More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Are the cravings for a fanbase an expression of how politically powerless we really feel? Or is it something else entirely? Though we insist we are Socialist and Marxist in our ideals, is social media and our pursuit for fame within this structure not the purest expression of individualistic, Thatcherite neo-colonial politics where we transform into scripted individual brands, launching ourselves like start-up companies while masquerading as being ‘in service’ to our ‘communities’ by ‘taking up space’ as if by being true to ourselves, we’re doing everyone else a massive favour?
Aren’t these wealthy aesthetes on Instagram merely another iteration of a class elite deciding what is good and what is not good, shaping our reality the way they always have just better disguised by technology which has the optics of transparency and democracy? Are they not the beneficiaries of the old, covert systems, descendants of the children of settlers and the children of Empire, left-leaning spawn from right-leaning families, who can pick and choose objects plucked outside of their cultural context in some sort of static menagerie in order to show how innately open-minded they are even
...more
The West’s insistence that it is humans who are an antithesis to the Earth is short-sighted and incorrect. It is a certain kind of human built into a particular system whereby solid, physical things like ancestral land, a tree, the rivers, water and rocks become unreal next to the dreamt up, magical apparatus of the stock market and quarterly growth. What is defined as ‘real’ has become abstracted—fuelling a disassociated state where we destroy without considering the consequences.
It’s as if she thinks she’s better than the rest of us, her ability to protect her privacy and to abstain from the internet and our collective narcissism.
The endless replication of her whiteness on Instagram was given a wake-up call in the summer of 2020. She now posts stories of tweets from prominent Black activists or else, at the time of Derek Chauvin’s trial, reposts stories of tweets from Black people where they say, do not celebrate this verdict, there is so much more work to do—as if she too is so evolved and in step with the conversation.
Liberal whites have got much better at disguising themselves post George Floyd—now they will post photos from their Thanksgiving dinner and say, holding what this day means and the joy at being with friends.
