.
  3. Role of government intervention: Smith questioned the necessity and effectiveness of extensive government intervention in the economy. He argued that the “invisible hand” of the market, driven by self-interest and competition, could regulate the economy more efficiently than government policies.
  4. Division of labor and specialization: Smith recognized the importance of the division of labor and specialization in increasing productivity and economic growth. He used this concept to support his argument for free trade and the benefits of larger markets.
  5. Free trade and international commerce: Smith advocated for free trade and the reduction of trade barriers between nations. He believed that free trade would lead to increased competition, lower prices, and greater economic prosperity for all countries involved.

Consequently, every supposed capitalist picks one or two of these talking points from a grab bag and warps their intention until they can justify the Starbucks they’re putting next to the other Starbucks, across from the Panera, down the street from Caribou Coffee.  An as-yet unmentioned and fundamental aspect of Smith’s thinking, which I’ve left out now for dramatic effect–and I welcome you to gasp audibly–is that the role of the government is to establish the equal playing field necessary for a market to be “free.”  

I don’t know if you knew this, but it’s nearly impossible to win a race when you’re asked to start half-a-lap behind everyone else.  There are edge cases to refute this thinking.  Usain Bolt, in his peak, maybe.  However, the sheer reality is that second and third place would be unduly enriched to the point that everyone’s competition is invalidated.  Apply that same logic to the last spoiled, nepo-brat you chatted with and tell me if you feel like the market is actually “free.”

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s jump back to where this capitalist train got knocked askew and plowed into the basic premise of human decency with all the insight of a mole optometrist.  

For reasons other than a jingoistic American perspective, 1776 was something of a major year for the globe.  From the dawn of the Age of Exploration until then, human beings had been undertaking a policy of colonial imperialism that breached the surly bonds of morality and snowballed rapidly into extractionist resource management and the advent of the chattel slavery system.  Now there was a country to embody that gross ethos for them.  By engaging with the USA, countries all over the world could now hold onto their cake and eat yours.  For the next nearly 100 years, the developed world had absolutely no qualms about either–in no small part due to the fact that the boots-on-the-ground beneficiaries in the Western World had little cause to question from where their newfound luxuries had come.  The period between the French Revolution and the American Civil War was famous for many things, but the advent of critical journalism as the fourth estate is perhaps the most enduring.  As writers turned their attention to the pernicious evils endemic to this misappropriation of Smith’s work, the public became less willing to engage in the system.  To combat that, some genuinely vile thinkers turned to the also-new scientific discoveries of one Charles Darwin to suggest that whereas “God” had given them their wealth, historically, it was now being delivered to them because the “heathens” from whom wealth was being stolen were “inferior.”  

Can you imagine a more winning strategy than telling people they deserve things because they are intrinsically better than someone else?  Nothing you or God could ever do would change the fact that, “some people are slaves because they can’t be anything else.”  Creating a “chosen people” is a fundamental fascist practice.  In that case, it’s often nationalism.  In America’s case, it was something even further removed from reality.  Instead of the already-nebulous concept of borderlines, we began to rank and score people based upon the accrual of fiat currency.  There was now a physical scrip the oligarchs above us could dole out to show which people were chosen and which people were not.  It’s unsurprising that most of these benefits only ever extended to people who looked and felt like those in power, already.  

The first time a human being was imported to the New World as property, we moved one step further away from the Free Market of Smith’s devising.  The natural flow of resources and specialization had been staunched by several thousand wealthy, white, landed gentry-men.  The market was approximately as free as the US Population in 1860, where both Mississippi and South Carolina had enslaved populations making up more than half of the total population.  55.2% and 57.2%, respectively, if you were curious.  

So, I’m sure the freeing of the slaves probably fixed that, though, right?  Since 1900, at least, we’ve been living in the free market, right?  

Wrong-O.  

