Emi ·
Over the past years I’ve been reading a lot of posts, articles, blogs, watching a lot of video essays, listening to podcasts and everything else you can do to keep up with the discourse online. And I have to be honest, I’ve been getting a bit frustrated.
Everyone seems to be looking into their own niche and isolating more and more. They go into the deepest rabbit holes trying to diagnose why the thing they love the most is not in its prime anymore. And this is not just nostalgia, there is a clear degradation of the topic each group loves. You probably can think of your own passions and how they are worse than they’ve ever been.
What frustrates me is that each one of these groups is so self-centered that they don’t see what I believe is the “true reason” why everything is shit lately. To be fair, the mental gymnastics and reasoning people go to explain why something is failing is fascinating to me, and there are good reasons that could explain some level of decay. Of course the discontinuation of physical disks of your favorite console is a tragedy, but the solution will never be to complain about it. The solution is understanding that the same reason why you can’t buy a game without internet is why your neighborhood is being emptied out of permanent residents. The same reason why reading comprehension is so low. The same reason why you keep scrolling an endless feed even if you don’t want to. Same reason why they are making another remake or sequel of your favorite movie. I could go on.
Let me be a bit more specific. People, no matter which city you are living in right now, complain about how hard it is to rent a place to live. They all complain as if it was a local problem they are experiencing. “Oh, you are looking for a rental here in Berlin? Good luck, it is one of the most difficult cities to find one”. You can replace “Berlin” with any city and you’d be right. I’ve been hearing this from people all over the world, and they all try to come up with the reason why. “The city is too small and can’t grow because of geographic reasons”. Maybe they will tell you that it is because “digital nomads moved in and are hiking up the prices”. Maybe they will tell you that the reason is because the city is not building more houses, etc… I believed all of those arguments myself.
But when it comes to finding a solution to the housing crisis, people try to find local solutions: Rent cap, building more, regulations! They are all local solutions to a global problem. Today it’s a data center in your backyard, but next week it will be a data center in mine. It could be a swarm of cameras tracking every move or a ruined mass transport system with eternal delays and interruptions. We are NEVER going to be able to solve any of these issues in your city from within your city.
Could this meme replace my post? Probably yes.
I don’t know how it happened, but it is somewhat of a taboo to acknowledge that the issue is capitalism. People are voluntarily blind to this. And I know that there’s people that would rather leave comments saying that this would be worse under communism, as if this was the only alternative to whatever we have now. The lack of creativity and how asphyxiated political and economic discourse is makes everyone do everything but to try to address it. This is the ultimate reason why everything is so shit today. The main reason why your games are not going to be burnt into a disk inside a plastic case. The main reason why you will blame your neighbour or your local politician for your problems.
Maybe capitalism worked well for many people for a while. Any system will work well until it reaches a breaking point. Then you either change it or you watch it become the worst version of itself. You can find examples of this everywhere. Think of the security controls at an airport. They might have been useful for a while, but now they are a zombie system keeping itself alive without a real reason. But who wants to do the work to get rid of it? I think we are way past the time where capitalism helped us get to where we are now, but it is time to leave it behind. Not amount of reforms will make it work better, it will only prolong the agony until everything collapses.
Now, to close the blogpost with the quote that any generic pseudo-intellectual youtuber would drop around their video essay:
It it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.