Tweet

More from @JYSexton

Jared Yates Sexton

@JYSexton

5 Jan

Capitalism requires expansion, imperialism, and invasions of frontiers to create new markets and vent internal tensions.

There’s a reason a new Cold War is brewing and why tech giants are either trying to create space colonies or shove us into commodifiable digital universes.

As frontiers have closed and nearly every possible society has either been rigged for markets or shoved into the machine of global capital, the only thing left is to create new land, new markets, new opportunities for expansion.

It’s either war, space, or metaverse.

Just as markets pushed people over oceans and to conquer civilizations and peoples, this new expansion is going to be predicated on brutality and suffering.

Tossing climate change and disappearing resources, land, and displaced peoples, this could be a historic tragedy.

Read 6 tweets

Jared Yates Sexton

@JYSexton

4 Jan

Working on the new book, linking multi-level integrated marketing of the LOST TV show to QAnon and rise of social media conspiracy theories, and I can’t stop laughing at all the early-2000’s era moody cast shots with poorly done edits.

For what it’s worth, corporations like Disney/ABC trained millions of people to spend their lives searching for “clues” and conducting “research” to unravel “mysteries,” all of it designed to push fan attachment.

It didn’t take long for that to short circuit people.

Corporations got people creating extra content around their products, podcasts and sites and accounts pushing theories to answer mystery box questions.

This is what QAnon is. What it’s always been. Marketing of neofascistic conspiracy theories using this same model of engagement

Read 8 tweets

Jared Yates Sexton

@JYSexton

4 Jan

Our media and politics are tuned to a certain status-quo frequency so that people can spend years watching an authoritarian threat build and boil over and then just continue arrogantly dismissing it.

It’s almost like it has to do with money and privilege and power.

You’ll notice that almost every single pundit and writer dismissing the threat of Right Wing extremism is calling for moderate proposals.

There’s a reason. They have no interest in troubling in their own positions and even less interest in risking their wealth.

These pundits are desperate to believe the GOP can be saved because they want to maintain the neoliberal economic consensus that has served them, and probably their families, well.

And so they’ll continue to peddle false hope and moderate policy. All of which got us here.

Read 7 tweets

Jared Yates Sexton

@JYSexton

2 Jan

We have to look at global and massive systems of power, analyze and demystify them.

But they are designed to make us feel powerless and incapable of changing anything. It takes people working at all levels, locally, personally, regionally, globally, to change things.

The construction of our modern systems of power were based on technocratic elites guiding everything while we stayed out of their way and exercised our "rights" by consuming and buying products.

We have to reassert our power and control if anything is going to change.

As a commentator and writer, I spend my time tracking these big giant systems, as well as how they protect themselves through violence and mythologies. I'm trying to demystify what they are.

Take action WITH that understanding. Knowing is only part of the struggle.

Read 5 tweets

Jared Yates Sexton

@JYSexton

2 Jan

The meritocracy was never real. It was a fairytale constructed to hide the fact that wealth and privilege guided power and profit and keep the rest of us working hard believing we might one day join the elect.

This illusion is faltering, flickering.

Capitalism was founded on the tragedies of white supremacy and brutalities of colonization. It was a laundering of that brutality through a lens of an “impartial system” of laws and economics.

Those systems perpetuate the suffering while hiding it.

jaredyatessexton.substack.com/p/white-suprem…

The construction of liberal democracy in the 18th century largely covered the oppression with glittering rhetoric, laws, and a new story of meritocratic power that concealed power through oppression.

Our crises are about that system trying to protect itself from necessary reform

Read 4 tweets

Jared Yates Sexton

@JYSexton

31 Dec 21

A reminder that Elon Musk isn’t actually good at anything besides convincing people desperate to believe in technological and capitalistic messianism that he’s actually good at things.

Capitalism isn’t going to fix climate change. It’s going to deny it’s happening while profiting from it until there’s no denying it and then it’ll profit from the tragedy. None of these people are going to shove you onto a spaceship and ferry you away. It’s a con. A big fat con.

We’re trusting a bunch of people who set up payment options on the internet with a future that has nothing to do with them, all while letting them destroy the planet because they pretend they’ll save us. They won’t save you. They’ll save themselves. And that’s it.

Read 4 tweets

Share this page!

Jared Yates Sexton

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

More from @JYSexton

Jared Yates Sexton

Jared Yates Sexton

Jared Yates Sexton

Jared Yates Sexton

Jared Yates Sexton

Jared Yates Sexton

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Like this author's thread?