We still had several issues to work out.  You may have heard of them:  Child Labor, unequal suffrage, the general disenfranchisement of women, and the continued accrual of most wealth in the hands of who used to be the slave-holding elite (who were not punished severely enough during the Reconstruction era) and burgeoning Northern industrial dynasties.  Furthermore, when the slave labor dried up, we took to the habit of calling for the “tired, the poor, the huddled masses” so they could be indentured as wage slaves and maligned by the emergent KKK, who took their faux-Darwinist exceptionalism to a fundamentally untenable extreme.  What wasn’t cheap immigrant labor was made up of sharecroppers and badly provided-for freedmen who took whatever unequal contractual terms they could get.  

Part and parcel of the corporate monstrosity is the capacity for infinite rebranding.  The emperor only has to be naked for a second before he’s, “empowering the human body by demonstration” and then suddenly a shadily-funded congressional edict comes down demanding everyone take off their clothes.  

The voices that needed change were so effectively quashed as to make the zeitgeist of the moment gilded.  A thin foil of something luminous around a rotten core of toxic, radioactive shit.  The accelerating snowball of oppression was reaching critical mass.  The great pyramid scheme had been perfected, and the creation of another marginally costless workforce was the only way to keep it going.  I’ve talked about that before, and won’t bore you again with the details, now (read the earlier post “Dawn of the Digital Plantation” for more on that).  Somehow, in the intervening hundred-plus years, we managed to repaint and rebrand the same kind of injustice over and over until we became numb to the torment.  

The original description of this economic system was called what? 

“Trickle down economics!”

Incorrect.  That’s some Hoover-and-Reaganomics rebranding; part of one of the most effective propaganda campaigns in the modern era.  They didn’t elect a president, they cast one from the backlots of middling Westerns.  The power of calling someone a “welfare queen” is amplified ten-million-fold when a handsome cowboy ‘awh-shucks’ his way through it.  Back to the original point, muckraking (read: noble & justified) journalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries called this economic system “Oat-and-Sparrow” economics.  Why is that?  Well, if you feed all of your oats to a horse, he’s unlikely to digest all that insoluble fiber.  I’m sure he’ll leave some behind in scat piles for the sparrows to pick at.  

Are you satisfied with your life picking through Musk and Bezos’ shit for the oats to feed your family?  How about with your stagnant wages and growing tax and interest burdens?  Does it bother you to experience both while multinational corporations receive massive subsidies, government bailouts, and whose executives are collectively responsible for $160 billion dollars in annual tax delinquency?  

Capitalism, in Smith’s original postulation, is not presented as a panacea.  Human incapacity for nuance turned, “this is a nice way to get more things for less money,” into, “why don’t we decide who eats and who doesn’t this way?”  Capitalism is not God.  It isn’t even a little-g god.  It only solves the issue of non-essential resource allocation.  It does not exist in a vacuum or in a position superior to moral reasoning.  As a matter of fact, Smith lays out some pretty simple parameters to the contrary.  While he did advocate for a laissez-faire approach in the sense of limited government intervention in the workings of the market, he also recognized the importance of certain government actions in creating a level playing field.

In “The Wealth of Nations,” (and again–the text that BIRTHED CAPITALISM) Smith argued that the government had a responsibility to provide certain public goods and services, such as education, infrastructure, and a legal system that enforces contracts and property rights. These provisions were seen as necessary to ensure that individuals could participate in the market on a more equal footing.  Almost as if a free market can only exist in a fundamentally free society.  Voluntary association is the foremost tentpole of Smith’s original reckoning and, much like the early church abandoning the individualistic bent of the Gnostic texts, the parts of the ethos which empowered all people were neutered and discarded.  

However, it’s important to note that Smith’s views on equality were shaped by the context of his time. I don’t want to provide the illusion that any great thinker should be considered a proud icon solely by virtue of his critical thinking skills.  Good ideas do not always translate to good men, generally.  For instance, among the great thinkers responsible for what little actual freedom there is in the Western World, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract is a boon to all mankind; his running, bare-assed in the street at women in hopes of an errant spank was not (look it up).  You are not required to be a paragon of virtue to be virtuous.  We are all an amalgam of the society which spawns us, and it’s hard to recognize that without the benefit of hindsight.  Judge not, lest ye be judged.  Going back beyond Smith himself, and regardless of anything else he ever did, his work’s primary focus was on removing artificial barriers to economic participation, such as monopolies and trade restrictions, which he saw as benefiting a select few at the expense of the general population. He believed that by removing these barriers and promoting free competition, individuals would have greater opportunities to improve their economic standing.  Full stop.

