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Literally taking away the bread and circuses
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this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
245 points (100.0% liked)
chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
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Literally one of the smartest things that Capital could do is to pool a tiny amount of their resources and make Netflix and Youtube free for the masses. These are incredible tools for keeping the masses placated.
one of the only good things about the stage of capitalism that we're in right now is that the capitalists are complete fucking idiots with no instincts for the preservation of their class. the competence has been fully bred out of them Habsburg-style at this point
Death to America
Conversely, they've realized the general population is even more servile and neutered then they expected and they are doing this to constantly reinforce there's nothing we can do and they'll make things as shitty as they want and nobody's gonna do anything about it. They're trying to soft sell us on being back in a feudal society and they're about 60% of the way there.
Working in exchange for housing with no pay is gonna be a thing again in our lifetimes.
"Now watch this drive" but about the inherent contradictions of capitalism.
Honestly if they take us back to feudal relationships it makes it easier to do revolution because it completely decomplicates who the oppressors are to the average person. It makes the enemy easy to see. One of the biggest factors of capitalism that helps them prevent revs is how the enemy is less identifiable.
I don't think this is actually true, feudal relations were very stable and persisted for millennia in some places. It feels that way because the propaganda machine isn't justifying feudal social relations currently. Company housing for example is slowly becoming more popular, even in the west.
The corvee labour system makes it extremely obvious you're working for someone else and more than you need to than the wage system where you work some number of hours get some number of money in wages and go home. The amount you work to pay your own wage isn't obvious. Having to work for a feudal lord or having to give up things to them directly via taxation makes them easily hated and peasant uprisings happened all the time because of it, what they didn't have was a conscious rejection of feudalism as a system but they knew who to blame (other than Jews obviously). Under capitalism people often complain about taxation and burgled theft because they make it plain who's taking what from whom.
Peasant uprisings were much less common than labor unrest today, though granted that isn't exactly the same.
Additionally, exploitation in peasant economies was not always as transparent as you indicate. Often, it was at least slightly hidden. For example, a peasant might be required to give sacks of grain to the lord who owns the mill, and instead of being allowed to keep some for seeds, they must buy the seeds from the lord, inequalities here can hold the exploitation. Further, debt was a constant of feudal relations and gives a veneer of legitimacy to exploitation, just as it does today. Further, surplus value extraction can be seen as acceptable to the peasant if they believe it is justified. The lord can claim that his cut is in exchange for protection, insurance, and other services. This applies to taxation today.
Good points.
well that is some wishful thinking.
I think it's arguably that they are beginning to see the end of the window of profitability and so they are gutting things on the way out. Obviously there are true failsons fucking things up like Elon, but a lot of it I think is actually them acting reasonably from the standpoint of quarterly gains and perhaps even medium-term profit-maximizing, because how intrusive Netflix ads are during a nuclear war doesn't really make a difference (meaning short-term gain is the only thing to optimize).
Suffering from success
It's a shame the ruling class can't agree on anything if it gets in the way of their short term returns.
That's assuming Capital exists as a single centrally planned homogenate, rather than a set of competing factions all warring over the stream of revenue that media consumers produce. We did once try something akin to this, with the Public Broadcasting Service. And it was very successful, at least for a little while, in its effort to command a large audience and manipulate public opinion along a liberal ideological view.
But now we have a much more Anarcho-Capitalist approach to infotainment. We've implemented a tiered and tranched distribution of media services, from Talk Radio on the bottom-of-the-barrel free feed to Pay-Per-View streaming services on the high end. They all serve the same fundamental role as Netflix/Youtube, but the lower tiers tend to have a more vulgar and poorly produced advertising methodology.
And people still consume these channels voraciously. No shortage of folks who will suffer through five minute YouTube ads or who eventually buckle to the "Please Pay Me!!" pop-ups that soft gate the service. Similarly, Netflix has no trouble maintaining a subscriber pool of a quarter billion registered accounts (with households averaging north of 2 viewers).
The payment model serves two purposes. It forces people to register their participation - through an online account - and allows digital tagging and tracking of consumption habits. It also provides a threat of deprivation to disobedient proles. If you don't clock in, you won't have enough money to pay your bills. That includes entertainment. The cost isn't particularly prohibitive, even to the poorest economic cohorts. But you are required to buy in and sign up and maintain the account, which puts an onus on people to keep in the good graces of the capitalist managers.
As a wise man once said, if you're good at something never do it for free.
But how are the investors supposed to make money off of it?!
If their goal was to placate sure.
If their goal was to reinforce that every single tiny thing you enjoy can be taken away from you with a snap of the fingers if you even think about complaining about the people who could make that decision the situation makes more sense.
It's Alphabet, they can 100% afford to have youtube premium be the default, they're just greedy.
One of the core tenets of this charade of a system is that people need to be convinced that there's no such thing as "free". Otherwise they will start thinking that a socialist system is possible and we can't have that.