I truly, and deeply, appreciate your work. I don't know if you're familiar with the Magnus Archive, but it's got sections that use the fears of flesh and infection and rot to discuss factory farming, making oneself "consumable" on social media and for jobs, and the ways in which cults and abusive affection can bruise and rot the self.
Your point about imminent critique and how we (and our critiques) can't position ourselves outside of capitalist ideology had a nice resonance with some passages I'm reading in Timothy Morton's *Hyperobjects* this weekend, namely that when it comes to hyperobjects (like global warming or capitalism), "there is no Goldilocks position that's just right to view objects" and that "you aren't part of a larger whole; everything is enfolded in everything as 'flowing movement'". I have to confess to so far only grasping like 33% of *Hyperobjects* so maybe you and Morton aren't fully in conversation here, but it stood out to me.
Yeah It's a point that's been made before and I think there is some over lap here too. That said, I think it's important to point out that lack of exteriority doesn't just apply to that which happens outside subjectivity (like the climate crises) but it runs down to the foundational nature of all our selves....
As a Secret World Legends player, I cannot help but think of how this relates to, in a way, to the Orochi Group. They are a multi-national corporation in game based in Japan and founded post-World War II (i.e., in the year 1945 to be exact). They are seeking to harvest anima (i.e., the stuff of information, magic, and essentially, life energy of the planet) as a source of free energy to try to avert the fossil fuel crash and climate change through one of their divisions, Sycoil. However, all of the divisions use and misuse the arcane parts of the world and its denizens for their own corporate greed. Ghosts become edible jello, a flesh golem becomes a breeding ground for cultured meat, demonic locusts become food bars, the Draugr are dug up when searching for fossil fuel offshore in the Sargasso Sea, the list goes on about their sins against the secret world and of nature. However, the largest of these sins that stands out in relation to this video is that of the Fungal Filth, first found in the Shadowy Forest of Transylvania, the third area of the game. It is an alien Mi-Go like form of mycelium, a variant of cordyceps, taking root in the forest and despoiling it enough to make a Lair. It is ambulatory and alien. The thing is this is just one of the abominations of and perversions of science brought forth by the Orochi Group, a corporate id if there ever was one. There are others. There is a whole tanker ship in Tokyo, taken over by this Fungal Filth. There are worse things such as children ruthlessly experimented on for the sake of profit or to crack the code of their powers. One can see this in the lead-in on the missions before first meeting Lilith, the Mother of Monsters, i.e. Lily Engel, the Chairwoman of the Orochi Group. She created these monsters out of a power grab, both for the world and in the corporation as she is falling out of a marriage with Samael, i.e. Samuel Chandra, her husband. All of these abominations, eldritchly corporate or otherwise, are extensions of this and collateral damage at the same time. After all, Orochi cares nothing for its employees, both at Core and out in the field. Even Mestophiles himself from Faust is in debt to them (here he appears as a djinn). Many Orochi die out in the field and at the Core, for what ultimately? Japanese zaibatsus have a different culture to American corporations, but they are still both toxic businesses at the end of the day. One is collectivist and driven by loyalty to one's employer to the point of karoshi or worse, the other is hyper-individualized and bloodsuckingly lifeless as a vampire and just as much of a liar as a demon. One is just as bad as the other, the impulse only changes by culture. They are the same and it is the same ideology with an uncaring, oppressive set of mechanisms behind it. It despoils the planet in turn, even if the building blocks (as in the case of the Filth) were already there before. After all, the Red Hand dug up the Transylvanian Filth, the miners in the Blue Mountain Mine did the same thing in Maine in the last part of the first area of the game, Solomon Island. So, there is something out there growing when it comes to the corporate id and it is nothing good. It is just collateral damage as are we to it, but we can still fight it and cleanse it. It is just going to take work to do so, might need to do the kudzu thing for it...find its root system, cut off all of the seed pods, and then burn the entire thing, root system and all, so that way the land can recover and can replace it with something better. Sorry for the long post, but I just had a lot of thoughts and this brought it up. Again, sorry.
