> In a recent op-ed, [David Brooks] warns that a rigid political climate on the left has led people on the right of the political spectrum to actively embrace nihilism.
That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis.
The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity.
We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising.
Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town.
If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it.
That’s a strange dodge. "The Left made me do it" is a child's excuse, not an analysis.
The deeper truth is that nihilism isn’t born of politics. Nihilism what's left when after the exhaustion of meaning under total commodification. It's born of the spectacle, the replacement of reality with its endless representations. Every human relation is mediated through an economic relation, and eventually every gesture, every feeling, every passing thought gets rendered into a commodity.
We are desperate for connection, and the spectacle knows it. So it offers us platforms that promise intimacy but can’t deliver it. They were designed not to connect us to other humans but to make us friends with brands. We log in for friendship and get advertising.
Go outside? Good luck. It's empty because this stupid city was designed around cars, and even if there are people, they're tucked into their phones. It's a social ghost town.
If I propose to decommission the spectacle, I'd expect to receive a bewildering array of responses: "naive," "utopian," "impossible." So here we are, trapped in a world of our making where no one has the choice to enter nor to leave and everyone has been leveraged to maintaining it despite no one wanting it.
Good job. We have only ourselves to blame.