I’ve been following Benn Jordan‘s work on Youtube for some time now. Coming out of a successful and accomplished trajectory of making music as The Flashbulb (video further below), Acidwolf and other avatars. his recent work on data centres and their infra-sound pollution (alongside all the other forms of pollution involved) is genuinely disturbing (below).
Yet the above video takes in a theory which Jordan has called Leveragism. What immediately struck me about this was that it tied in with a conversation I’d had with our local ice cream van owner a year ago, when he was telling me he had been close to giving up because of all the ways he was being charged extra – all of the locations where new costs and increased costs had arisen. I remembered at the time, seeing what he was referring to (in an abstract sense) and remarking that everything was being leveraged to the maximum (in the systemic interest of the profit motive of capital owners).
And yet I don’t feel this is a surprise to anyone. If anything, the surprise is how long people have allowed this to continue. I recall my parents (when they were still here) telling me twenty years ago that ‘things have become harder’ – and that when they had been young and starting their family, it was possible for a single income to be enough to raise a family – but that that had become almost impossible now.
Of course, all of this is relative, I am talking about life in the United Kingdom and Jordan’s video is titled about the US. It just so happens that the US has been the capitalist engine of the world for the last 80 years, in this respect being the upstream arbiter of capitalist practise for the rest of the planet – and in some respects, having been the captilist-hegemon which has maintained most of the global south as a zone of exploitation (both in terms of resources and including labour).
There are areas where in his video-essay Jordan makes detailed analysis of finance-capital and lists the historic and frankly horrific actions of the Coca-Cola company and yet maintains that much of this must be due to greed and complicit governance rather than being endemic to capitalism as a mode. It potentially misses the reality of power as the means of production, underlying as Monbiot excellently argued, that capitalism is exploitation – and exploitation – to use a Jordan term that isn’t just assymetrical against the masses, but barbarically so.
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Ownership roll-back and disenfranchisement
An implication of Jordan’s analysis is the ongoing disenfranchisement of people in basic capitalist terms – ownership. A fitting example of this has been taking place in terms of the availability of ditigal products. Giant creative software corporation Adobe has alienated it’s customers to a point of near universal ill will (and this was before they they tried to cut photographers out of the loop last year with their hurried adoption of AI image generation). The company behind Photoshop, AfterEffects and other seminal industry software were early adopters of a shift to a leasing-only model of software use. Of course it was relatively expensive to lease individual software tools (rather than their strategically bundled tools) and cancelling a subscription not only incurrs an early termination fee, but cuts off access to files still stored in the cloud. Now not only is the tool beyond your ownership – but also potentially the materials you make with it.
But perhaps Adobe is a greedy and isolated example of obese market power? Maybe not, Sony has recently announced that they will no longer sell physical media in the gaming market beyond 2028. A move prompting outrage from gamers, now at risk of random deletion of titles they have paid for and previously would have owned outright. A view not helped by the same company annoucing just a few days earlier that it would be deleting over five hundred film titles from its online Playstation accounts that buyers had paid to own.
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Digital enclosures
Property, the central territorialisng power of capitalism, the invention which has propelled relentless historical genocides in the spread of the western-European ethos – and the plot on which capitalist acquisition has been able to sell it’s dream.
There are long lineages of disenfranchisement in this sense. The Enclosures which forced commoners off the land centuries ago in the UK, while the industrial revolution was entrenching new forms of crushing servitude in factories for those now removed from their capacity to use the land to live – and have a right to do so. Further away from the land and into the necessity of using money to survive. And frankly, to hold this to the standard of the menace of capitalism and not reference that entire peoples were literally enslaved would itself be an injustice – and yet they are instances of the same capitalist equations of power. There is a reason that while the narrative of progress has been equated to technology, to health and wealth gains for leading nations (and leading exploiter nations) the conceptualisations of the wage-slavery of the populace have not relented in relevance.
