Capitalism is well known to erode, then to obliterate, all familial, cultural, and other affective-communal structures, followed by what we can call the self-structures that those structures undergird too. 

First the larger structures are atomized into ‘individuals,’ then the individuals are atomized into ‘attention-bytes.’ Such is the psycho-‘productive’ ‘attention economy’ that sucks out our surplus attention-labour, through use of our surplus ‘digital creator’ labor, atop the new ‘platform-capitalist’ infrastructure. 

(‘LLM’ AI, synthesizing our intellectual labor, is in large measure simply an intensification and tighter concentration of this pre-AI dynamic, as my Closest Comrade Uyen elaborates better than anyone.) 

As Marx memorably described this corrosive and decompositional process, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ And again, AMONG the melting solidities is the self itself, the moral core, the sense of situated identity and ‘what’s what.’

Some people coherently GROW in these circumstances, in the way Nietzsche and later followers sought. Like Zarathustra, they self-overcome. (At least provided they use social media, if at all, only ‘intentionally,’ critically, and judiciously.)

In effect, they develop individually somewhat in the way Hegel described ‘Geist”s developing historically and in the way Marx was sure WE, AS an innately creative-productive ‘We,’ could develop upon taking collective control of our own productive circumstances – which at present would of course include platforms, as I’ve been writing for years now in hopes of socializing this shite.

But many, it seems, in capitalism’s molten environment as Marx described it, melt WITH ‘all that’s solid.’ They ‘melt-DOWN.’ 

Maybe MOST people do, especially as supportive institutions (friendships, families, schools, towns …) and communicative media succumb – hence Nietzsche’s concluding that only a few especially strong, ‘HEALTHY’ folk pull the trick off. 

I have no idea what the numbers are, but what we see here, in images like that I post here, is a case of the meltdown response. It is not ‘revolution’ or ‘praxis,’ but shared psychodrama. 

Performances like these, when not intentional parody, are meltdowns-in-public by very confused people now desperately looking for things to believe in and build selves upon.

A drowning animal will grab at anything that seems to be floating. Thus, if a corrupt petrostate sheikdom spends hundreds of billions of dollars of ‘oil money’ to make a cretinous backward ‘religiosity’ whose name means, quite literally, ‘submission’ appear as a life-raft, or a cretinous pre-civilized murder cult look like a family, it shouldn’t surprise us when lots of psychotics take the bait. 

Instead we should combat the mirage, combat its funding, and combat the capital – including the ‘platform capitalist’ platforms – that enable or accelerate the degeneration, that undermine the moral-cum-cultural immune system that is the bulwark against corrosive capital and capital’s psychosis alike.

Hence, again, my proposals in recent years truly to SOCIALIZE ‘social media.’