For as long as this video has a presence on Youtube — that is again, the whole problem with the digitization of information. It can be shut down at any time. It’s not like owning books or records where the powers that be would have to smash down your door. It can all be taken away at any time. I could write about all the information contained here but it’s almost pointless while I’m only just formulating my thoughts.

My key takeaway from this video: You cannot escape a prison if you don’t know you are in one.

A new mechanism of control — the influencer culture — There are many examples of course where the technology is utilized as a vehicle for rebellion, but here in The West it is by and large a marketplace where people are led to believe that they are, A) The product and brand, and B) the one controlling and profiting from their product and branding.

“unprecedented fetishization of money”

I would call it as much a fetishization of “self.”

That is the prison, really, isn’t it? The fetishization of self and narcissism is hardly new, on the one hand. On the other, what is new is the information by which and through which identity is created. We are awash in a sea, albeit a still vast sea, of curated information. Where once identity was informed more by individual experience, we now have a limitless menu or feed of imagery — and while it could be said we still possess freedom of choice, finding choices that might pertain to us as individuals is increasingly difficult. It’s obscured by… marketing? Recalling what Frank Zappa referred to as “the trendmongers at Big Swifty’s,” there is a giant machine churning out barrages of images. It’s easy to get caught in the current. Much the way Amazon gives you “options” in the form of “customers who bought this also purchased” we add more and more extra items to our carts while we shop for identity. We have self-created flesh and bone brand avatars that we turn out in public and present to the world as me, myself and I. We are inauthentic, for the most part. Even those of us who choose the least likely and popular fighter (to use gaming terminology) are still opting for an identity someone else manufactured for us.

I can point to my own fashion choices and brand loyalty, for example, to Doctor Martens boots. It started with my fealty to the “punk rock” image. They were more rarely seen and they clearly identified me as being part of a specific tribe. They were never the most comfortable footwear, despite that brand loyalists will vow that they are. It was image. When they gained a more wide appeal I scorned and derided the “newcomers” as just climbing aboard a fashion bandwagon. That was of course all I had ever been doing but now my identity as part of a tribe was threatened. The outsiders got me agitated in a way that wasn’t so different than citizens of a city or nation reacting negatively to immigration of people who don’t necessarily look or behave the same… which brings us too quickly to politics but there is quite a bit worth mention between shoe-shopping and immigrant bashing and nationalism.

I’m more concerned with freedom and perceived freedom and how the ball gets to rolling in any social movement… or personal movement. I’m more concerned with the larger picture of how the technology we thought could liberate us has done exactly the opposite. Nothing new to see here really as many cried out right at the start in the Post-War West that the media would be our undoing. And as a side-note, the religious fundamentalists of all denominations are actually making the same argument when they say we need to travel back in time to escape the depravity and decadence in the onslaught of media-generated imagery. Not so different at all though it’s easy enough to see their solution is… well, it’s fucking stupid, to put it simply. Going backwards has rarely benefited anyone in any context. No, the answer is somewhere forward to the future in a place where we are emotionally and spiritually evolved enough to make authentic choices.

A tangent… a sidenote: The current climate has created a scenario of the accessorization of identity. In other words, identity as not who we are, but as what we put on.

A further exploration of this would include the latter part of the video that speaks of Societies of Control and possibilities of more nefarious uses…