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Broader Refrains
At a certain point while thinking about this, I also wanted to reference Boots Riley, the musician and film director whose work including the 2018 film Sorry To Bother You, brilliantly skewers capitalist modes of power operation, spliced through social-historical heirarchies – and locates the class struggle as the primary vectors of action. Even if its focus only partially seems to consciously reference the intensive topographies of human lives – it displays it’s own freedom in creative apertures of becoming and clarity. Some of Riley’s music with The Coup is below.
And so late capitalism has also been a return to Robber Barrons and oligarchy, and now alongside venture captilist vehicles (Jordan’s reference of the US home ownership meta-grift is particularly of note) are finding ever more sophisticated ways of slicing money off the masses. In fact, they’re probably not that sophisticated, they’re just base – iterative operations that turn up in more spaces and more areas, iterative predation or parasitism.
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The PR of marketism relies on the idea that customers won’t return to a poor service provider, that sellers won’t abuse their corporate power due to the competitive nature of the market. This though fails to take into consideration a number of crucial factors, namely that governments have become market-slaves themselves (with leaders bought off and endlessly sliding into subsequent corporate executive positions).
The advent of Trump has accelerated and made transparent this extension across the corporate and the governmental. Accelerationist proponents (and the billionnaire class) routinely call for a more corporate model of leadership; autocracy via corporate takeover of states, as if this would improve or rescue the circumstance of humans. This assessment conveniently misses that the executive servants of capitalism are fundamentally resposible for the worsening predicament of the planet and human beings in the first place; think of endless examples of profit over life – Exxon’s internal memos on climate change (and their subsequent denialism) from the 1980’s, or the creation in the 1980’s of recycling as a concept to make newly more planetary-conscious consumers switch off on the disaster of waste and go back to consuming guilt-free again. Here is a great piece on this particularly awful chapter of corporate mendacity – among other things highlighting how corporations first engendered single-use packaging in the 1950’s, while simultaneously placing the blame and responsibility of waste and litter onto consumers – which they would go on to do.
Trump’s deletion of climate data tracking facilities (now resurrected by the scientists who originally ran it), the anti-vax propaganda and vaccine programme cancellations are endemic of a wider malevolance towards humans and the public at large. While foremost among the corporate-agitant billionnaire class is South Afriacan immigrant to the US; Elon Musk. The arch-symbol of the technocrat class, whose actions against people at large run from causing the deaths of millions through his US govt. cuts programme DOGE, to his championing of hate-filled right wing rhetoric and support for racists such as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Along with his purchase of twitter and subsequent levering of the platform towards hate-amped predominant agorithms – surely no one can have had as destructive a pollutant effect on human consciousness in recent times.
Ultimately, this kind of mentality is reliant upon the self-importance and self-centred world view of its incumbents. In a traditional class-war reading, anything that dilutes or poisons the consciousness of the masses is helpful for capital-owners. While this approach also serves to impact any micro-evolution of consciousness at the same time.
We referred earlier to data centres, currently emobodying a paradigm-changing driver in the sphere of culture and economy – the state-corporate drive to incorporate AI into every aspect of consumer and work-life is being marketed as the inevitable arrival of the future. Some vague notion of relaxed, techno-social assisted living seems to be the pitch – while the reality is that we are charging ahead with little to no safeguards, while capitalists have disenfranchised artists’ and writers’ commercial viability while stealing from their work. Another example of the corporate predation on human production being Spotify’s leveraging of it’s platform and AI to create music ‘artist’ identities and then prioritise this output algorithmically to avoid paying artists what are already miniscule rights fees. This practise extending (and originating) from Spotify’s creation of cover versions of songs and inserting them into playlists to keep more of the revenue again.
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The situation is grim and the US is already being run and politically dominated by captured media and government. Thankfully the US left finally seems to be accreting in a meaningul form, as the rise of the Green Party in the UK along with the strength of the smaller national parties in Scotland and Wales give some succour as to the fight ahead. The time to resist in whichever form – has never been more evidently now.
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reflectivewavelengths 