#commoditization

It's funny, isn't it? What is and isn't fashionable. Changes with the weather sometimes, others times things stick like glue.

There aren't many dolls left anymore. Not much use for them since the gig economy took over.

The doll aesthetic, though?

So hot right now.

Can't go a minute in a sleepy village without seeing a girl with porcelain mask or clockwork gloves or something else "dollcore."

Sometimes a literal doll core, showing oh-so-coyly from a provocatively low neckline, elegant crystal facets nestled in between so much garish flesh.

I grimaced as just such a number went mincing by, sundress all embroidered with primroses, hair coiffed and topped with a canted, raffish arrangement neither quite fascinator nor derby hat. All that kept it from being chintzy was the price tag with more zeros than class.

It might have been a convincing display, if not for her airs.

While a doll might once have been bedecked so by its owner, any would have done all it could to avoid notice, even in such an getup. Certainly, none would have walked with so much...heaving and jiggling of flesh.

I brushed the thoughts away as I followed the girl down the street. There is, of course, no accounting for taste, and yet that saying is so rarely afforded to the more daring of us, those who actually broke norms.

Like it or not, dolls were "in." Or at least their aesthetic was.

Only problem is they weren't made anymore. Hadn't been for decades. On the other hand, given the number produced, it was easy to find old stock to break down for parts.

First, it was just the broken and worthless, of course, but then, well, fashion demands nothing but the best.

Flesh might decay, but dolls never did.

The thought brought with it bitter awareness of the once-taught skin that now sagged and slumped tiredly about my face.

Dolls just...went on existing, no matter what changed, untouched by the passing of the years.

Buyers started scouting estate sales and secondhand stores, desperate to find anywhere a well-maintained family heirloom might have been carelessly tossed out, hungry for the payday such a find could bring, like so many vultures...no, vultures ate carrion; these were predators.

Then, of course, the market caught on, as it always does, and deals became rare as the pickings became slim. There's only so long you can drain an irreplaceable resource before prices skyrocket.

The cheap knock-offs from overseas were simply no match for the real, vintage item.

This girl, well, she clearly had the means to afford it. The parts she wore were pristine, or had been before they'd been scalped. My fingers clenched, not as smoothly as they once had, true, but still with a force than belied their gnarled form.

It was revolting. Sacrilegious. Dolls had been marvels of engineering, masterpieces of ingenuity. Beautiful, yes, but not for porcelain shells and glittering cores. Beautiful because they were a thing made for a purpose, made to last, effective and graceful no matter the task.

The beauty lay in how they'd been made with such care by human hands, the ineffable meeting of the mundane and the sacred.

No, not the mundane...for dolls were not mortal, purposeless things, cursed with free-will and the capacity for sin. Dolls were created, yes, but divine.

Dolls were as angels, wheeled, mechanical things of inerrant purpose and inscrutable construction.

Angels on whom God had turned His back.

Angels now cast from heaven for the sin of having shining wings that pleased the eye, no matter they'd once been used to fly.

She turned to face me, eye vacant, smile vacuous, devoid of everything but life.

I shut my eyes, trying to forgive her sins. It had been her hunger that destroyed, if not her hands.

I didn't fear death as she did. Nonexistence was simply that. This fate, though, how much worse?

That a thing once given purpose might be hacked apart and used as but aesthetic trappings?

I could think of no worse fate.

A pity I couldn't inflict it on her. She'd been made for no reason but a grunting, sweaty collision of flesh, some tepid spurts of what passed for passion.

If anything, well, I'd done her a favor.

The thought amused me as I made the switch, peeled the near-putrid skin off my frame and replaced it with her face and hands.

Some creators found meaning in their creations, whether they wanted to or not.

Financial inclusion may seem like a way of teaching more people how to successfully participate in speculative markets for their own benefit, but this narrative masks the often predatory terms of the inclusion for the benefit of the existing systems. Just as philanthropically framed microloans allow the global financial centers to open a thousand tiny cuts of interest collection in previously inaccessible areas, the new tech platforms and gimmicks reshape our lives and selves to more effectively serve as resources to be extracted and exploited. As Rob Aitkin argues in “A Machine for Living: The Cultural Economy of Financial Subjectivity,” “the process of financialization … entails the configuration not only of new assets in financial markets but also ever-widening kinds of populations that could understand themselves as risk-bearing, investing or indebted subjects capable of navigating those markets.” Financialization enters our daily lives not just through macroeconomic fallout — unemployment rates and global capital flows — but through the attitudes and behaviors it encourages or forces us to internalize, often in the guise of “opportunities.”

