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Title: Intervention on the Filipino Mindpsace Author: APS Date: February 2020 Language: en Topics: post-situationism, Social Media, Philippines, Bandilang Itim Source: https://bandilangitim.tumblr.com/post/611389509404442624/what-is-egoism
Attorney Oli Reyes mentioned in a viral tweet how foreign youtubers were
taking advantage of the Filipino need for global validation to garner
more views—and therefore, ad revenue. But what is going on here? What
does that mean for us as people? Does anyone care?
“Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by
incompetence.”
— Hanlon’s Razor
I can’t really call what these content creators did as “incompetent”.
Neither are they also likely to be malicious either. It’s not like
there’s some weird cabal of Youtubers that go “Hey! This demographic is
an easy mark”.
At least, I hope there isn’t. LOL.
Although the lack of intentionality behind this phenomenon might
actually make it all worse.
Love him or hate him, Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Zizek considers
ideology as not just the amalgam of ideas and ideals, most especially
today, as an unconscious process that serves as a series of
justifications and spontaneous symbolic acts which support abstract
authorities. We do things and follow certain social mores, all the while
not seeing how it keeps things the way they are. People following a
trend is just part of that.
But what is “That”?
“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of
production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of
spectacles. All that was once lived has become mere representation…”
“…The Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social
relationship between people that is mediate by images.”
— Guy Debord, “The Society of the Spectacle”, emphasis mine
When French revolutionary and artist Guy Debord wrote those lines back
in 1967, he was talking about the Press, the Movies and the Radio. In
the age of Vainstagram, Facestalk and that little annoying bird, it
becomes more and more relevant. Watching foodbloggers cook instant ramen
with melted cheese and barbecued pork bellies so you don’t have to.
Seeing people travel to distant places to live vicariously through them.
Feeling proud about your nation winning in the Olympics. Living the life
of your dreams becomes a matter or sending “Likes” or sharing their
posts on your own social media page. Living becomes a matter of
consumption. Consumption.
Consumption. Brings up images of cows grazing out on pasture, don’t it?
Labels for the trees only benefit the logger.
The Spectacle, in the words of Debord, creates labels and “images” for
us. The entire process of demand management depends on the management of
demographics, which are in terms of The Spectacle, a social relationship
that is mediated by images. Youtuber Peter Coffin words it cleverly in
his video Somewhere to Belong:
“Instead we’re presented with an identity and a ‘community’ that keeps
us on the path of consumption that we’re already on… It’s birthed ways
to convince people not to band together in a meaningful way, painting
the individual as the prime concern and authority—Ultimately preaching
that the basis of community is the validation of the self.”
Like what Peter says later—validation in and of itself isn’t a bad
thing. But the only validation that we will get from the current order
is the kind that gets us to buy more. Watch more. Eat more. We get
divided into these little cults of cultivated identities. And like crops
and livestock, these identities are cultivated in order to be harvested
later in some form.
Nation-States like the Republic of the Philippines are among the biggest
culprits in cultivating identities for their own benefit. Historian and
Political Scientist Benedict Anderson calls nations “Imagined
Communities”. And not the kind that form because of shared interests,
no. The kind that forms just because you happen to be born in the same
place as the people who want to take advantage of you. This is
especially true for the Philippines in that before the Spanish conquest,
the inhabitants of what would come to be known as the Philippines lived
in semi-autonomous communities that band together according to need.
Although there was a proto-state formation in the case of the Kingdom of
Maynila, but it was an outlier.
It served its purpose in building a united front against the Spanish,
and then against the American and Japanese occupations. But in today’s
fully-integrated global capitalism, the oppressive force is no longer a
single nation of colonizers. It has become a network of centers of
capital around what is known as the “Developed Nations”, The United
States, Western Europe, Japan, and increasingly, China. Gone are the
days of coming in guns blazing to suppress a native population to grab
land and resources. They’ll go to your World Bank conferences and your
United Nations meetings to do it for you! Nationalities have become
nothing more than a useful illusion to get people to work together in
the interests of a global elite. How else can you get people to lay down
their lives to make a few rich perverts richer? “Serve your country!”
But, before I get misrepresented, this is not a call to a past “Golden
Age” before global capital, before social media. This is a reminder to
be more aware and vigilant about how our actions and patterns of
consumption feed into the agendas of the ultrawealthy and ultrapowerful.
The cat’s out of the bag and the bad guys have already taken over. All
that’s left to do now is to weaken the structures that hold the dystopia
in place. Unionize workplaces. Build communities. Find. The. Others.
A storm is coming and building the infrastructure needed to survive it
with people that will have our backs is critical.
But we might be too busy watching rich foreigners eating Jollibee to do
it in time.