Knew a guy for a while, one of those types who loves to say “most of 4chan isn’t bad, it’s only /b/ and /pol/, here look at this funny meme they made” I rolled my eyes whenever he said something like this but figured he was just in denial.
Then one day I mentioned to him that I cut contact with someone for defending drawn CSAM, explaining that I did it because it’s used to groom minors and accustom them to being sexualized, and his response was “I don’t care, it’s the parents’ responsibility to protect the kids, there should be no legal or moral barrier to what people draw”
Anyone who browses or defends 4chan is a fascist, a pedophile, or most likely both. Every interaction I’ve had with them only gave me further proof.
Jonah Paretti wrote about this back when he was an academic Marxist. He outlined the general process by which subcultures get recuperated by capital. Then he went and followed his own blueprint, I guess. Now we have Buzzfeed. I have a bunch to say about that article but I’ll leave it at that unless someone’s interested.
I’m interested
Hi, interested. I’m drunk. So the basic premise of Paretti’s paper is this. We form identities based on desire. Capitalism inserts itself into the process of identity creation in order to get us to desire capitalist commodities. Not only that, but this process of adopting and discarding identities is being accelerated by capitalist forces. There’s a lot of psychoanalysis jargon involved in describing how this works.
Paretti argues that countercultures have the potential to avoid recuperation by capital when they offer a positive form of desire rather than a desire based on lacking something. If all your counterculture wants to do is watch pirated media, there’s not a good way to monetize that. But if that counterculture can get bogged down in minutia about the implications of Blu-ray sales, for example, capitalism can and will step in and insert itself into the identity creation process of the subculture. He also cites women’s rights and queer activism as a counterculture which could resist recuperation while outlining how rainbow capitalism would work. And he did this in 1996 and with seemingly minimal background in feminist theory compared to his peers with a focus on it.