These practices create inroads to extract new forms of value from individuals: as data to inform the speculative investments of larger hedge funds, as users on platforms, and as debtors under the thumb of financial surveillance and discipline. They work to fill our minds with the language of debts and returns on investment, in much the same way as widespread student and medical debt do. In Revenge Capitalism, sociologist Max Haiven argues that these structurally imposed debts are construed as individualized “responsibilities” around which one is obliged to manage one’s life and future.

In other words, the sort of “financial inclusion” promised by pseudo-democratized investment entails a risky incursion of neoliberal market logic at the level of individual practice. In an environment of deregulation, risk, and desperation, people are urged (or compelled) to take on an entrepreneurial subjectivity. 

[...]

So the thing where tumblr gently pushes you to sort yourself into a very specific type of queer (and, like...often encourages self diagnosis as well, I mean I’m not against self diagnosis but there’s something about the way tumblr does its blog recommendations that encourages this sort of tunneling/bubble creation) in exactly the same way that if you start following a particular fandom blog you’ll get more recommendations for blogs that focus on that fandom, and if your blog has a clear focus then your blog will get recommended more...

And same for political positions.

Like...obviously I get something out of being on here. I’m still here. I’m not saying it’s all bad. But...I think it’s something to be aware of. How we’re encouraged to sort ourselves into categories and base our identity around labels because that makes it easy for tumblr to keep us on this site and keep up the scrolling that gives them ad revenue. How that distorts our understandings of the things we want to be and have and fight for. How different that is from making connections with people in other contexts.

Worst case scenario, how it can make it harder to form and maintain connections with people in other contexts.

We'd been called Angels, once. Seraphs, in the days when we'd been the last seal on the book of Revelation.

Then, we'd won. The world hadn't ended. But it also hadn't changed. Nature abhors a vacuum, and mankind couldn't live with itself without the threat of the Beasts.

Some I suppose had feared no one would know what to do with the Seraphs after the apocalypse. Not the cynics, though; they knew to fear instead that someone would know exactly what to do with them.

They'd been right.

We'd been called Angels, once. Now it was just SPs. Cheap, disposable things a quarter the size of the ones who'd saved everything.

nations were willing to sacrifice us to preserve their way of life from the Beasts. They'd been no less willing to throw us at each Other as well.

The discovery of Flux had made it easier to stomach. No more bad optics of mangled children pulled from the porcelain shards of wrecked control pods. The whole process was sterile now

Humane.

Routine.

Just a cheap S-Link inside the SP, the pilot's consciousness plucked out of the Stream at the moment of mission failure and tucked safely back in their body. No muss, no fuss, no dead children weighing on their consciousnesses.

And then there was the added benefit of years more field experience. We didn't die now, we learned, immortal weapons that sharpened themselves further with each deployment, valuable assets in the Cardinal Wars.

The body was safe somewhere they called home, curled up in a Boat. I was Adrift. Nowhere.

The Stream, as if it were some gentle thing. A misnomer.

I was nothing immersed in it, tossed about by currents, unfamiliar emotions and memories flowing and ebbing, stochastic and sudden.

"You know the drill. Again." Handler's voice pulled me under, down to some hellhole, ass-end of the continent. It could've been anywhere; the briefing seemed lifetimes ago.

"Bring them hell, 117." A call sign? An ID number? Or just the number of times I'd been sent to kill Him?

The sun was warm on my skin, and I stretched my six wingblades, feeling stiffness in their joints, as if this was the first time they'd been moved.

And then, there He was, a bare 100 meters away. Just a man. More than a man. That Man. The Fluxsaint I'd been sent to kill.

At the sight of Him, the Chorus raised their voices. Some snarled in rage, some sneered in defiance, some simply became Still or cried softly. And some few tried to snatch control away.

I pushed them all down, the countless others. I was still here, still alive, still fighting.

"You, again?" He sounded tired. Concerned, even. Closer now, only 20 meters, a fragile thing I could have stepped on. He loomed over me, Crook in one hand, stretching out the other as if to lay it gently upon my steel. "How many tries has it been? How many times have I hurt you?"

Metal groaned as my body moved in fits and jerks, and I realized I was sobbing in a body that could make no other sound.

Please tell me. I've lost count.

His touch was certain, tender, one thrust cleanly through the S-Link. He'd done this the same number of times, after all.

I'd been called Angel, once, I thought.

Now I was a disappointment. A memory of pain and failure. One more voice lost in the Stream, sobbing quietly in a distant corner of a metal body that strode again to a destruction it was allowed to forget.