Frankenpolitics

How Global Capital Broke Democracy and Social Movements

De: George Tsakraklides

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Our civilisation is no longer run by humans, but by profit. Society has become a money machine with no blood, no pulse, and no other preoccupation than to monetize itself and the original humans who created it. Within this dystopian context, even humans themselves have become products: they need to be bought and sold so that they can exist. They need to be used to have a purpose. And they need to lie about themselves in order to be loved.

As witnessed during the industrial revolution, aggressive commoditisation across manufacturing resulted in inferior quality consumer goods, significant loss of human life, as well as human consciousness. Thanks to technologies which are already racing past us, this model of commoditisation and value erosion is now extending to areas we thought profit could never reach: social services, mental health, our very attention span and need for human contact, and most importantly, our civil liberties and access to information. Our lives are being held captive online, sold out to AI machines and replaced by cheap alternatives enabling the economic necrosystem to draw its greatest profits ever. As the global consumaverse converts every aspect of human existence into a single-use commodity, our life is both devalued and shortened: workers are only as good as their last burnout, relationships only as good as the last iOS Tinder update, and democracies only as resilient as the number of Taylor Swift albums they lasted for.

But the biggest damage has been the commoditisation of truth. When news are engineered in AI information nurseries, paid for by the highest bidder and unleashed like forever chemicals into the river of media vomitus, then truth is the little fish in the river that never stood a chance. The media has become a broadcast channel for global capitalist interests, where zombie journalists and puppet politicians regurgitate the same lies again and again until they become the truth. As our planet accelerates towards a civilisation-ending climate crisis, reality is being banished from existence, labelled as terrorism and put on mute to protect the profits. Climate activists are given jail sentences longer than real terrorists, democracy is reduced to a sugary breakfast cartoon show with plenty of product placements, and Gaza manages to outshine Auschwitz as the first ever concentration death camp with live cameras on set for everyone to watch. If you are searching for the truth, there’s nothing to see in the mainstream media. Your safest bet is to assume that everything you’re being told, or shown, is probably a lie.

This was all perpetrated by global capital: an entity which operates across borders, time zones and language barriers. Our collective failure to panic, to sound the alarm over the planet’s polycrisis, is testament to the nerve-paralyzing effects of consumatronic narcissism, meaningless work and entertainment distractions which keep us constantly mummified within this colourful consumer theme park that modern business has meticulously curated for us. Our future depends on claiming back our consciousness and whatever is left of our humanity, from the system which tried to profit from them. The essays in this book unravel the role that capital has played in everything that is wrong with the world today, and what it will take to resist.