#pseudocapitalism

[kntxt]

"On Chinese Currency: Coin and Paper Money" (1877) by Willem Vissering - PDF: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c7/On_Chinese_Currency_-Coin_and_Paper_Money_By_Willem_Vissering%281877%29_-_Version_2.pdf

Full disclosure: I haven't read the book myself. Was brought to my attention by TXMC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ytjzfjz5Bzk

[rjzimmerman]

Corporate utilities......pseudocapitalism hiding behind state sanctioned pseudomonopolies, acting with the arrogance of both, and generally fucking up when things get really bad. Solution? Probably many, but boils down to either publicly owned (i.e, municipally or state owned) power distribution, or privately owned but eliminate regional exclusivity, and expand the list of criminal activities to include gross negligence or reckless conduct. In other words, you want capitalism, then have had it, but be prepared for the consequences.

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

It was a problem that California had come to dread. Weather models were signaling extreme winds and dry conditions from one end of the state to the other. The risk of wildfires was high.

Pacific Gas & Electric, the giant utility whose power lines and transformers have been blamed for a series of disastrous wildfires in recent years, was determined to prevent another one.

Just before last weekend, the company informed state officials that it might shut off power to a large area of Northern California, potentially leaving millions of people in the dark — something no United States utility had done in recent memory. It made that news public on Monday. By Tuesday morning, about a hundred utility executives, state officials, meteorologists and others had gathered at an operations center in San Francisco to coordinate the effort.

Things quickly began going wrong. PG&E’s communications and computer systems faltered, and its website went down as customers tried to find out whether they would be cut off or spared. As the company struggled to tell people what areas would be affected and when, chaos and confusion unspooled outside. Roads and businesses went dark without warning, nursing homes and other critical services scrambled to find backup power and even government agencies calling the company were put on hold for hours.

All told, more than 700,000 homes or businesses — from the state’s northernmost reaches to the outskirts of Silicon Valley — lost electricity beginning early Wednesday morning, and the state’s emergency center usually used for natural disasters was activated. Most residents had power restored by noon on Friday, and just over 12,000 were still without it on Saturday morning.

“There were definitely missteps,” said Elizaveta Malashenko, a representative for the state Public Utilities Commission who was in the control center. “It’s pretty much safe in saying, this did not go well.”

[arcticdementor]

IRONY AS A MODE OF POLITICAL ACTION

We are generally used to the assumption that the motivation driving political action is sincere. All past political movements fit that criteria. Progressives were, and still are sincere about curing racism from the world. Nazis were sincere about doing Nazi things. And so were Protestants, Catholics. Augustus Caesar and his army were sincere in wanting to rule an empire.

There is a growing current now, present particularly in forms of youth culture like 4chan and now TikTok, that everything cool and memetically attractive should be deeply layered in irony. The most striking example to me was a series of TikToks about Holocaust themed pornography, that were lambasted by mainstream media - but the culture that produced them continues to go on unabated.

This sort of phenomenon wouldn't be news to Baudrillard or Nietschze - the lack of sincerity of belief would just be an obvious symptom of modern life. Normally, these insincere people are cast as politically helpless, last men and slaves to a few rules who control their lives effortlessly. But suppose that the way to move them into taking action was through the opposite of sincere ideology, instead only through the insincere.

The most clear, and perhaps only example of this - was the debacle involving the Gamestop stock. A bunch of normal people were willing to throw their money at something for reasons that were mostly insincere: memes and shitposting at the man. Mocking the man with graffiti is nothing new, but usually there is a framework held in opposition to what the man believes. The 60s radicals had their communism to hold against the pseudocapitalism of 60s America. Antifa today still does, and still is sincere, even if their ideas are pathetic and wrongheaded. But what does r/wsb believe in?

The radical right does have tenuous ties to Nazi or Randian ideology, but not conclusively. It's hard to be a Nazi outside of Germany, or to rescue the capitalists from themselves. So all that's left is to believe in nothing. Some 'neo-Leninists' want to resuscitate the old ideals of Marx to give them an ideology, but I haven't been that impressed with what they've accomplished so far.

A friend mentioned to me that they believed a second Holocaust was possible from today's youth, not from any sincere hatred of Jews, but from how they would do it ironically, laughing about how those crotchety old boomers couldn't stand joking about it. I don't think that result is particularly likely, but it seems more plausible to me than any claim that a sincere genocide will happen, from the left or the right.