America

The Gameshow Edition

This morning I read a piece in the Daily Beast about DHS plans to for a gameshow in which contestants compete for an American Citizenship. Winners get sworn in on national TV (is there such a thing anymore?) and the losers get lifetime gas, one million free miles on American Airlines, and a $10,000 Starbucks card.

Idiocracy has arrived sooner than we imagined.

It appears America is doomed, cannibalizing itself in an orgy of fast-food, cheap consumer products, and illiteracy. Who could have predicted that late capitalism would look this stupid? Marx did.

In contrast, the commodity-form has nothing at all to do with labor products’ physical nature or the thing-to-thing relationships arising from it, and the same holds for the value relation of labor products, within which that form is expressed. Here, it is only a particular social relation among people that assumes, for these people themselves, the phantasmagoric form of a relation among things. To find an analogy, we have to travel into the misty place that is the religious world, where things produced by the human mind seem endowed with lives of their own: they seem to be autonomous figures interacting with one another and human beings. So it is in the commodity world, too, but with things produced by human hands. I call this “fetishism”; labor products become fetishes the moment they are produced as commodities, and this fetishism is thus inseparable from commodity production.

This passage on commodity fetishism itself explains the entire economy of the internet. It also explains how American citizenship can be turned into an Apprentice-style reality show.

We really do live in the stupidest timeline.