'Woke capitalism' in 2020

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
woke capitalism is essentially capitalism throwing the public a bone on social issues to create the illusion that genuine progress can be made without looking at economics
perhaps not that overtly cynical, but essentially

the vast majority of woke capitalism is - publicly - woke to the degree it's good business

in that it does reflect prevailing social attitudes. but it can never address economic issues, or structures.

and I guarantee you there are plenty of companies marketing anti-woke rn too. as Michael Jordan famously said "Republicans buy sneakers too".
 

version

Well-known member
I have to give some credit to MJ atm. He just pledged $100m to help clean up policing and support black communities. That's an obscene amount of money.
 
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version

Well-known member
Michael Jordan says he will donate $100m (£78m) to groups fighting for racial equality and social justice.

The NBA legend said in a statement that he and his Jordan Brand would distribute the money over 10 years.
The money will go to a number of organisations in a bid to tackle "ingrained racism".
 
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entertainment

Well-known member
and I guarantee you there are plenty of companies marketing anti-woke rn too.

not unthinkable that there are ad types out there working on pitches to sell this message to companies as the 'cool renegade brand'. Surely there's a market for people who oppose the 'woke' disposition and would like the opportunity to express that.
 

version

Well-known member
Isn't it good business to cater to the larger market though? That's why Disney etc are willing to jump through hoops for Beijing.
 

entertainment

Well-known member
I think for huge companies that sell to a broad audience, yes of course. but smaller firms with more niche products. If you sell to the larger market, you're competing with a lot more other firms. Differentiate your brand and you can get a bigger slice of a smaller pie.
 

version

Well-known member
khrfou2jthm51.jpg
 

version

Well-known member
This is the kind of shit you see and you just know we've completely fucking lost.

Honestly though, every advertisement I ever see like this is a dead giveaway on what advertising is okay talking about, identity, and what they never want to bring up- class. The managerial class is more than happy to make you distinctly aware of your constructed identity while doing everything it can to avoid talking about your class relation, material reality, and the broader institutions and forces that shape those things.
At first it's somewhat surprising we don't see this extremely obvious fact recognized in academia, but it seems pretty much most of academia has been captured by capital at this point too.

Or I don't know, maybe it's that the solution just really isn't that complicated and we just have a bunch of incredibly smart people working on a problem that is already solved and just needs action. I feel like the dialogue of 99% vs. 1% has done more political work than basically all of critical theory has done in the last 50 years or something. Who knows, maybe I'm just incredibly blackpilled at this point.
 

martin

----
Wondering if any corporations are getting excited by calls to defund the cops. Citigroup and Verizon running the new 'community projects' - but also the new well-armed police squads. Why stop there - what good's a con rotting in a cell when s/he could be packing boxes in an Amazon depot?
 

constant escape

winter withered, warm
Just wait til they manage a more robust data extraction method. We see this already with appliances you can buy, through which you record what/when you are watching on TV, how many viewers, etc - and you get paychecks, presumably negligible ones.

Eventually: Pay people to get hooked up into some virtual-reality-electroencepholography focus-group/beta-tester simulation, run the Consumer Experience, record electrical and/or chemical activity in the brain, and then reverse-engineer the experience, based on feedback, to optimize consumer experience.

Simulations, if operationalized this way, could cut research and development down to a fraction of its cost, no? Fine-tuning a simulation ought to be orders of magnitude less expensive than reiterating supply and production chains, no? This could very well be the bottom-of-the-barrel occupation, at some point, for those who aren't literate enough in programming languages to avoid effectively becoming data slaves, infinite repositories of data, exploitation abstracted beyond labor.

Even scarier, this whole operation could be marketed as some cutting-edge new-age form of labor. No need to exert yourself, get a decent paycheck for just sitting through some techie-headset experiment. Might not even need to leave the house. There would be a virtually unlimited amount of data to collect, so there is your income security. A culture could form around it, with a sensibility of ripping the man off, getting paid to "do nothing", etc.

Hell, since brands will have already firmly colonized our identities, being a beta-tester for a favorite brand could be an additional point of pride, and this pride could also be exploited.

This would also be a job that only humans could do, because by the time data harvesting is automated (on both sides: harvester and harvestee), we're either in the dust or we've reached communist heaven.

edit: or we're in those matrix pods.
 

vimothy

yurp
I think that if the historical moment is headed for a world without capitalism, then there's gonna be a titanic struggle, and this is part of that, as is the cops situation - they are the rear guard digging in to resist mass social justice and protect babylon, which is shrinking but concentrating/intensifying
i was seeing some tweets about the pendulum swinging back - trumpism perhaps reaching its limit
idk this seems unduly optimistic. what if instead woke capitalism is not the rearguard action of a failing system but the vanguard of an intensification of capitalist dynamics.
 
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constant escape

winter withered, warm
If it is the onset of some larger trend, rather than the end of the swing we've been in, than it would warrant a higher tolerance for the capitalist spirit/essence, no? I do believe, in a way that feels gnostic, that we will ultimately reach something essentially identifable as communism, but it might require a full-on possession by the capitalist spirit to get there. Again, much more in the realm of cosmology/gnosticism than anything empirical... until the empirical case can be made.
 

luka

Well-known member
The left are very pro capitalist in some ways. Every social rupture and displacement caused by capitalism is greeted rapturously by the left.
 
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