contraction

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born” – Antonio Gramsci

Everything expands and contracts. The culture, the economy, the optimism of humankind. Time progresses in a very linear way insofar as we experience life down here as third dimensional creatures, but the world seems to experience looping refrains that mimic but do not mirror the past. It rises and it falls. The 1920s saw first-wave feminism and those crazy flapper chicks smoking cigarettes and showing their legs off. It buckled back into the modesty and housewifery of the 1950s. Their daughters wore bikinis and painted peace signs on their boobs. Et cetera. Right now, we’re in a contraction, and it’s a big and fucking painful one.

And I mean, you can trace the threads of history back as far as you’d like. Everything leads into everything else, that’s obvious. We like for stories to have clean and neat little chapters and beginnings and endings. But the truth is that the tapestry of history is more like a wet ball of spaghetti noodles that is for some reason three hundred feet long. One might go back the Hundred Years’ War, and call that the end of feudalism and the beginning of the State and capitalism as it is today. When the hereditary bloodline monarchies gave way to the institutional mechanisms that still dominate in our time. When kings and kingdoms morphed into heads of state and countries. When serfdom became wage employment. It’s the same shit, it just evolved in a way to shift culpability. The same rich, privileged shitheads are in charge. But now you can’t necessarily overthrow them by raiding their castles. They are the figureheads of an institution. The office remained, even if the bloodline was lost. The common man still did not own anything outside personal property, but he was free to serve any master of the means of production.

Or you could look at the Industrial Revolution, for my purposes roughly the time between the mass production of guns to the invention of the automobile. This period represents the annihilation of the merchant, specialist class. The folks who were not nobles, but could forge a sort of landed-knight recognition that was based on merit. No longer were these guys needed. Mass production meant that expertise was outmoded, and the people who owned the production were the very same that inhabited the upper class.

Everything expands and contracts.

Now we’re in a different block of time, one that is prey to the internet. In several hundreds’ years time, historians will look back and say that we had a really hard time adjusting to the internet. It shouldn’t be that surprising. We all have little internet access machines in our pocket all day. They notify us when something happens, when any interaction occurs. They fit in your hand. They promote “high engagement” subjects. Things that will make you either really happy or really mad. It’s a machine to hijack your sentience and proffer more engagement. It’s a black rock that demands more and more of your attention, and it gives you dopamine hits when you obey it. We’re having some trouble with it.

And capitalism has sucked up so many resources. So many creature comforts for the little guys have been getting squeezed that people feel kinda desperate. Food is more expensive. Rent has gone way up. Gas is pricey. Everywhere you look, shit is getting more expensive. It’s more onerous to live your life. The owner class is trying to pinch your fucking veins and squeeze that last bit of blood out. They have no frontier anymore. They have no great wiz-bang technology to offer. Even in the last twenty years, there were new things that consumers wanted to get their hands on. A smartphone? Yeah, sure! I’d love to check my bank account and search for a hotel while I’m out and about on a vacation. Facebook? Yeah, I’d love to show pictures of my wedding to all of my old friends and family. Now? You can pay thousands of dollars for some crypto currency shit in the hopes that it’ll be worth more later. Why? Why would I do that? You can go into Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse and have a work meeting in a shitty 3D video game realm. Why? Why would I do that? It’s just the new frontier. The 3 or 4 media networks have been talking about it, so you’d better get on board.

Because the regular, straight-laced world is so crummy, a bunch of tech-bro types have also started to co-opt other cultures. A lot of them have started “micro-dosing” hallucinogens (like mushrooms or LSD or whatever) to Boost Their Productivity, which is such an egregious example of putting the cart before the horse, I can’t even really explain why it makes me hiss into my own teeth so hard. Aaron Rodgers, former Packers hall of fame quarterback, has famously done ayahuasca and made documentaries on Netflix about it and stuff. He’s looking at it like a Performance Booster, in the way that the tech bros do. Like, the idea that you have to optimize yourself for…some reason. I know zero people who have done ayahuasca, because you have to be rich to fly to another fucking continent to do some weird ritual where you can ceremonialize your own awakening or else you’d like your money back, Karen.

Anyway, I was thinking about love. Not Jordan Love, but just love. It’s astonishing that we don’t factor love into our greater political, cultural decisions. We act like those things are somehow outside the bounds of public policy. Like Law should be devoid of a human element. Why? We invite a lot of hatred and suspicion into our laws. Why is love thought to be too wishy-washy or stupid or feeble or something?

Ask somebody what the most consequential days of their lives were. Probably the day they got married, the day their kids were born, the day their parents died. All of them are marked by a profound love. All of those things are rooted in our connection to each other. Capitalism, this world, they try to separate us, to atomize us down to a single consumer who will purchase according to the algorithm. This world is contracting.

It expands, grueling, groveling, from us.


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