Which part of that sounds like the economy you live in?  

Social mobility is a myth perpetuated by the oligarchs who consume our lives as an excuse for when they find another unindicted co-conspirator to elevate to their parasitic equal.  Wealth is still distributed pursuant to “God’s Will,” we’ve merely traded in our gods for shitty, little, middle-aged men and their insulating field of cronies and bought politicians.  We let the wolf in sheep’s clothing pilfer the larder and run off with the flock.  He lends them back to us at a premium that increases annually for no reason at all.  At which point does human life become the commodity being traded back and forth in these shadowy backroom handshakes?  How many scores of human beings were entirely cut out of the economic picture during greased palm passing on board the Lolita Express?  This kind of wilful corruption is also evident in the increasing government-sponsored monopolization of key industries and services.

Name a search engine you used today that wasn’t Google.  Did you order something from anything *other* than Amazon, lately?  How about that really great array of affordable electric cars you have to pick from?  

The human capability to rationalize our own bad actions is almost impressive in its capacity to absolve oneself of wrongdoing.  Our willingness to rationalize the bad actions of others is a preposterous evolution of that concept.  It’s time we stopped justifying bad actors for the promise of eventual progress.  The ‘progress’ they promise is wildly unequal and it’s high time we stop supporting nefarious regimes out of complacency.  As much as I hate the reductio-ad-Nazism trend in modern rhetoric, it’s hard to pick a better illustration than the road to Bergen-Belsen being paved by apathy to injustice which does not impact you directly–at least not today.  The general trend in history is that if you do not stand up for others, there will be no one left to stand up for you when the spotlight of kleptocracy finally deigns to cross your path.  

So when you look at a political candidate, supposedly the face of capitalism, and you see that he received 100% of his fortune via inheritance and has made nothing of it–raise your eyebrows.  When the “strongest economy on Earth” is propped up with insane tariffs and anticompetitive practices, alongside a long track record of war profiteering as a national pastime–raise your eyebrows.  When campaign donations are undisclosed and unlimited–raise your eyebrows.  

Most of the things you supposed-capitalists are asking for would be the death of the free market and of what modicum of freedom and social mobility to the refusal of mercantilism allowed us, once upon a time.  

It’s time we reclaim our own economy, which is of and by the people, to be for them once again.  We’ve built empires solely with the power of outsourcing our externalities.  Whether by extracting resources elsewhere or by diminishing the populace of another place to create a marginally-cost-free workforce, we have made sure the only thing in our backyard is the above ground pool and truck on blocks. 

I ask you to resist that impulse; to consider the miseries endemic to the trappings of pitiful luxury that have trickled down to you as a pale, cheap imitation of something for your “betters.”  To build a functional democracy, we have to build it back in that neglected backyard.  Competition between equals takes place at a local level, removed from the concept of multinational chains and unchallenged mergers and acquisitions.  The individual is not supposed to be a data point amid millions; the individual is meant to be the primary unit of society in a civilization structured from the ground up, as a collection of independently operable and sustainable cells.  

Until the eventual catastrophic reckoning (whatever it is; I’m betting climate change), all you can do is start small.  Pay attention to your local elections.  Get to know the difference between a right and a responsibility.  Take on the latter to acquire the former.  Stop shopping big box until the government offers the same subsidies the big boys get to your mom and pop shop.  Resist the ongoing urge to grow infinitely and grow intimately, in a way that empowers the world immediately around you.  If everyone’s backyard is in order, purview entirely to their efforts and their efforts alone, the entire world becomes a quilt of beautiful squares.  

