I have a can of Diet Coke. It’s not a purchase I am happy with, on ethical grounds. I’ve been talking a lot about the importance of boycotting America.
Especially those companies targeted by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in support of Palestinians. Coca Cola is the target of an organic boycott supported by the movement.
I drink it and enjoy it anyway.
This is combined with other shit I do that goes against my feelings. Shit that I don’t recycle, stuff I buy from Amazon, battery farms I eat shit produced by.
A long list of daily moral crises. The prevailing wisdom, which you hear all the time is… hey! Don’t beat yourself up, if you do you’ll just end up miserable from trying to be perfect.
This is an ingrained idea, that individual action is in fact so draining that it causes burnout, and hey, we’re all doing it anyway! You just wait until things get better through collective action. Not to mention you’re a buzzkill.
I don’t think any of that’s true.
I think it’s part of the defense mechanism of companies and nations that has been grown inside us in fact.
I had this idea last year of what we’re experiencing, in the broad collective of countries that are dedicated to commercial empire and biosupremacy, of the ‘Daydream Apocalypse’.
We can see that what we do is bad, and yet we do not stop, because it has a comforting effect on us. At least I do, and think myself pathetic for it. But I don’t think I’m alone.
The world can be shown to you exactly the way it is, with no separation, no ‘They Live’ glasses, and full understanding of the consequences of your support for companies as genocide and the destruction of a livable world, and you can even say “This is bad, I will not do this.” and yet still you will do it.
Like you’re in a walking dream, your actions become separate from your intentions, automatic and ingrained.
This is the daydream apocalypse.
I found myself this way with social media platforms.
Accelerated letter sending, or acting and applauding… text messaging and forum posting… my finger still refreshes the feeds on Mastodon or Bluesky in the same way I was trained to by the machines of Instagram and Twitter.
When companies like Meta and Twitter were profiting from experiences that I didn’t find pleasurable, like their flagship websites becoming Self-fulfilling Newspapers, it was easy to align my distaste with their business practices and quit.
It was the collapse of the experience of a separation there, between one world of ideology and a world of consumption into displeasure.
And yet elsewhere, when I am brought pleasure, there is the separate mind, trained to reflexively indulge capital and cruelty and override concern.
This is not new thought, it’s pretty basic. Skinner Box behaviourism and anti-capitalist ideology.
Yet I struggle with the persistence of it in my body. I know I don’t experience this alone.
There is no UNTHINKING mass, as portrayed in so much vindictive media and thought about consumption and compulsive behaviour. This idea that we all just need to wake up is not true, we are already awake and most people in the world share communistic impulses.
It is rather we also have impulses, akin to that of our deepest knowledge, trained parasitically by companies and nations which we give power to accordingly, that let us act against our wishes. Not ‘sins of the flesh’ that we should atone for, mistaking our material entanglement for inner evil, but actions that help those perpetrating cruelty against all people to do so.
That’s where the intervention needs to be, against the impulse.
Because I know the things I want to do. But, I do not know how to stop doing the things I hate, and yet find satisfying. That is maybe the first thing to say.
cover image from ‘ghosts of noise‘ by S.T.
GlitchOut 