How the fuck did we get here?

"all we know is fake fodder and buying shit, that's how we speak to each other, how we express ourselves is buying shit" "we buy shit that's not even there" Dear reader, we live in hell. The quote above was from the second episode of black mirror, a science fiction anthology series, the line was written by Charlie Brooker and his wife, Konnie Huq, and delivered incredibly by Daniel Kaluuya.

The episode follows Bing, Kaluuya's character, as he goes through life in his universe, a world where his home is a small cube, advertisement and commercialism, and modern, first world "industry" is the default, the world appears like a collosal gym, caked in concrete, cut off into different sections, the episode constantly shows this, to the point where it's debatable if we see any plant or animal life in the episode at all, after hearing a woman named Abigail (Jessica Brown Findlay) sing, Bing decides to sacrifice a significant portion of his savings to bring abigail to an obvious stand in for Britain's got talent. Prior to the show, Abigail is shown taking a drug named "Cuppliance", and after her performance, is offered a job as a pornographic actress for her perceived innocence, Abigail then agrees. Bing, his savings destroyed, is forced to watch advertisements of Abigail performing on "wraith babes", to which he reacts violently before breaking down into tears. Bing then collects himself, taking a shattered piece of glass from his cube, and keeping it under his bed alongside a oragami penguin made for him by Abigail, he tirelessly works to once again enter the stage, at which point he delivers a rant holding himself as a hostage he then delivers the speech that the above quote is sourced from He calls the actions of the judges "one more ugly joke in a kingdom of millions!" and declares "Fuck you for happening! Fuck you for me, for us, everyone, fuck you!" At the end of the episode, Bing is seen creating a show, a show that goes out to people on the exercise bike, with an insurrectionist plea that the system should be destroyed, and finishes with "Goodbye forever... Until next week." Capitalism subsumes everything, commodification of Che Guvera's face on shirts is an easy example Brooker and Huq create a show that manages to deftly portray this, how all good governmental systems roll their critics into themselves, there is no end to the bikes, there is no end to the division of labour as it currently exists, Marx's points were undercut not by a ultrareactionary, like Charles X, but rather, a pragmatic man who understood that the greatest way to alienate the Proletariat from their own power as a class was to more evenly distribute wealth, the man at the top would always be better off, but the lowest a man could fall could be shifted at will, and was done so, by Bismarck, the current system as it exists has had nearly two centuries to figure this out, we're 15 years away from the 200th anniversaries of the various uprisings of 1848. After the second season of black mirror, the show (and the rights to produce it) were taken on by netflix, who then produced three seasons of black mirror, with Brooker slowly walking away from the project, and black mirror to was subsumed into the mass, past season 2, the show became self conciouss, with "san junipero" being an active rebellion against the shows image as "the depressing sci-fi hour" So why am i writing about this? This is a house, currently for sale in my county of buckinghamshire

Both of these items, are, according to the market, the same value (or at least a token, represented by nyan cat is) Nyan Cat was created in 2011, a fusion of a silly animation made for charity, and a popular japanese vocal song consisting of the word "cat" being sung repeatedly, Nyan Cat wasn't sold, it wasn't made for profit (in either of it's iterations), it was a little joke that the world shared, a cute song, and a cute animation How did this happen? We've entered a strange, dreamworld, collectively, value is dead, the idea of anyone being able to say what the value of something is, has died, and really it had to, capital doesn't care about any utilitarian "value" of a good, as any sensible marketeer will tell you, a good is only as valuable as the price it can be sold at (including labour) In such a world, where any reasonable explanation of the world; "This company will not make money", "this currencies only usage is in hard drugs and illegal transactions", becomes anathema, we grow to accept these things, to say "This is wrong" becomes moralistic, who are you to say that nyan cat is not worth the price of a home? everyday, the system becomes more and more monstrous, and we are expected to sit, and continue watching everything important, anything sacred, burn to ash in order to sate these latter day kings While people starve, and die on the streets, others live in obscene luxury, spending houses worth of their stores of wealth on knick-knacks, more ugly jokes in a kingdom of billions And what recourse is there? What way out of this dreamscape of liberalism, a world where the new kings reign benevolently over their loyal subjects?

The truth is, there may be no way maybe not for a long time, at any rate.

That was a serious digression, and didn't really answer my original point, how does these collide or mean anything relative to each other? So, cryptocurrency is, in effect, the dream of the right libertarian, currency, a form that has been synonymous with government, decentralized, a finite money supply, with the value of the currency determined purely through the markets in practice, it's an investment bubble, why does the price of bitcoin keep rising? people declare it so, people buy what people sell it for, there's no actual usage as a currency, in a normal currency, the kind of deflation (that is to say, the individual coin rising in relative value) would be an utter disaster, a bitcoin reliant economy would be almost totally incapable of export due to high demand that being paid in bitcoin represents, if a pound was worth 10,000 dollars, it would be harder for an foreign exporter to pay someone in pounds Capital, steadily, has attempted to divulge itself from the state, it's traditional ally, in order to increase profit, with no regulation or even capability of regulation bar "the guiding hand of the market", capital will be free to consolidate and create more profit through the usage of monopoly power, the libertarian dream of hundreds of companies competing is a pure myth, monopoly power and barriers to market entry are problems that in many industries cannot be surpassed. So, we have two contradictory ideas here, A fictional show inside a fictional show pleading for revolution while being utterly dependent on the systems as they exist And a non-fictional "commodity" with no actual value whatsoever, other than it's ability to be exchanged for other currencies, in effect, it's one of the earliest forms of money, a universal good we all consider to have value

Both of these contradictions are rolled into their respective worlds, and accepted wholesale So yes, a non fungible token is worth a house, and goodbye forever. See you next week.