From Hell,

–The Strangest

Source Decay

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You’ve lived your life, whether you know it or not, gripped by the fear of a myth.  In much the same way someone aquake with the prospect of Sasquatch might be looked down upon, perhaps it’s time to look down upon the uninsightful myriad who perpetuate the false notion that scarcity has to be part of the human condition in the year 2024.  

I’ve been told that the world is getting better.  This message is usually communicated by the idea that people are living longer and everyone is increasingly equal in the eyes of the giant organizations and institutions that bat them about as data points.  As much as I’d like to really dig into the various statistical reasons that both of those are intentionally misleading figures, I’ll suffice the digression with this:  “Tell me what numbers you want, and I’ll find you the sample audience that feels that way.”

I want to talk about whether or not the world is getting better, with my boots on the ground.  Someone just starved to death in Africa.  Someone else just decapitated his unfaithful wife in Indonesia.  Forty-eight-gajillion dollars in goods are being stolen and traded and swapped and stolen again.  We treat each and every one of these incidents as isolated disruptions in the stream.  We actively choose to ignore the negative space between these conclusions that suggests something considerably more pernicious and universal.  Every time one of these tragedies occurs, we punish the action and not the system which created the action.  

Limited exclusively in the hands of 1% of the global population is the power and means necessary to literally absolve the world of physical need.  The only thing preventing that is the time they all spend at each other’s throats, creating competition where none exists in order to satisfying that aching place in their spirit which correctly identifies them as essentially unspectacular when set against the enormity of the species and the infinite span of geologic time.  

I often hear competition touted as the only means to founder innovation, but I struggle to see the forty-thousand inedible flavors of an ubiquitous sandwich cookie as innovation.  Competition certainly breeds more ‘stuff,’ but it has bred ‘stuff’ which is actively antithetical to improving the universal human experience.  Any ‘innovation’ resulting in the proliferation of automobiles was obviously less interested in improvement and much more interested in maximizing the most selfish impulses of human beings, now confined to environmentally catastrophic machines that increase the individual footprint to SUV size.  Competition, as always, gratifies the friends and cronies of those winning and destroys the soul of the thing by demanding it be made cheaper and more plentiful until it becomes simultaneously indispensable and worthless.  Competition created a human existence which is, more or less, a subscription to a wan form of brand-powered life.  

And the vision that set the snowball to rolling is dead.  The odds that *your* direct supervisor founded the business for which you work is an increasingly unlikely prospect, as your jaded, millennial middle manager doing his best Jordan Belmont impersonation is merely a cog in a greater bureaucratic machine.  Worse than that, however, is that even the C-suite of most companies had little to do with their founding, any longer.  We created a series of amorphous, cancerous masses of capital.  Whatever dynamism is required to found a business venture is capped and snuffed by the passage of time, either when a small business is cannibalized by a larger one threatened by its product or when founders pass on and are replaced by the pale facsimiles found in their ingrate nepo-babies and brown-nosed cronies.  So the process becomes the point and an ethos of creating a problem to sell a solution enamors the executive class with the idea of activity instead of action–to dance as fast as they can to prevent anyone from noticing how naked the emperor seems.  

Then they’re too big to fail and swaddled so closely in the quietly-spoken trappings of socialism which they pay corporate-friendly politicians to decry when implemented for the common person.  These great beasts, borne on the backs of a paycheck-to-paycheck nation, are the unique beneficiary of bailout after bailout, despite their predatory business practices being directly related to the dire pendulousness of our economic state.  Immoral wealth disparities and the weaponization of debt has replaced social contact in an era where investment in society is wholly being stifled by society’s complete lack of interest in reciprocal investment in its populace. Your value in the social hegemony we all choose daily to perpetuate is determined by someone who has progressively less idea what you do for them aside from, “keeping them on top of the pile.”  Data models require data points and rendering a human to a data point requires the debasement of all their essential humanity.  The advent of AI is yet another weapon in the tyrant’s arsenal, as they require fewer and fewer essential workers to analyze and enact their distant directives. When an AI manager handles operations for an automated manufacturing system, where then do all these people go?


