Oh my GERD, this started as a short blurb for the video, because I think Drew Gooden is great at what he does. I don't know what happened. I can't read this anymore, so I'm posting. Not sure if I'll keep it because I don't really know what it is.
Drew Gooden provides my annual realization that Spotify is still a thing. He is such a good egg. Love everything about this video. I have no idea why anyone is still using that parasitic garbage service or propping up these kinds of destructive companies.
This is where the "you can't stop/hinder capitalism by boycotting individual companies without organization, so it's pointless" shit drives me nuts. Sure, if you're of the mind that you're a one-man capitalism fighting machine, but that's not the point nor the expected outcome. Brother, you're only saying that for selfish reasons (which is fine, some treats are fine, but be honest with yourself and others about it). Your behavior as a consumer absolutely matters, if for no other reason than to show others that they have the power to say "no" to companies that are misanthropic and to emulate supporting and promoting ethical companies and owners/workers. You might just inspire a corporate subverter or a person/collective who wants to try something different (like a co-op). Socialism and communal ideas can catch like a wildfire in the right conditions (like living under global fascism). That's why throughout my entire life, they have wanted social and economic punishment for even talking about it in a neutral or positive manner. You currently can't control where you get your water from, or in many places, what your ISP is (which is why all utilities should be nationalized), but you can control where you get your produce, dinner, and your shoes. You consistently have a choice of whether you'll keep paying for meals at a restaurant you know doesn't pay well, is a union-buster, and treats it's workers like shit. Or supports/facilitates genocide and the dehumanization project. As workers, we often don't have much choice but to take what job is available to us or end up on the street and/or in jail (as a very legal slave). As a consumer, especially AS A WORKER-consumer, you have a responsibility to be discerning about what you buy and promote. Stop using your consumer addiction and loyalty to the tools of the system as an excuse to tune out your ethics in order to pretend to not give a shit. It's the same thing greed addicts do. Just acknowledge it so there is a freedom to have a conversation about it. No one is pristine, making all of the perfect ethical choices all of the time. Especially if you live in the West, it is next to impossible. The point is doing what you can is, at the very least, better than trying to live honestly with or promoting doing nothing at all.
Only thing I'll add is that art is just like every humanistic thing that Capitalism inevitably decimates, the industry is not broken. It has never not worked as intended. It's why 95% of "pop" music everywhere in the western world is so bland, formulated, and soulless. Always has been. This shit is nothing new. They're just still prospering because everyone who should be reporting on and regulating this shitty system ends up in their position precisely because they will never produce or do anything of consequence. Once we created super-citizens in the form of corporations, the old/new money families who freely rape and pillage because of that status don't need us anymore. They choose their representatives. They just need some of us to show up and vote every two years to validate their openly corrupt sham system and to unquestioningly prop up their bottom of the barrel companies, services and modern day feudalism. They then use that power and those companies to create a constant spectacle of working class infighting with an entire industry that swallows up all media. Always recentering all things around voting and politics to give the illusion that something, anything, everything is happening solely because of how important elections and our faux democracy are.
It's all a part of the meat grinder. Technofascists hate art because it first teaches, then reminds them and everyone else of how soulless and sociopathic they and their products/services are. They must be totally detached in order to steal all of the wealth and life-sustaining resources of the planet from 8 billion people and all other life on the planet. Without real pushback and economic consequences, it was inevitable that their delusions of grandeur would eventually have them longing to do it to other planets too. Unironically, their own "AI" grift is unintentionally exposing their eugenicist misanthropy on a much grander scale because they can't see how much they have completely exposed themselves with these schemes. It's inevitable that this artificial bubble is eventually going to burst, so until then, they must contain the media we're exposed to in an attempt to soften the blow.
Some say they're "evil", I favor "soulless," but really, we're saying the same thing. I just don't believe in predetermined "goodness" or "badness" in part because they're defined by humans as opposite poles of a spectrum that is based on a very narrow perspective and very little information in terms of universal knowledge. Our little monkey brains who can't even hear or see as well as billions of other "lessor" beings on this planet really don't know a whole lot to be acting like we understand the unseen objective polar opposites of the Universe in totality. It just isn't logical as the most informed among us are still adjusting, re-defining, and discovering our basic laws of physics, while the uneducated and selective dumbfucks are still insisting dinosaurs never existed. Driven to coerce you to parrot their insanely stupid beliefs by withholding your basic human rights if you don't.
The technofascists and ethnofascists who own and control most of the major outlets that claim to disseminate "verified" and "unbiased" information must repeatedly hit us over the head with how SmArT, just, and virtuous they all are. Even though it's easy to find out there is no evidence to back that claim at all. The reason people listen to AI slop unironically is directly linked to the same people who need you to think people like Jobs, Gates, Zuckerburg, etc are just one-man operations developed in a basement/garage that shat out computer systems, conjured an ugly car out of thin air, or was divined a shitty society-collapsing app because they're so brilliant. That’s what want to force upon us instead of the reality that ultimately tens, then hundreds, then thousands, then tens or hundreds of thousands of people contributed to that defining and expanding that idea, worked to bring it to fruition, creating a company to sell a product that very, very, very few people will soak up any recognition and capital/profit from. The workers and users are deliberately detached from their own contributions and experiences, human interaction and social/ethical norms.
