User:RD/9k/material consumerism (Q618)

Main entries

material consumerism
(meta-Marxism) / Material Consumerism (Signifier Case) / mystery box consumerism (in reference to the concept of newly-released products being "mystery boxes")
material consumerism / consumerism per se -> I called it this for a few weeks until I decided it needed a more distinctive name

Consumerism and copyright

Why allow let's plays?
/ Why is it acceptable to stream video games? / Why is it acceptable to broadcast video games when in practice watching a video game often actually is a substitute for playing it or owning it, more so than listening to an audiobook is a substitute for buying a book? -> my hypothesis is that video games really are one of the last gasps of capitalism where it has carefully tried to smooth over contradictions that existed with other things, yet ultimately made those contradictions more obvious.

think about this. when there were only books, it was relatively easy to say that capitalists have the power to keep people from broadcasting books. when there were only motion pictures, it was relatively easy for capitalists to treat people who re-recorded movies as the devil. before there were video games there was no ambiguity over whether something can be broadcasted or whether capitalists have the power to stop it. but suddenly, there's such a thing as "let's plays" when that was never widely allowed for any other form of media. how did that happen? it really makes no sense from any Liberal-republican point of view. what would have made sense is for, say, audiobook markets to become obsolete and people to just start wildly streaming novels and comics, or for corporations to insist video games can't be streamed and can only be reviewed. but if corporations had done that, people would have caught on faster to how stupid the entire thing was, so they had to treat video games separately and specially so people wouldn't realize they were the same thing. by convincing people of that, they got people to buy into capitalism as it had been previously all over again and to accept the concept that people repeatedly buying "new!!" enclosed mystery boxes specially prepared by someone else that in the end remain fully under the control of someone else was inherently good, and grinding on a business territory as a worker or owner for more money just to buy more and more mystery boxes that tell you how not to act and what to think was inherently good.
the cracks appeared immediately. people were modifying games, they were putting new content in, they were making fan games, they were getting all kinds of unintended use out of old games. they were learning the exact art style of the earliest generations of games and creating fake concept art. they were making whole video channels and getting ad revenue off all the stuff they added to old games, or more often, pretended was already in them and that they weren't in fact adding anything. they were getting entire careers at emerging corporations because of all the derivative works they made of old games. corporations had to do something to keep up the false charade that they had actually created the games rather than the observed reality of fans taking the entire space of a game and filling it up with new content and re-birthing a whole new game all over again. so what they did was attack fan projects, destroying the outward appearance that fans had an equal ability to create. this left a really strange contradiction that effectively, corporations were actively endorsing hordes and hordes of tiny businesses making unauthorized money off copyrighted works and it was more okay the more unoriginal and restricted to the source material it was. this should go directly against what copyright is stated to be for: encouraging a greater number of distinct creative works as opposed to many wholesale-copied bootleg versions of a few creative works. these days, you can get a nearly full experience of a media series just by watching reviews, theories, let's plays, and other secondhand bootlegs. copyright has been wholly reversed so that it prohibits creativity but encourages praising and worshiping existing corporations and products and enshrining the exact artistic ideas that currently exist. this would be utterly incomprehensible without considering everything within the context of an actively-moving historical timeline and the material interactions inside it.
here's what I think is going on with both let's plays and "Pokémon lore channels": everyone has misrepresented what copyright actually "protects". what copyright protects is Consumerism Per Se. people are allowed to share content if it is obvious that their sharing of content essentially requires the channel owner to walk down to a business territory owner, buy a product, pay a specific individual owner for the privilege of capitalist products existing, take home a product, own it in a consumerist way, show it off as a status symbol with inherent class connotations, encourage other people to specifically shape themselves into workers or owners in order to earn money to buy products, buy the products themselves in a consumerist way, and show them off to other people to encourage those people to become workers or owners to extract money and labor out of other people to be able to consume their product and relate to others socially and culturally being part of a social fabric and a population specifically by consuming.
I am goddamn tired of this thing. I swear it's what destroyed the Soviet Union. it doesn't make anybody happy. it makes a lot of people unhappy. we outright buy things and wish we didn't have them but then have nowhere to get rid of them most of the time because the overall system or process is based around nudging individuals to own stuff specifically in their individual house in order to be part of society; we do all this because it supposedly encourages the accumulation and spread of wealth across society but when the products are owned and not circulated they actually lose all value as you more and more don't want them for their use-value and want to get rid of 'that worthless thing'.
consumerism per se, careerism, and capitalism are three different interlocking systems that operate on different layers somewhat separately but also simultaneously.
lanthanum rule (new metallic rule) / Patronize others as yourself / Buy unto others as you would have others buy unto you / Encourage others to consume freshly-created products at maximum retail price in order to socialize and be part of society, and others will encourage people to buy your freshly-created products or support your freshly-created tiny business territory / (9k) -> the metallic rule that creates consumerism per se / material consumerism.

Consumerism and Western-Marxism

Many acts of marketing perform education / Consumerism is inseparable from media representation -> it sometimes makes me nervous when people talk about "consumerism" or "overconsumption" without it being in the context of Marxism, and the inability to control the shape that capitalism grows into so businesses don't waste money on things. it's not hard for someone to argue, however spuriously, that buying stacks of Media Representation is an overconsumption process either on the part of corporations or readers or the reviewers who keep saying people should buy it. a lot of art has a partial purpose of making people buy new books at full price instead of used ones in order to make money; in one sense the purpose of a lot of art is to be expensive. at the same time, look at something like Japanese anime and manga. publishers can support a seemingly endless churn of manga, a lot of which are similar to each other, and yet, every one of these that is translated for another country does a little bit to counteract prejudices against the country of Japan. capitalism is a very social process of going from no relationship to building bonds through exchanging goods, and in some senses, it's the process of us being more and more wasteful every day in order to better know each other.
I'd like to see Trotskyists get a satisfactory model of world economic transition out of that
North Korean mass media is amongst the most strictly controlled in the world [1] / Because a greater number of separate non-cooperating media outlets necessarily equals more freedom, North Korean mass media is amongst the most strictly controlled in the world -> claim found on Wikipedia page. this is a very misleading framing. it's accurate to say that Korean state media is 'a monopoly' or there is a limited number of media producers. but this is literally due to the wealth of the country. it's an underdeveloped country that only develops slower with every sanction, thus by Liberal-republican poststructuralist pluralized-wealth-equals-freedom standards becoming ""less free"".
you start to see how disingenuous this is when you realize how common Western-Marxist rhetoric has become and how much every single political movement becomes about "moral panics in mass media" and "representing things correctly in the media". in North Korea you don't have that problem. the one good thing about the state monopoly over what mass media will be is that mass media never becomes this wild uncontrolled thing that can just go spontaneously spreading racism at the drop of a hat when nobody expects it. the Existentialist-Althusserian-Trotskyite axis basically created that problem and then proceeded to push all other issues under the rug while badly trying to solve the problem it created.

Ideologies or fields

ES / small-scale bourgeois ideologies
W / Western Marxism
W / "Fisherism"
MX / meta-Marxism
MX onto W
MX onto ES

Main entries

material consumerism

Consumerism and copyright

Why allow let's plays?

Consumerism and Western-Marxism

Related

Ideologies or fields