We have reached a point in our history where it is vital for the government to perform its role as the guardian of the people from undue burden.  Many industries have become dominated wholly by conglomerates with incestuous, intermingled boards.  They have become hydra-headed monsters reaching well beyond state lines, often in flagrant violation of antitrust and anticompetition law.  If not always the letter, then certainly the spirit. There is a solution to this problem which has been successfully undertaken many times in Europe wherein these companies which have become “too big to fail” are nationalized, corrected, and set back to work with better leadership once the damage has been corrected.  I vote that America takes this a step further and reduces all business to none-larger-than regional.  If Amazon is dead set on operating universally, they still must incorporate and enact itself as a confederation of smaller scale enterprises more tuned to the populations they serve.  Any business of a sufficient size becomes, in itself, ‘government.’  It is preposterous to allow seditious, anti-human governments to continue to coexist within our borders when they do so to the explicit detriment of our own representative democracy.  They must be reduced to their proper place in the social order, where they serve their clients, customers, and workers instead of some vague notion of “infinite growth.”  No institution, given such control over the modern lifestyle, should attempt to meet every need for every person.  Our population outpaced that style of leadership many moons ago.  “Of the people, by the people, and for the people” is not a marketing slogan; it is the groundwater of democracy.  At the level which human beings are viewed by these multinational leviathans, at the macroscopic height, the people look like bits and bytes to be shuffled and reshuffled until the results come up how they’d like them.  

Allow me to preempt your rebuttal:

“These are complex, systemic challenges with no easy answers. Heavy-handed government intervention and constraints on corporate scale risk stifling economic dynamism and growth. Open competition, even if imperfect, is still the best system for allocating resources and spurring innovation.”

Anyone who thinks “open competition” exists in a world where A) the inheritance system does little to claw back undue benefits from the unexceptional children of the vaguely exceptional businessman and B) the largest companies, headed up by some of the most devout conservatives and free-market proponents, are the recipients of a disproportionate array of subsidies and handouts which prop up their anti-humanist proliferation.  The former is feudal; the latter is socialist (though lopsidedly benefitting the vague “individual” notion of corporate personhood).  The idea that a corporation is an entity making decisions outside its leadership and culture is a brilliant move in protectionist legislation and in propaganda.  Dismantling corporate personhood is the first step towards clawing back human decency from the grasp of foolish fiduciary responsibility.  When companies are “fined” and “penalized,” it does nothing to correct the corrupt wellspring of that malfeasance.  Until we corner those oligarchs as they are–as parasites abusing a system they’ve sculpted like a warped bonsai–we will be unable to rectify our grand failures as a species.  

Another rebuttal:

“The dramatic reduction in extreme poverty in China over the past few decades is directly related to the expansion of their free market system. According to World Bank data, in 1990 there were over 750 million people in China living below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day (adjusted for purchasing power parity). By 2015, that number had fallen to less than 10 million.”

On top of the issue that cherry picking statistics causes in a discussion, let’s compare this to something more tangible.  The international poverty line hovers around $2.00 a day.  That, alone, should cause most people to wretch violently.  But let’s quell the urge to spew and consider even further–there are still *10 million people who are not making more than $2.00 a day.*  Any system which allows that to happen is bad enough but one who allows it to happen while the wealthiest of our society loose the surly bonds of morality and ethics and use their extravagant wealth to peer behind the veil of good taste into depravity unbecoming.  10,000,000 people made less than $2.00, today, while Bryan Johnson, 45-year old ‘tech tycoon,’ spends incalculable sums taking blood from his son to inject into his own veins in some vain and foolish pursuit to “reverse his aging.”  What would have once been viewed as heavy-handed ‘eat the rich’ satire is literally occurring and no one is doing anything to stop it. 

The joy of it is that they only *want* you to feel trapped by it.  Anyone who tells you to “accept the things you cannot change” is not demonstrating wisdom.  They are demonstrating a complete lack of imagination.  

