Every so often I see someone at a bar that reminds me monetizeyourcat was a Portlander
Every so often I see someone at a bar that reminds me monetizeyourcat was a Portlander
Every so often I see someone at a bar that reminds me monetizeyourcat was a Portlander
Realizing that my time being sentient and active on the broader internet (but especially this site) was perfectly timed for me to entirely miss both gamergate and monetizeyourcat
Falling into moneycat’s orbit and getting into the rhythm of daily effortposts was how this [tumblr] really kicked off. It was an amazing salon.
tumblr mutual cliques were small internet groups in the early 21st century media platform “tumblr” composed of a charismatic mystical leader and their 20-30 students
ursulaklegun-deactivated2024122:
This is an extremely niche and nerdy thing, but “The Divine Comedy was fanfiction” and similar takes are…Reductive? Like the cool thing about old literature is that it’s from a world very different from the one we live in today, so I don’t understand the motivation to retroactively label classics as fanfic, which is very modern. I’m all for people joking and having fun, but I’ve seen that sentiment repeated here and on twitter in complete seriousness and it’s just a wacky framework with which to approach literature from a context centuries removed from the idea of fandom. Dante, a medieval Christian, did not think of himself as a “fan” of the Bible. Christianity isn’t a fandom lol. Dante did not think of the Bible as a work of fiction, and the Divine Comedy was not viewed as fiction by his contemporaries, either. When he went and recited that shit, it was as testimony to something he claimed he witnessed.
Medieval European dream visions are an entire genre of literature; there are many examples of people using a “vision from god” seen in a dream (or so they claimed) to criticize political/religious figures that were otherwise untouchable to them. Thus all of those popes being punished in Dante’s hell, for example. Vergil’s presence in the Inferno functions as 1) a mouthpiece and 2) an appeal to the authority of a revered poet. Vergil was a device, not the canon character in a self-insert fic. Isn’t that so much more interesting than “it was fanfic about Dante and his pal Vergil”? Imo it’s so much funnier that the safest way to criticize, say, a king was to be like, “I had a dream where Jesus himself called the king an ugly slut. Dreams come from god so it must be true”.
On one hand this is very understandable and it’s in a way true that it shouldn’t be simplified that much… but on the other hand, a literary work of transformative character in which a writer expresses their views, opinions and reflexions on a previously existing piece and using it to expand, explore and explain previously unseen portions of the content and/or using it to understand themselves and reexamine the original work through his own lens is literally the definition of fanfic.
Monetizeyourcat used to make a good point that Joseph Smith and the origin of Mormonism make sense as the result of a clever, creative young man in a Western New York “Burned-Over District” where like, The Word of God was the basis of all popular culture
you hear this a lot, but what does it mean, specifically?
the pre-1776 americans who came from a sex, race, and class background that enabled them to participate in the conventional history of america sought to buy into aristocracy as a system of production. they were the youngest sons of minor aristocrats, the children of men with rank and no land, successful but socially limited military officers. there were people other than white men in america, but our history is not defined by them, they were not in power, they struggled to survive and their voices are faint and hard to hear. even the reality of working-class life in america among white men is largely silent; children read thomas paine’s agitation for the bourgeois revolution in america but nothing about his labor agitation in the us and england, nothing about his work as a corsetmaker or his parallel struggles to break into the bourgeoisie personally and defend workers as a class. we learn about the composition of washington’s teeth.
more people know washington had teeth extracted from slaves than know he was rich, and had an obvious and immediate material interest in the revolution as a wealthy planter.
george washington was arguably the richest man in america. not in money, although there is that. he was rich in land; he was a successful surveyor, planter, and politician. “politician” makes sense to us, and while it meant different things in the 18th century (and certainly he would have rejected any attempt to identify him that way) it’s something we can comprehend pretty well.
the planter class were slaveowners. this was a universal fact of revolutionary america; there was nowhere near enough ‘free’ labor in america to maintain their massive, highly inefficient cash crop farms. expanding the population of slaves in america was a major priority to intensify production.
before the cotton gin made cultivars of cotton that grew outside of fertile bottomland economically viable under even plantation slavery by reducing the titanic amount of labor necessary to make their bolls usable for fiber, the major cash crop of america was tobacco.
in america, because of peculiarly american mythology, we tend to believe that in the late 1700s and most of the 1800s people didn’t understand crop rotation or soil nitrogen. even in the context of european agriculture this is incorrect. soil nutrition was an incomplete science, and the primary fertilizer in the west was not an efficient nitrogen source but bone meal, yet american planters understood the basics of crop rotation and fertilization. they simply refused to use them because they would have driven up costs.
the rudiments of the agricultural revolution were things that wealthy american planters chose to forget. this is why america is larger than europe and has only been a food exporter in living memory - not because it is infertile, but because its economy was one of indifference to fertility, and this set down powerful cultural roots and industrial norms. the dust bowl was a product of this history as much as anything.
in slavery times, wealthy american planters planted a crop of tobacco on every surface available to them on good land - and they could tell if land was good for tobacco by means of both common knowledge about agriculture and surveyors’ trade secrets. a good way to tell in virginia was to count the pines.
