I’m done trying to educate people, if they want to stay ignorant, let them.
| Website | https://carlosrodriguez.mx |
| Location | Mexico City |
Carlos Rodríguez
- 54 Followers
- 386 Following
- 1,015 Posts
Interested in art, history, architecture, design, science and technology. Skeptic and atheist. Avid reader. Pedestrian and cyclist. Web designer and developer. Creative director at labproy.com.
Half the time I am intellectual, the other half I am a no-nonsense practitioner. I am no-nonsense and practical in academic matters, and intellectual when it comes to practice.
Capitalism offers freedom but it actually imposes new forms of control through the abstract system of money, channeling everything into economic exchange and production. Desire is no longer structured by nature or culture but by market forces.
About the Apple thing in the UK:
We should stop asking companies for protection and to stand for values. Who should be protecting us and standing for values are governments. The raison d'être of companies is profit; for governments, it’s serving citizens. Companies will fold to governments’ rules, as they should. If we want privacy, our government should make companies respect our privacy, not the other way around.
Hail the capitalists, the rich! Pave the roads with our bodies, clamp the chains around our necks. Use us, exploit us—let us be the labor force that fills your coffers. Rid us of all responsibility; silence our minds, let us vanish into the eternal hum of another credit card swipe.
We’ve confused an open market with freedom, availability of products to choose from with free will; while we’re enslaved in jobs and gigs for the sole purpose of having the means to consume more.
It is telling of the stupidity our age is immersed in, that a considerable part of our work consists on writing non-consequential reports. Digital files that will never be open, nor read and less understood, just functioning as evidence of work done. A bureaucratic-nightmarish waste of time that justify receiving our checks at the end of the month.
When was the last time you did something for the very pleasure of doing it? Without thinking about how to capitalize on it or scale it? Isn’t it sad that we sometimes abandon personal projects because we feel unproductive? Or that we don’t give what we did away for free because we feel like we’re being robbed and are just robbing ourselves of the pleasure of giving?
Capitalism is an impossible-to-cure disease because it behaves as a mutant virus. It changes its appearance, its narratives, according to what suits it best. It creates responsible shopping so we can consume the right products; it creates green and eco-friendly products so we can keep buying with a clean conscience. Capitalism even sells anti-capitalism so we can buy concert and movie theater tickets.
Protests tend to be inconsequential, a safety valve for political tensions. What has consequence is political organization. In democratic systems, voting, forming political parties, running for office, and organizing to influence legislation. In authoritarian regimes, revolution emerges as the only possible form of political action.