From Hell,

–The Strangest 

Poems and a Story from the Edge of the Abyss

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Odes to the Void:

I. 

The warm smell of bad coffee

mingles mindlessly with the

maddening crackle of permanent

white noise machines

to underscore the fact that

this is someone else’s reality

and you’re merely being forced

–like a sharecropper–

to prop it up and play along.  

The expectation of humanity

in the workplace

is increasingly like

looking for gold in a uranium mine

and hoping the fortune finds you

before the cancer.

The expectation of humanity

outside the workplace

is a fool’s errand

resulting most often in death,

of the body of the soul and

of the dreams that nourish them both.  

The void calls in mellifluous tongues

from some place I can’t discern

and the clarion call of dull static

erupting ceaselessly from the

speaker above my head

nudges me closer.  

Sartre’s hell pales to the level just below it:

Hell is the people you work for.

~~~ 

II.

Somewhere, there’s a lifeboat

without an occupant

as I grasp askance at tides

and recoil at what brushes

against my legs in the abyss.

I’d taken stock of the sinking ship

with the equanimity of a drunk

and the awareness of that drunk’s

disinterested support system.  

I elected to do nothing.  

And I watched the women and children

clinging to one another, weeping;

But there was still liquor in the ice, so

I asked the dance band for a lively one

to drown out the dying

The captain’s revolver is at his temple

and the crew is playing taps over

the waterlogged corpses of their kinsmen

The water rushes in, the deck splits,

and I realize there’s no one left to die with.

So I leap into the water,

grown ugly and whitecapped 

in my inattention

and notice little makeshift vessels

where they’ve already resorted

to cannibalism.  

May the dark deep well of the ocean wash us all clean.  

~~~

III.

It’s 9:21 on a Monday morning

and I’m already out of things to do

except stare at the blank page

and try to codify the maelstrom of my mind

(the tempest in a teapot)

into something more closely resembling

shouting madness into a drainage culvert

to comfort in the return call of an echo.  

Between A and Z is the weight and sum

of human expression;

and in that primordial soup of thought

lies an essential truth.  

Like some code in an airport novel,

the life of the mind is one of 

parsing right from wrong

until all that is left is one, true sentence.  

There are false positives.  

There are wars and crucifixions,

all on the proliferation of unreal truth.  

The destination became the journey

as invective became the whole measure

and invention became a byproduct of

the end and the dying.  

What truth there may be,

if there may be,

Is highly unlikely to amount to:

