Imagined Realities — Messages from the Confinement Facility
Come on in, the door is open. Witness the downfall of everything you believed in. The American dream is slowly coming to an end. Witness system failure on a global level. If the entertainment business has taught us anything, it’s that capitalist propaganda is an imagined reality. Life isn’t like a Hollywood movie. Life is real, movies are imagined. There is no such thing as the Economy, you fool. We have come full circle, and we will now auto-distrust, and eventually self-destruct as a capitalistic structure. Let’s get this paper :
“There are no gods, no nations, no money, no human rights, no business corporations, except in our collective imagination. In the real, natural world, there are no legal fictions we call “limited liability companies”. We have been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.” -Yuval Noah HarariImagine if you could tell a virus that you’re a limited liability person (LLP). In other words, you are not personally liable for your body’s diseases or liabilities. If you die, you can just hit the restart-button, and play again. Now imagine that you’ve just been imagining all this bullshit and come to your senses: you are fucked. It’s quite simple, really. If your body gets terminally ill, you will die. If you get a virus and things go haywire, thou shalt perish.
Now get this… In our imagined reality, which we call the Industrial Complex, the Capitalistic Economy if you will... somehow, these laws of nature do not apply. If your company goes bankrupt, and you had the intelligence to put the house and the car on your wife’s name, you are homefree. The workers that worked for your company might become so poor they can’t afford housing or food anymore, and THEY might die, sure. The pollution you caused by producing your goods might still kill trees and blacken rivers, shit happens. But you, the Manager, the Owner, the Businessman, the guy in that Armani suit? You can just create another company and start all over again. What kind of phantasy world is that? Where is the equality, the common sense, the spiritual or moral value in that reality? Yet this is the world we live in, the reality we love to hate and know to be imagined.
So now this virus is upon us, to remind us all of the objective reality of life. Yes, if we fuck up the planet, if we pollute and overpopulate and use up all its ressources, eventually we will die.
Look at music. You’ve been calling it a “music industry” with “products” and “markets’ for as long as I’ve doubted the whole concept. As an artist, or a fan, you’ve “produced” a track, or “consumed” a song. Still, all you had to do was listen to the spiritual vibes, the melodies and the messages, and enjoy the emotions. You can feel it and hear it, but you can’t actually touch music, eventhough my vinyl collection would probably not agree. Music is a Culture with Creations to be Enjoyed. Music is joy and pain, and a collector’s edition of “Do The Right Thing” on cassette. Music can be owned, but who owns music? Very rarely, the artists who actually made the music. You see, your eager imagination and the shiny happy record companies and publishing corporations made you believe it’s a Market with Products to be Sold. A game like any other commercial venture, to be played to win. Because you too can be a Success. We’d just like you to change the melody a little bit… So you signed, sealed and deliverd the deal in the hope of becoming one of the happy few to break on through to the other side and “make it”. Who can blame you? We’ve all been sold the same dream. We all think we’re going to be rich and famous one day, if only for 15 minutes. Stop looking at your phone, Andy, I’m still talking.
So what’s left of all those beliefs today? What are the most important things we need right now as human beings, after only three weeks of confinement? Food, clothing, shelter, care, human contact… and culture. Of course, they had you believe there was a crisis in the music industry, in the cultural world, in the financial world… They told the artists they had to rely on live concerts to make a living. Meanwhile, the industry found a new way to take the creations from your soul and turn them into sellable goods, as the profits from streaming and selling records didn’t simply fade away, but went straight into the pockets of Big Corporations and their shareholders. They told the people they had to work harder for less, they told the politicians to save the banks, they told the hospitals to cut deeper — meanwhile profits soared and the very rich… got obscenely rich.
Where is that money now? Who’s living in tiny appartments with no savings, no food, and hardly any health-caren and who’s holed up in secured mansions loaded with guns and stuffed with toilet paper? I hate to say what’s written on your face. You behaved, you craved and you thought you had it made. Your wild imagination will be your early grave. You know it. You’ve been played like a slave.
