I began as follows: in a hypercapitalist economy—one that has found a way to monetize human attention itself—we are the product.
Well, sure, everybody knows that by now, even the fourteen-year-olds.
But within this fact does there not lurk the not-so-hidden possibility of a radical and thrillingly simple act of resistance?
Think about it (I said, to the fourteen-year-olds).
With every other extractive and exploitative industry of the past four hundred years, the process of unraveling and resistance was far more complicated.
To end the racialized system of capital called “slavery,” for example, you had to violently revolt, riot, petition, boycott, change minds, change laws, all in order to end one of the most lucrative gravy trains the Western world has ever known.
To rein in the unprecedented wealth of the robber baron industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century, you had to regulate their businesses, the banks, and the labor laws themselves, and create the electoral majorities needed to do so.
But to seriously damage the billionaire empires that have been built on your attention and are now manipulating your democracies?
To achieve that right now?
All you guys would need to do is look away.