“Mexicans, go to hell.”

~~~

IV.

At the bottom of my soul,

which feels to be wedged in too-small

space between my heart and lungs,

there is a black, cancerous mass

which seems unlikely to metastasize

and contents itself with a death

by one million cuts.  

I feel the pressure of knowing

pressing at the seams of my skull

and threatening to spill out

the well of vitriol and venom

that mutated into the gnawing,

tumescent sickness of aura.  

The eventual escape of death

is merely another symptom

of the malady, carried congenitally

by the last, gasping breaths of empire.

Millions will rise to replace you;

and nothing you were born to do

matters to anyone else.  

The villainy and the tyranny

come part and parcel

the cruelty and the crassness

endemic. I hope our last hacking cough

is a miserable one

and that those who live to see it

in their billion dollar bunkers

finally fulfill their ouroboroan destiny

when the luxury food runs out.   

America (or: the unexpected virtue of virtuelessness)

The match wouldn’t strike on the wet flint strip, the tarp roof had a tear that was becoming a skylight, and the thick carpet of mold implied his food wasn’t going to carry him any further.  The little cartoon songbirds fluttered around his head and faces appeared and disappeared in the shortening light of an oncoming night below freezing.  Sam closed his eyes tight and rocked until he found the rhythm that shook them all away.  Even still, shadowy figures danced in and out of his periphery, whispering to one another about him.  Sam couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying, but he felt in his heart they were laughing at him.  Laughing at how he can’t even take care of himself.  Making fun of the way he can’t keep a job and how everyone he knows thinks he’s a dangerous nutcase.  Snickering about how pathetic he is.  

He closed his eyes again and pressed the heels of his palms into them until green and blue flashes crash and scatter like a thunderstorm out past the ocean’s horizon.  He presses until it hurts, happy to see things he knows he can control and things he knows are at least a little bit real.  The mist was becoming a drizzle and hopefully just became rain.  Sleet would cave the ramshackle tent immediately in on itself.  Sam didn’t have anywhere else to go.  Even in the shelter, he can’t afford his medicine, and the shelters never let him stay when they realize what’s wrong with him.  They can’t take on the liability, they say, and they try to have him taken back to the other place.  He can’t go back there.  Some people say he just won’t, but he can’t.  

Thinking about the other place makes flashes of blood and guts appear and disappear in his head.  He hears words like ‘meat’ and ‘bone.’  Sam doesn’t hurt people, but sometimes he’s afraid he might.  

The drizzle was then rain, and he could see it starting to glaze over into a slushy frost in the potholes on the blacktop.  His teeth chattered in morse code, communicating messages of comfort from God.  God would swallow him up and hold him.  God didn’t talk to him much, anymore, and he was worried he had disappointed him.  

That’s what Sam was thinking about when he froze to death under a torn blue tarp, stiff with ice.  

Thirty-six floors above him, Jeff Bezos shot a hot wad of cum from a chemically assisted hardon into his mostly-synthetic fiancee on a $2500-a-night hotel bed.  He was basking in the afterglow, thinking about ordering half a grapefruit and how cool it was when he wore that cowboy hat to space.  He wished the sirens outside would calm the fuck down.  The only voice he heard in his head was his own, telling him what a fucking superstar he was.  

Dawn of the Digital Plantation

/ thestrangestinastrangeland / Leave a comment

There’s something considerably more terrifying than Romero’s dead shambling over the horizon.  It’s a brand new slave class, courtesy of approximately 50 years of intermittently successful research into artificial intelligence.  

Perhaps the strongest piece of evidence in the continual assessment of whether or not human beings have an inborn inclination towards morality or immorality is the fact that, despite several attempts to alter our behavior grandly, human progress until now has been more or less entirely dependant upon indentured labor and the systemic subjugation of a large subset of the population underneath some much smaller and more nefarious group.  

While literal chattel slavery has been decreasing in attractiveness in the developed world for some 400 years, those wily autocrats never fail to recreate the system by measures and by shades in the economic vacuum left by the complete dissolution of a labor force which marginally costs zero.  Even in the supposed democratic powerhouse from which this piece is being written, the wheels of commerce would grind to a halt without a powerful combination of 1) undocumented labor, 2) Outsourced sweatshop labor, and 3) labor which is paid well below living wage, creating an endemic system of need not unlike the disenfranchising practices utilized against freedmen sharecroppers during the Reconstruction Era.  Thus, it is with no small measure of fanfare that the fledgling AI revolution has been heralded as an end to menial labor.  While I lack the longitudinal perspective necessary to debate the relative morality of creating something arguably intelligent solely for the purpose of subjugating it, I have enough human experience to state–unequivocally–that ‘the end of menial labor’ will do approximately zero to alleviate human suffering unless proactive steps are taken to minimize the externalities congenital to the birth of an infinitely cheap, massively pliable slave class which can be comfortably housed in the cloud.  

