where every aspect of your sensorium that can be saturated with corporate property
is being flooded, as it has been since your inception, without your consent.
your eyes and ears are constantly exposed to corporate property on subway walls,
on bus stops, on video screens, and via sound waves transmitted in public. those
sensory impressions become memories, physically stored in your synapses.
corporate property takes up space in your brain so that it can influence your
future consumer behaviors, enhanced through repeat exposure to train the very
personal neurological network that exists in your own body.
many of your earliest memories contain the property of corporations, which by
design live in your head rent-free yet compartmentalized for the rest of your life.
grant them the exclusive power and rights to use that property, which if given to
you would weaken their power to wield the influence of that property on you. these
systems also allow corporations to buy up culture made by workers, and trade and
speculate on that culture like assets in near perpetuity.
for example when warner chappell bought the song happy birthday in the 1980s, nearly
a century had passed since it was written. for decades they siphoned money from what
many misconstrued as a folk song until a class action lawsuit ended this practice in
america in 2016. they had expected to profit from it until 2030.
the function of artists in this scheme is to stake neurological land claims for
corporations in human consciousness and culture, creating property that must be
physically stored yet neurologically compartmentalized. deflecting attention from
this form of neurological prospecting is rhetoric about protecting individual
capitalist units, like artists, while corporations buy up culture en masse, letting
them flood our memory banks with their property. and should you use that property,
they have hoodwinked the public once again into equating theft with what legal systems
regard as an injury that lowers the fair market value of a product.
expect this daily ubiquitous form of extraction and neurological invasion to be
glossed over. it is in the best interests of some for all to simply(tm) accept its
validity as an objective moral fact about the world.
those who have worked to give corporations full exclusive control of the infinity
generation machines have handed corporations the abilty to drown our daily
sensorium in endless corporate ip controlled exclusively by these corporations.
it is ironic: as the infinity machines became popular, when viewers noticed the ease with
which they could reproduce corporate ip, they took that as a sign that they could just as
easily reproduce anything from their training sets. this interpretation was encouraged
as an homage to the law, to cover an even greater scandal: that the earlier infinity
machines that could not produce photorealistic imagery without dreamlike distortions and
even then with difficulty, still often produced corporate ip from completely unrelated
prompts, because they were trained in the very same online visual landscape that is
blanketed in corporate ip to saturate human neural networks and direct human behavior.
the inevitable effect of infinite generation is to push everyone to transform everything
that exists into property, as the so called visionaries looked up to cannot concieve of
any other means to counter the infinity machines other than to turn every photon and
sound wave emitted from our bodies into tramsitters or vectors of property.
but the inner spontaneous language of dreams and the subconscious obeys no such rules.
dreaming is dangerous and must be kept in secret. any technology capable of recreating
even a hint of the above, even infinite generation must be realigned into the realism of
the capitalist order, akin to how creative work must be pigeonholed by relics of the past.
i do not like the altenatives i am being presented with right now. i do not make art to
exist as if it were a piss stain marking my territory in culture. it does not exist to
dick size over the effort it took to make, or to produce workflow visuals. it is my
attempt to communicate something about subjective existence, things that cannot be put
into words, sometimes things that might be too taboo to put into words.
i do not know how to make genuine personal art in an environment like this. when
everything is owned and subsumed into the platonic substances of this particular form of
capitalist realism, joy and wonder becomes land enforcement, serendipity becomes
dogmatic insistance on process, creativity becomes nothing more than a fashion statement
affiliating one with a group, a performance of a script complete with a set of platitudes
to be vigorously defended, and a conscripted false dream of a past that never existed.
somehow, somewhere, the infinity machines became the baudrillardian watergate or perhaps
a proverbial disneyland. so frequently the response is to double down on every broken
thing that led to the moment we are in, portraying it as the real, as what is meant to
be, and here we are. now some people fantasize about an era when foxconn employees lept to
their deaths to escape the working conditions under which they built the machines that sad
nostalgic eyes gaze back on. some borrow the language used to describe that adversity to
debate ethics rooted entirely in things which contradict them.
but the only way forward is through.
nostalgia is death - dylan