my journey to one million dollars pt. 8

choo choo here comes the money train

progress update

Would you believe that since I started writing about manifesting a million dollars, I’ve actually gotten poorer? I should take a class on visualization, because I think something’s gone haywire with this manifestation hardware.

you need to pay to be here, chump

I’m not particularly suited to modern society. Not suited to any type of society, really. There isn’t much space out there in the world for lazy flaneur-dreamers like myself.

But then, there isn’t really much space for anybody, is there?

My rent, without utilities, clocks in at around $15,600/year. People don’t talk about rent like this, but that’s the fee that I pay to be alive. We love fees. I live in Portland, OR, which isn’t exactly the cheapest place in the US, but it’s by no means the most expensive, and my rent is actually pretty reasonable for the city.

But is any rent reasonable when you consider what it is you’re paying for? Should it cost more to not fear dying in the street? Should it cost less? What are the metrics for basic need cost analysis?

I’m always on a quest for a more interesting or nuanced answer than “that’s just the way it is!” I’m well aware that it can be tiresome for the people who care about you to constantly have to hear all this complaining about how exploited we all are, but then, I wonder, does that also have a price tag associated with it? Does a friendship with me have a monetary threshold? I’m around $12,000 worth of complaints. Go overbudget and friendship is over. I suppose this is the real reason I need a gazillion dollars, not a more just society, eh? So I can keep people around.

white malice

I just read a book called White Malice, and hooboy, those anglo-colonizer nations in the 60s really didn’t want any part of Africa to have even a modicum of self-determination or governance.

People often do this thing where they misinterpret what the American Empire is. They often tend to think about it in terms of old empires, like the British, or the Romans, or some other collection of white guys in weird outfits. See, in my conception of how these empires constitute themselves, there’s always an imperial core — for example, the British were doing all of this horrific stuff in all of their satellite territories to strip resources, labor, and capital and bring it back to the homeland where they could build awful looking cities and stuff all their wealth into the NHS and ugly museums. It was a filter system — extractive in its essence. You take the things, people, material, and you grind them up to make empire soup back home.

The US is different, though on its surface it does not appear to be. We’re a settler colonial nation, a nation of miscreants who left their homes to go murder other people and take their homes. That settler attitude just kept on going, it was an insatiable hunger that even genocide could not stop. These outcasts of empire which eventually formed the American empire took the 50+ million people that were living in the Americas before colonization and consumed them, pushed them around, took their land, became hungrier and hungrier for more and more and more.

Fast-forward to the end of World War 2, where we now have an empire with a corporate structure. You’ve got 50 subsidiaries which are all part of the larger corporate firm, a larger parent company.

This is where the shape of the empire becomes clear.

See, each one of these subsidiaries IS the corporation. America becomes a hydra. Sure, there’s a capital with a president and a congress and all that, but ultimately, what matters is where the capital flows, and the capital flows everywhere. A great flow of extraction and consumption that sweeps over a continent, and is ever hungrier and hungrier. It is not a single deal.

Back to White Malice. The general attitude of the American empire becomes, post-WW2, an attitude of expanding the corporate umbrella. The empire demands more subsidiaries. More resources which can be extracted, abstracted, and moved around. More America. This new America cannot exist in a world of nation states, so it sets about destroying them, including those who would try to reassert the concept of a nation state within the borders of America itself. This is the foundational idea of liberal ideology, a world of open markets, where capital can freely flow. The people who structured and fought to make an empire that was a “vast and ecumenical holding company.”

Through the CIA and other forces, the US destroyed men like Patrice Lumumba (murdered horribly like a dog) and Kwame Nkrumah, who believed and fought to try and create pan-Africanist nations that would protect and safeguard their populations from the vast holding company. The driving force of capitalism cannot account for individual human lives and suffering.

The Congo, Ghana, and dozens of other countries were toyed with and extracted from, rolled into the Great American Project. More corporatization, more abstraction, more extraction.

What the reactionary right is up to can boil down fairly simply. They want a return to traditional nations and nation states, where borders are established and sabers are rattled to protect those borders. They are infantile morons who believe that somehow there is a connection between the degradation of the nation state and gender fluidity. There is no connection between these things. The real right is the same order that has created this dark god of capital, an ideological and physical force that continues to expand the tentacles of capital, in pursuit of fair deals and fair cash flows. Empathy, care, comfort, these concepts only have value insomuch as they can be consumed, that they can have a dollar amount attached.

What is so horrifying to many is that the American empire is now what it always has been, with no bullshit—a settler colonialist nation that became a capital engine where aesthetics can be anything as long as they don’t interfere with the great capital tides.

Donald Trump speaks to many baby ‘mericans through a promise of a return to a nation state. That state is not coming, or it isn’t coming in the way we imagine. Climate apocalypse might force it, but I have yet to see a contender rise to challenge the elemental power of the profit motive. I get the Capitalist Realism guy now.

Go watch Network, great film.

sidereal confluence

Speaking of profit motive as nation, I recently played Sidereal Confluence, and I can’t tell if it’s demonic or not.

Here’s the premise of the game. A bunch of aliens get together for a big old party, where everyone has decided to build a perfect and equal society that joins together all of their strengths into one. The source of conflict? Everyone has their own idea of what equality and perfection will be. What decides who wins? Points, duh.

Basically, everyone has a bunch of cards that look like this:

Low res, but I couldn’t be bothered. You take input resources, which are cubes, octagons and tokens, and you turn them into other cubes, octagons, and tokens. Each player is an alien faction that produces a surplus of certain types of resources and has a deficit in others. So, you gotta trade stuff to get stuff, to run your converters better and better, ultimately building technologies which everyone gets, giving people new converters. Repeat until there’s a winner.

The main shtick with this game is that there’s not really a way to force or harm any of the other players. You cannot take things from other players (there is a faction that can steal, but it’s fairly mild, and is ultimately another form of trade), and the game provides convenient ways to determine how many points every cube and token is worth, so unless you cannot do basic arithmetic, you’re usually able to tell if a trade is within spitting distance of fairness, and you’re unlikely to be taken advantage of.

Now, of course, overarching all of this is the shared economy of the game, where the overall economy will have surpluses and deficits of specific resources that emerge from certain factions being in the game (there are nine, and the game plays 4-9 people). You don’t have control over this entire economy, because each player is pulling individual levers in their portion.

But, the overall thesis here seems to be the same one you see in liberalized economic theory. Fair and free trade results in the general advancement of society, nobody gets hurt, and everything is hunky-dory. THE INVISIBLE HAND OF THE ALIEN MARKETPLACE BABYYYYY.

Is this secret propaganda? I don’t know, but it seems that there is something that rings false in the idea of perfect production and consumption.

I don’t know what to make of it. Fun game though. Talk soon, xoxoxo