The BBC's Gaza Fiasco / Daniel Trilling

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

I avoid advertisements as much as possible. I’ve avoided them like the plague, which has been good practice for the plague. I’ve missed all the commercials my friends are in because of that avoidance. When I listen to podcasts I scrub past pitches for absolutely anything. But Hulu makes you sit through the ads. I mute them, but sometimes I’m not quick enough. Thus, many’s the time I’ve heard, “At so-and-so, we believe—” Every company pulls this crap at some point, no matter how non-sensical it is. “At White Claw, we believe –” there is no “at.” You’re a beverage. And you don’t believe in anything but making money. “At Clear Blue, we believe –” What do mean, “at Clear Blue?” You’re a stick women pee on to see if they’re pregnant! You’re not a place. There’s no brick-and-mortar house of pee sticks. And what can you possibly believe? “At pee stick we believe in the pH level of urine.” You believe in selling pee sticks. You don’t have any other beliefs, because you aren’t human, regardless of what the Supreme Court has said in the past. You are an agreement to peddle pee-activated color-changing material housed in plastic for the profit of your owners and part-owners. You are a legal construction designed to be a financial instrument. That’s all you’ll ever be. Give up your stupid dreams of being a real boy, Pinocchio, it’s not going to happen.

I’ve gone off before about advertising. Commercial advertising. How it’s a waste of education dollars. Because that’s what it is, bad, poisonous education. A commercial is a 15 to 60 second lesson on acquisitiveness and shallow values. It’s school for consumers, and most of it is either outright lies, id-tapping fantasies, or dramas meant to communicate insecurity. Sometimes I’ll catch a radio ad out of the corner of my ear, and something they say, some made-up statistic, reassures me about the future, then suddenly I’ll realize what’s happened, what I’ve bought into, and out of shame at being such a gullible sucker I want to stab myself in the brain.

The amount of money spent on advertising is hard to get a grip on. There are figures that represent ad purchases, but the limits of an... read more

Welcome to the Moment of Truth: the thirst that is the drink.

Last week I presented a primitive diagram of recent history from the advent of modern class consciousness in the 19th Century, to today, dividing mass phenomena redounding from class consciousness into 3 waves: the first, the classical revolutionary communist events; the second, the parallel phenomena of reforming classical revolutionary communism in the East while fragmented identities including labor sought social and economic reforms in the West; and third, the emergent process we find ourselves engaged in at the current moment.

I’ll remind you that the three waves explanation is a taxonomy of convenience, that no one will agree that there are three waves, or that they contain the phenomena I have crammed into them; that I have trimmed historical conceptual clusters with Occam’s Razor and smashed them with Bozo’s Mallet to form of them an object susceptible to a certain brutish examination; and that quantum physicists do this to subatomic particles all the time, and everybody thinks they’re super-geniuses.

We left off with a description of our global economic system as fatally entrenched in past destructive modes of domination – domination of resources, economies, means of production, populations, and the environment. Let’s pick up there.

We know that we have to stop killing the Earth, and from the Pope to a sixteen-year-old Scandinavian girl, along with armies of scientists, economists, and community activists, all agree that unless capitalism is radically transformed or destroyed, a mass extinction, already in progress (along with massive changes in the climate that will certainly disrupt our food supply), and the inability of many millions to remain in their home locales, will change our lives for the worse, forever, and possibly extinguish them.

But we can’t ignore the threat that our side might pursue a wrong way of changing capitalism into something new. Right now cyber-capitalism is content to spy on us in order to target us with ads to manipulate and profit from our behavior and thinking. If the Stasi or the KGB had had these tools, they might have used them on the people to ferret out deviant thinking, and ultimately exterminate whoever they deemed incorrigible.

We can’t allow the desire for wealth accumulation to dictate our existences anymore. We can no longer allow it to pervert our... read more