In the capitalist empire, there is no value to be generated by contented people. Our minds must be continually prodded and diddled to manipulate us out of our natural serenity so that we are in a constant state of toil and dissatisfaction, at all times reaching for the next fix of the next product. Clever manipulators have figured out how to generate vast fortunes by harnessing the restlessness they deliberately stir up within us.

We are psychologically hammered with advertisements and consumerist messaging from mainstream culture to convince us that we need more than we have and that we aren’t okay the way we are. That we’re not beautiful enough, not stylish enough, not successful enough, not abundant enough. The products are designed to be dependence-forming so we need to buy them, and they’re designed to quickly become obsolete so that we need to keep buying more.

They trick us out of our natural state of contentedness and then sell it back to us. They deceive us into leaving our home and then charge us an admission price to come visit.

— Caitlin Johnstone. Empire Psychosis.

–ooOoo–

In other news, AI has woven its enshitifiying tendrils into the platform I use for publishing this blog (WordPress). It now has an AI agent that will:

• “Rewrite this to sound more confident.”
• “Rewrite the event details in a more exciting way.”
• “Give me three title options for this page.”
• “Generate an image of a croissant for this blog post.”
• “Change the background color of this image to blue.”
• “Design a flat illustration of a laptop and coffee cup for my about page.”

Mercifully, for now at least, I have the option of disabling this agent. I am considering migrating my entire blog to a different platform. However, this would be time consuming and for now I just cannot be bothered.

Any and all sloppiness that you find in my blog is of my own, human, making.