BTW, just responding to the hearted post since I got it recently from you, should you want to experience the game yourself, it is free. Halloween event is starting up on this MMO (that's what it is, an MMO). I can give you the tour so that way you can see it and experience it for yourself. Just choose your faction and initial set-up/class and we can go on from there. There is eldritch horror adventure, action, espionage, and investigation to be had along with fighting corporate zombies. After all, that is what happens to Orochi personnel in the field...if they do not die permanently, then they become Filth zombies. Again, eldritch horror/cosmic horror meets the horror of late capitalism combined with cults and a falling out of a cosmic marriage of evil. All sorts of bad-horribleness in general. However, there are some spots of light barely; so, it is not all bad. Nassir and the Marya in Egypt are one. You got to respect a man who can dance and make merry in the light of great horror as, if he does not, then the enemy wins. Ricky Pagan in Japan is the same way...just with rockabilly music and a damn good Japanese Elvis impression. There is also some school antics at the Innsmouth Academy in Solomon Island...high school all over again...just with a super-powered version of the kid from Firestarter, perhaps Carrie, who you have to protect yourself from in one mission. Honestly, if you don't when she turns her powers loose, death is inevitable. So, get the things you need for that mission before going down to the basement. It is an escort mission, but you have to protect yourself from the teen you are escorting. However, I just thought I'd extend the invite to you. If you want to experience it for your own eyes as well as the story itself, including striking back at the Morninglight cult which hijacked Orochi, go ahead. Let me know and being an experienced player up to the area of Transylvania, I will try to get you there. From there, I will see if I can hook you up with another RU-vidr who has done the Tokyo and South Africa parts of the campaign. I have not gotten over that hump and difficulty spike yet. Just let me know. O.K., thanks!
What you've done here isn't the same thing, and I'm not saying at all that, it just. It strikes me as a useful metaphor, that is so well shaped for discussions of capitalism and its horrors
@@JonTheLitCritGuy no, thank you! Someone else mentioned the Magnus Archives and I absolutely see the comparison. Not just the Flesh, but also the Corruption, that thing seeping in at the corners, tainting what was once clean. And yeah, maybe it *is* natural, but so is it's death and undoing, so maybe if capitalism is in some sense natural, so too is its mortality. Quality stuff once again!
I have the perspective that there is no exterior perspective from which to view the world, and attempting to define an exterior hobbles our capacity for understanding. Every system, both constructive and destructive, is a conversation between parts that are inherently inextricable from one another. There is no outside and inside. This aspect of our world is what I apply the concept of divinity to. That there is no thing truly beyond ourselves because we are merely a component of a much larger system in much larger conversations, and that both my interpersonal interactions and the interactions of galaxies are inherently linked together, and simultaneously independently evolving. They contradiction of interconnectedness and independent development is the mystery of divinity in my mind, as both sides of the contradiction are necessary for the movement to understanding the whole. I am simultaneously an ecosystem, ambivalent to the processes that maintain me, a human individual, acting directly and intentionally on the world around me, and a cell in the organism known as earth, unaware of the intricate processes unfolding around me that maintain both my own existence and the life of the planet. I dunno if there is a thesis outside that.
I've recently come to the realization that my future is not mine. My future must be given to grandchildren, I must create an environment by which it becomes possible to exist beyond the capitalist ideology. I exist further beyond capitalist ideology than my grandparents and parents. I look at star trek, the imagining of post-capitalism of a human embedded deeply in the neoliberal turn, and I see all the points where neoliberalism had it's tendrils in the story. Star Trek helped me begin the path to post-capitalism thought, but it was not complete, because it could not be complete. A human embedded within capitalism cannot create a world without capitalism, we can simply create an environment where it is easier to disgorge ourselves from it. We must build homes in which children can learn themselves freer from ideology than we were able.
Resources exist to be consumed. And consumed they will be, if not by this generation then by some future. By what right does this forgotten future seek to deny us our birthright? None I say! Let us take what is ours, chew and eat our fill. - CEO Nwabudike Morgan, "The Ethics of Greed" It's scary how a satirical quote from a 1999 game has become the driving creed of our times. You can clearly see how we got here and how this path will lead to a grim outcome yet, no will to steer the wheel.
@@MrOpellulo for a moment, I thought the quote was the comment, and that the quote was in earnest. How far we have fallen that the line between satire and gospel has become as naught. Fuck neoliberalism and it's stranglehold on imagination.
Great work. I watched it first about a month ago, and certain things said have stayed with me. As a visual artist, or maybe not because of that reason, I'm instantly drawn to the symbolic; or more so, to when a symbolic order has a reckoning with 'public secrets' omnipresent, but which lack potentency; but when you said "we're all tired, nobody is feeling good at the moment", I just felt so NOT alone...for a moment. And the same sentiment could be attributed to the section on how "we can all feel it in our lungs", yet to all intents we cannot name it.Thanks man