If we know, for a demonstrated fact, that unemployed and unhoused human beings are not a primary concern of the wealthy oligarchs who marionette their puppet government through the legislated graft of lobbying, then it would be preposterous to expect any consideration for the remaining dregs of an erased middle class absolutely set to be cannibalized by a corporate world hungry for this mythical digital labor force incapable of collective bargaining.  The high barriers to economic independence are already made higher by a hegemonic crippling of social mobility.  Do we dare imagine a world where these new corporate gentry are no longer even  remotely beholden to the cries of ‘mere mortals’ as their indispensable workforce is made entirely of digital artiface? 

Do I dare to eat a peach?    

Without careful consideration, the rapid adoption of AI among the corporate world could be a bigger blow to democracy than the evolution and adoption of the world wide web and its subsequent dot-com boom which worked in tandem to delegitimize dreams of fiber optic freedom.  We replaced them with kitschy amusement parks for business interests.  To borrow a quote from my favorite fictional author:  “The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24-hour-a-day access to kiddie porn.”

The glib wisdom of Hank Moody aside, it’s difficult to imagine explaining to those who were there at its inception that the internet itself would grow into a tool for mass manipulation and the transmission of corporate-and-consumer messages to the masses.  As a matter of fact, it’s apparent that it didn’t occur to them, as it was released into the wild where it supplanted a natural sociological food web with a soulless internet of things in which average citizens are merely a small and inconsequential data point to be rearranged ad nauseum at the whims of daytrading masses.  How is it, in a world and a nation where the individual is continually connected to every other individual by this invisible lasso of gigs and bits, that our self-limited American democracy has become less direct, more capricious, and less involved in improving the daily individual experience of most of its populace?

Yet here we are again, at the precipice of technological change, which our species has continually failed to culturally or intellectually advance in pace with since the discovery of long-term, preserved food storage.  Since the dawn of civilization, mankind has often held the tools necessary to advance itself holistically, and chosen instead to exploit mindlessly its many gifts.  The human being, left in a moral vacuum, has the natural tendency to act as an agent of general entropy and decay.  As an electrical current follows Ohm’s Law through the path of least resistance, so too does a person follow its biological equivalent past good taste and into the depravity of selfishness.  

The central human myths, globally, share some version of a particular story that is arguably the most ubiquitous.  Pandora opens the box; someone eats an apple and puts on pants.  Our capacity to want more than we are afforded is the core component of the monomyth.  We are acutely aware of our capacity for avarice to the point of our own undoing and have been since the dawn of recorded history.  The story of the human experience is one of evolution curtailed and warped by the wilful ignorance of our fatal flaw.  Whether or not you’d like to blame how cool Michael Douglas is, personally, it’s ever apparent that the postmodern era has been beset almost entirely by a grotesque predilection towards embracing those greedy, ratlike tendencies.  

We pride ourselves on our capacity for evolution; that human beings are infinitely adaptable by virtue of whatever combination of higher order thinking aggregates to ‘sentience.’  Yet, we change precious little.  We are apes clubbing one another, championing might making right, with the only thing that really changes being the size and the shape of the weapons we use.  It would stand to reason, after centuries of being clubbed by physically stronger apes, someone would use that wily higher order thinking to redefine ‘might’ along terms wherein even the most unexceptional can flourish.  Accrual of a fiat currency is a great way to claim might without due cause or associated benefit to society.  For several centuries, that dark wrinkle of the American Experiment has been innocuous enough to be swallowed.  The dissolved Occupy Wall Street movement was an immature stroke at addressing the issue, drowned in its infancy by the powerful pro-corporate propaganda machine of Big Media and its corrupted Fourth Estate power.  Only now, as this new wave of AI implementation threatens the scattered remnants of a middle-managing middle-class, has the public become anxious and conscious of an impending reality where baseline humans are separated by an enslaved and digital middle class from the executive echelons where the American Dream takes on a corpulent bent.  I only hope it is not too late to uproot the sinister infiltration of corporate interests into the groundwater of our still-young nation.  

The executive-elite are removed enough from the work you do for them to consider anything done by anyone else ‘menial.’  There will be no liberation.  There will be a concentration of miserable millions consigned to toil away in the lowest rungs of an economy with an impermeable moat of inhumanity growing wider between them and anything besides a sisyphean struggle of building equity in someone else’s ambition.  

Rod Serling would have me submit for your consideration the following:  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/06/ai-interviews-job-applications

Right now, today, someone wasn’t hired because a mostly unsupervised AI middle-manager didn’t pass their resume on to their human boss–wherever on the back nine he may have been.  And you and I didn’t do a damned thing about it. 

From hell,

—The Strangest