#capitalsim

The enshittification of the Internet is gaining momentum.

We're on our way back into the fifties and I really think we need a giant meteor at this point.

From Cuba to Louisiana: Two paths after slavery’s end

By Gregory E. Williams

Government Turkey Tail Mushrooms. More bans on the way.

Archivist's note:

Turkey Tail fungi, therapeutically used for millennia

2025 Reclassified as “novel foods” and declared illegal to trade. Raids are already underway.  

This is not an isolated incident. Further bans (including Reishi) are anticipated.

Turkey Tails are alleged to be among the most studied fungi in human history

Move presented as consumer protection*

Sugar-laden, ultra-processed and pesticide-coated toxic products are subsidised, available, and advertised everywhere

Natural plants and fungi are being erased from daily life

Fast food is the norm in many places.

Nutritional knowledge is being disappeared

Some claim that global public-private partnerships are making the population ill by design.

*Note: Many claim such State actions enable pharmaceutical companies to patent and sell degraded/synthesised versions of naturally occurring entities at prices few can afford. Millions are sickened by denial of access or by working multiple jobs to pay for what could once be picked from markets, woods or even an inner-city pavements. 

Deprivation and dependency appear to be means and ends.

...

These pleasures can be seen as interrupting the liberal and capitalist subject called to consciousness, intentionality, and effective will. Interruption and self extension are not opposites, of course; that is my point. But the other point is that in the scene of slow death--where mental and physical health might actually be conflicting aims, even internally conflicting--the activity of riding a different wave of spreading out or shifting in the everyday also reveals confusions about what it means to have a life. Is it to have health? To love, to have been loved? To have felt sovereign? To achieve a state or a sense of worked-toward enjoyment? Is “having a life” now the process to which one gets resigned, after dreaming of the good life, or not even dreaming? Is ‘life” as the scene of reliable pleasures located largely in those experiences of coasting, with all that’s implied in that phrase, the shifting, diffuse, sensual space between pleasure and numbness?

I am focusing here on the way the attrition of the subject of capital articulates survival with slow death. Impassivity and other politically depressed relations fo alienation, coolness, detachment, or distraction, especially in subordinated populations, can be read as affective forms of engagement with the environment of slow death, much as the violence of battered women has had to be reunderstood as a kind of destruction toward survival. But what I am offering here is also slightly different. In this scene, activity toward reproducing life is neither identical to making it or oneself better nor a mimetic response to the structural conditions of a collective failure to thrive, nor just a mini-vacation from being responsible--such activity is also directed toward making a less-bad experience. It’s a relief, a reprieve, not a repair. While these kinds of acts are not all unconscious--eating involves many kinds of self-understanding, especially in a culture of shaming a self-consciousness around the moral mirror choosing pleasures so often provides--they are often consciously and unconsciously not toward imagining the long-haul, for example.

The structural position of the overwhelmed life intensified this foreshortening of consciousness and fantasy. Under a regime of crisis ordinariness, life feels truncated, more like desperate doggy paddling than like a magnificent swim out to the horizon. Eating adds up to something, many things: Maybe the good life, but usually a sense of well-being that spreads out for a moment, not a projection toward a future. Paradoxically, of course, at least during this phase of capital, there is less of a future when one eats without an orientation toward it.”