Why yes, there is a vast world devouring monster with its tendrils encircling all of us, and it’s plainly visible once you notice it, and it’s everywhere. But you come off as insane when you try to tell other people about it.
Is SCP-3125 an allegory for capitalism? Shit.
Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad.
yeah, but you get used to it
Lovecraft was basically translating his alienation with capitalism into short stories. Unfortunately, being a reactionary for most his life, he punched down instead of up, and his fears were pointed at minorities and women and air conditioners instead of the pervasive system itself.
Lmao nice to see Cold Air get a reference instead of his usual stuff people talk about
Hasn’t anyone written modern leftist horror in his style?
Depending on your views of NK Jemisin, The City We Became is arguably an example of this.
Thanks, I can just imagine the stuff lovecraft wrote but leftist, it really isn’t that impossible. I kinda feel like Rats in the Wall is about aristocracy and old money, though it also has the cat.
I also found a reading of the book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd0nQm1tzZY
Honestly that’s what makes his stories good imo, shows that liberalism is ultimately the fear of the big Other that is represented by minorities and how its inherent.
This is a good videogame premise ngl, you’d just have to make the enemies fascist in order to make things palitable
Now your dreams will never again be so peaceful. You will see capital in your nights, like a nightmare, that presses you and threatens to crush you. With terrified eyes you will see it get fatter, like a monster with one hundred proboscises that feverishly search the pores of your body to suck your blood. And finally you will learn to assume its boundless and gigantic proportions, its appearance dark and terrible, with eyes and mouth of fire, morphing its suckers into enormous hopeful trumpets, within which you’ll see thousands of human beings disappear: men, women, children. Down your face will trickle the sweat of death, because your time, and that of your wife and your children will soon arrive. And your final moan will be drowned out by the happy sneering of the monster, glad with your state, so much richer, so much more inhumane.
—Carlo Cafiero, Summary of Marx’s Capital
After finally getting into theory it fucked me up badly when I finally came around to the conclusion that there is violence all around us, unending, unyielding, all in service of making some number, on a server in the middle of nowhere, go up. At the behest of capital, the state is taking away our homes, our health, and our life all for an imaginary number
I personally love that feeling of clarity and dread that comes with reading a good dose of theory. When everything clicks into place and you can see the monstrosity of capitalism animating everything from behind the veil of normalcy. Makes me feel better knowing I’m living in a horror novel.
Ya’ll ever feel like learning theory does to your brain what Lovecraftian eldritch horror is meant to do?
Naw, reality does that part, theory just allows you to see it
Silicon valley types worry about evil AI destroying the planet. There are a few cults around it even. MIRI is the most well known around here.
That is specifically a system created by people that is two large for any one to control that has goal antithetical to human life and the ability to manipulate people to support it.
What they fail to realize is that they are projecting their alienation under capitlaism unto the specific tools by which capitalism alienates them. It is wild.
Capitalism is an artificial intelligence, or at least a god, in the sense that a will is enacted on its behalf that does not rely on any individual person making contingent choices. And it has destroyed the earth.
a blind idiot god… something like a slime mold, chasing food by reflex.
It’s The Moss landlord from Season 2 of Tuca and Bertie
Exactly. It uses people as components is a giant machine that produces only waste and misery.
We dwell in the very armpit of Babylon
Like any other computer it has started to run too fast and the heat it is putting out is going to cook it’s substrate
I’d argue it’s the demon Mammon, but same thing
yeah i normally go with Moloch
Futurists who worries about AI and immortality is the peak form of imperial core privilege. When you are so far removed from want and bathed with wealth that you have to concocts fictional scenarios to worry about. I fucking hate these people.
I don’t hate them. Deep down they want falgsac. They are just so brian poisioned they can’t picture any form other than neoliberalism.
Like in the the deep time when we have achived ful nano scale control of all matter and our brains are digiatally stored in cold iron starts orbiting black holes till the heat death of the univere they picture there still being a need for people that specialize in contract law.
A lot of it is projection as well, another form of Capitalist Realism. If you’re a STEM/adjacent person in the West, odds are you work in Defense, Oil&Gas, Auto, Aerospace (which rely on the first 2), or Tech/Entertainment (which makes money the same way tobacco or alcohol or gambling companies do, addiction).
Regardless of what exactly you make, odds are someone down the line you come to realize that what you do for a living is based on either killing people, or killing the planet, or making people miserable by selling them more pointless shit to coerce them to keep working for the empire. So it’s definitely possible for you to develop a mindset where you can’t even imagine the things you work on being used for anything but Bad - prime example is how Silicon Valley leaders shelter their kids from tech more than fundamentalist Christians. You hear about AI, and of course your brain goes to “how are we gonna use this to sell ads, get people addicted, or bomb other countries”? Because that’s what the capitalist world makes technology for.
I feel this. As much as liberals love stories of people escaping from cults, they really don’t like the suggestion that they may be living in one too.
I wish I could remember this movie I came across years ago.
I thought it was going to be something like “Supersize Me” but about brands in general. But it turned out to be a lovecraftian/capitalism light horror film. It was weird as fuck and I liked it.
(just looked it up, its called " Branded "
In future Moscow, where corporate brands have created a disillusioned population, one man’s effort to unlock the truth behind the conspiracy will lead to an epic battle with hidden forces that control the world.
HAH… its Russian…
I second this movie, it was quite good.
Damn, this looks tight. Counting this as informal nomination for movie night.
They of all people would know just how much capitalism sucks and tends to ruin everything it can…
Yeah, it’s like looking at Chthulhu. You won’t be able to really explain to others what you’ve seen, and it’s too big to really get at all at once anyway.
and we can only really see the shadow it’s casting on the world?
I mean, arguably that’s the purpose of Marx’s dialectical method in Capital. You can’t just glance around at random and arrive at a self-consistent conclusion about the broader abstract structures of capitalism. You have to just keep clawing at it until you arrive at some binding kernel of truth.
Yeah I used to jokingly call it forbidden knowledge awhile ago.
It’s the knowledge the people SHOULD have though, so I changed my perspective on it a bit even jokingly
That’s how I see it. Like being deprogrammed to see how evil the US government is like finding out that not only does the mythos exists, but that we are only a hairs away from an elder god waking up and consuming the sun