It starts with little (conditioning) lies like Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Disney princesses. The foundation of sex binarism at birth and the accompanying socially coveted gender reveals, pink vs. blue, patriarchal vs matriarchal mentality leave out a whole lot of people and biological nature. Conveniently, it innately evolves into red vs blue, whether it be the Cards vs the Cats, Coke vs Pepsi, or Dems vs Republicans. Our capitalist politico-economic system relies upon this dichotomy-dependent brainwashing.
It is sustained with enforced brand worship and leisure-time religions like the NCAA/NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL/FIFA/NASCAR. If you aren't into sports, you'll always have the old-Hollywoodlike 24 hour Next Door feeding "News" cycle of whining, false/malicious grievances, gossip, slander, defamation, calculated targeting, and stochastic terrorism. Out of all of that comes the required proselytized dogma that provides cover for abusive/corrupt family/religious/community members and leaders, as long as they've been approved as "not one of them". Now you are ready to become a professional and proud propagandist hypocrite with squishy, ever-changing boundaries and morals.
Throughout history, the transformation always ends with trying to stave off the predators we've fed by sacrificing the most vulnerable among us out fear and selfishness, disguised as necessity and freedom. Finding yourself voluntarily throwing your hard-earned money back to your masters, since they'll just steal the rest anyway. Worshiping a geriatric rapist-grifter as your apocalyptic self-fulfilling prophet, while he eyes your 14 year old daughter. Or son. Cheering on or demanding the imprisonment, state-sponsored murder, torture, ethnic cleansing and eventually genocide of other oppressed people you've been told are your enemy. All the while, wholeheartedly believing that if you deserve your own level of enslavement, punishment, and misery, so too does everyone else who is "below" you. You're fine with going back to at time when racists could be overtly racist because you perceive you're the one who will always be in charge, while mainlining the fear that you won't. What you're conditioned to forget is that they always oppress all of us. Like, for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
The 1950s that they long for are when there were millions of parents and children with trauma and PTSD after WWI, the depression, and WWII who were forced to tough it out without being able to talk about their private hell or risk going to the "nuthouse" and being dispossessed. This was the heyday of major "job-creating" corporations freely and knowingly taking advantage of and poisoning their employees, citizens, and/or air and water supply of surrounding towns with the blessing of the government. They creating a cancer epidemic in some of the poorest parts of the nation. that still exists today, and never had to fucking pay for it, so they still do it in new oppressed towns (see East Palestine, Ohio, Flint, MI, the entire state of OK). That's what they want to get back to and improve upon. To be able to do that once and for all, they must contain, direct and control class struggle, not end it. It's just the majority will never be ok with criminals doling out justice for the oppressed. Never forget, in 2026 everyone has the power to learn what they believe is based in capitalist propaganda and not provable facts, but if they're taught seeing themselves as the "winner" above all else, it means as those who dominate others in the name of Nationalism, they don't have to care.
Without the distractions, myths, and lies we tell ourselves, or more accurately, that are shoved into our brains from birth, we'd eventually have to actually look into the meatgrinder as we're pushed toward and then through it. We might ask why are we the ones on the butchering line at all when we're literally 99.9999% of the world's human population? Which begs the question, since we know their bullshit "AI" is deliberately programmed with bias and an agenda (@grok is this true?), what do you think those catchy AI generated songs are allowed to convey as we live in a society of ad overload, forced and uninformed/limited choices? Where monochromatic out-of-touch billionaire con artists have convinced themselves they are a gift to the earth who can do whatever they want, whenever they want, because after all, it all belongs to them, including us. I'm sure their AI songs are all about helping one another, the perilous fallout of greed addiction, subversion, and questioning authoritarianism.
Because apparently I can turn any discussion about music and politics into something that will piss people off, this is where I would have probably started to blather on -- as person who has never identified under as any social label other than being socialist (which is a natural state of being) -- would say 85% of what you think is punk, is not punk. People who don't agree with you and have a solid argument with history to back it up are not "gatekeepers." You can't require me to meet an impossible monetary requirement to buy your album and call it socialism, and you can't just use that word because you don't understand the stance or intent behind it. Anyone can become a punk, anyone, there is no gatekeeping, you just can't change the definition of what it is to fit your favorite band... or you. That the adoption of "pop" punk as a thing amongst some of the old guard is what killed punk. Punk died with bands like Green Day and the Offspring. Then I'd say something about bands like the Descedents being part of the problem and reiterate that skate/gutter punk has absolutely nothing at all to do with "pop punk". I am waaay too easy find on the internet to invite some emo kid who has spent 20 years of life calling himself a punk because he owns every Blink 182 album to come throw shit at my windows. It's also not something I really give a shit about all that much. Especially since we're kind of all punks now on the left, whether we like it or not. So, to be clear, I won't be doing that.
What the fuck do I know, anyway. I'm just a dipshit who has possibly been walking around on a broken or fractured leg for 4 weeks, as I pay almost $900 a month for insurance, but can't talk myself into going to the Dr. because of severe anxiety due to a couple of really shitty doctor experiences over the past 5 years (and when I was younger). I told the wife of the MD I work for about it for the first time today in passing and she didn't seem to think anything of it, so I'm sure it's fine. I swear, next week is the week. I'm going next week. After I cry a lot. And maybe take some Xanax. Probably. Maybe.
