The solid and the ethereal, though, have traded traits, and the result is something new and unfamiliar. We no longer have the “spiritual” and the “material” – I would argue that what we have is the “informational” and the “totemic”.
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Look, I didn’t think I had been gearing up to write about the Tim Burton movie Beetlejuice, but I’m really seeing that a lot of what I’ve been talking about fit into this movie, and I really must admit that it’s a fun movie. I recommend rewatching it if you get the chance. It’s only an hour and a half long. However, I stand by what I said about the movie previously: it is part of that genre I mentioned and labeled American Cringe. (cover image from “Dead Ink Apparel” https://deadinkapparel.storenvy.com/products/24311235-dont-tread-on-me-chuck)
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In my thinking, this hinges upon the “black pill”, which I’m explaining as a coincidence of despair and conspiratorial thinking (there may be other aspects, but I think this is the formation.) The mutant epistemology of conspiratorial thinking provides an explanation for the despair and a supposed pathway out of it, but this is a snare. It only leads deeper into the mire.
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The tendency of profits to decline is is what drives the supposed innovation of the capitalist system: the need to always move to a different horizon of extraction, to find untapped sources of value that can stave off this heat-death for just a little longer. Sometimes the state intervenes and slaps them away from one horizon of extraction (see: child labor laws,) but this only rarely happens.
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Consider: we think of paper when made by human beings as an artificial substance – a relatively benign one, but artificial nonetheless – but when made by wasps for a nest, the paper is natural. Every building is artificial, but a beaver dam is clearly natural. A tool made by an octopus or a crow feels more “natural” than something made by a human.
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