we’re lovin’ it

Our current social arrangement makes us feel like shit. It is taking its toll on the world we live in as well as on our selves.

Capital exploits and runs our life-forces to the ground, extracts value from our personhood, zombifies us, pollutes and degrades our minds and very being, shortens our attention span, and limits the parameters of our imagination and our capacity to think up better worlds.

There is no longer any distinction between life and work. We are always producing surplus-value; we are always at the ready to answer a work email or call, and we generate data in our leisure time as we upload, check in, share and like. And yet most of us now find ourselves chronically underpaid or underemployed.

We have never seemed so connected, yet we find ourselves increasingly separated and atomised, alone, anxious and paranoid, pitted against each other and against other ‘others’, viciously competing for crumbs.

Our nervous systems are restructured in line with the post-Fordist restructuring of the economy as Mark Fisher observed; in order to effectively function as components of just-in-time production, we have to naturalise this state of absolute instability and precarity, and learn to adapt to unforeseen developments and ever-changing circumstances, finding ourselves unable to plan for the future.

Even those who materially profit from the current social structure are wounded by it, enslaved by its poisonous logic and bound to its so-called rational imperative of endless accumulation.

We’re faced by the seemingly infinite choice of goods and services to satisfy our needs, and we mistake this choice for freedom as we blindly trudge through the landscapes of late capitalism, the piles of rotting rubbish and putrid waste it discharges and the ruins it leaves in its wake, a planet scarred by the devastation it wrecks upon it and scorched by the never-ending wars it wages. But we’re too busy looking for the right emoji to even notice that we too are being burned and consumed.

This is merely a contingency, another world is possible.