Negations: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

Under modernity, each person must be a piece in a jigsaw puzzle: completely unique but predictably so—a piece that is different from all those around it but still able to fit into a larger picture. We have more artifacts, both material and digital, than ever with which to enact our identities, yet we can never seem capable of staying unique for lon

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This instability extends to identity itself. Where offline identity is grounded in lived experience, online identity forms through affinity and alignment. We become collections of interests, allegiances, and aesthetics. The internet’s second self becomes a curatorial project, constantly revised according to shifting community standards and platform... See more

The Cult of Yesterday

Capitalism, Necromancy, and the Dark Side of Nostalgia

River Quintana

Feb 09, 2024

Some of the sources of Pop Art VI, Peter Blake

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Capitalism, it seems, can’t let go of the past. Like a necromancer, it reanimates the corpses of bygone trends, ideologies, and aesthetics, then sells them back to us at a markup. This “capit... See more

It has already built an ecosystem that runs on exploiting attention and monetizing the self. Even if you avoid the internet completely—my partner does: he thought #tbt meant “truth be told” for ages—you still live in the world that this internet has created, a world in which selfhood has become capitalism’s last natural resource, a world whose term

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