they continued to plant tobacco season after season, crop after crop. the land was never given rest, never allowed to lay fallow. no land capable of raising tobacco was used for anything else; food and feed crops that would have partially restored soil were grown on bad, rocky, marginal soil.
in a few years, the best land used this way would become utterly infertile, and would be allowed to revert to barrens. the semi-indigent white smallholders of the antebellum south filled this vacuum, and in struggling to make do with an agricultural technology adapted for intensive, land-destructive agriculture, degraded soil still further.
the planters who had used up land then acquired more. land was cheap; formally it was necessary under english law to acquire title from natives, the english system of transfer of title was not a native institution and was easy to use to steal land. the american mythology includes a story about settlers buying manhattan for $50, and a riposte that this represented an easement and not a permanent purchase to the native lenape. there are also stories about natives selling land they did not own. these are both applicable in some cases, inapplicable in others; the interface between white settlers and natives was unstable and heterogeneous. in most cases, white title to land under english law was only ever ambiguous at best, and the land bought in this way rapidly became incapable of supporting people outside of the deformed european style of agricultural production prevalent in america. even if the system were not rigged against natives, economic pressure would still have created a comprador class which sold out and moved north and west, and this would still have intensified political struggles among natives and between natives and white settlers.
these conflicts, and legal hassles for the british government, lead to the proclamation of 1763. we hear mostly about it forbidding squatting - white settlers moving over the mountains and claiming land without title. in the american popular imagination this is what the revolution changed.
the reality is that the main thrust of the proclamation of 1763 was that the purchase of native land in america by private agents was forbidden, and all such purchases had to be formal purchases by agents of the crown itself. to a planter class whose bloated, vampiric way of life depended on shady and frequently illicit private land deals between themselves and natives, this was a deadly threat. from the word go, it was challenged by planters - who, being sustained by the legal system in a basically predatory life, in general took pains to be literate in the formal law of england and keep copies of significant precedents in common law courts - using a forged version of the pratt-york opinion.
the pratt-york opinion held that the british east india company was within its rights to purchase land from princely states in india. it held, unambiguously, that its decision did not apply to america, and american skeptics always expressed scorn and ridicule about the idea it suggested of dealing with indian “princes” and “governments”. (after the war, john marshall made it clear that there was no homology in the eyes of anglo-american law between the formal, legitimate governments of the raj and american indian nations.) but when you think about it, the same logic was really at work: the british east india company was an agent of the crown in its own right so its expropriating land from natives was in the crown’s interest even without its formal say-so. and so in a sense were american planters agents of the crown in this capacity. if george washington, the richest man in america, was not an agent of the crown in north america, who even was?
forged versions of this opinion, which clipped off language making it unambiguous that the decision was inapplicable to america, circulated widely. they are in evidence in the personal effects of washington, jefferson, lewis and clark. whatever the crown said, the land grab would continue, be damned any border or line. more land was needed so more land would be taken.
before, during, and after the revolution, washington was a surveyor; he wrote down the characteristics of land which white people had seen but had not investigated in depth for its suitability for plantation agriculture. he took the best land of the west for himself. it was not considered unseemly or ridiculous that he would do this even while on campaign; it was a necessary part of his profession and a universal behavior of the plantation aristocracy.
the use of land in this way continued after the war, and especially after the war with tecumseh’s confederacy was won at tippecanoe; land was close to free for the first white people to survey it, and cheap as dirt for the rich planters that came after them.
this is how americans became rich. this is how american capital came to exist. this land grab logic extended into the west, and this is part of the reason oregon was settled so far in advance of the great plains - the thick, dry grasses of the modern breadbasket of the us were not suitable country for cash crops, and only at its southern margins did plantation slavery ever successfully advance.
it is sometimes treated as inevitable that this should have ended, that plantation slavery reached its zenith before the civil war and the civil war was part of its decline. but this country was literally founded by people who stole land to farm so intensively with slave labor that it was destroyed for agriculture for generations - and those people would never have imagined most of what we think of as ‘the south’ being subject to their economic system. it was not suited for tobacco or long-staple cotton. but american and european industry, whose hunger for production was insatiable, found a way.
this form of production followed exploration, opening, and exploitation of native nations distant from white settlement by a diverse class of explorers and outdoorsmen. it followed that exploration and opening more or less everywhere. when we read histories of the rest of america we encounter other, less discussed cash crops, far outside of the main area of plantation slavery: ginger, indigo. (ginger in particular was a cash crop because of british merchants’ penetration of markets in china.) the same economic logic that applied in plantation slavery applied everywhere, and while some crops were limited by the absence of free labor, enormous families and punitive economic policies against the indigent were tailored to minimizing that. the same economic idea - land is limitless and can be destroyed without consequence, and labor can be someone else’s problem - underlay everything america did. it underlaid acquisitions of millions of acres of land with no conceivable economic use to agriculturists.
it underlies, in distant echoes, the modern american system, where the acquisition and mortgaging of domestic land is one of the primary ways capital disburses to the middle-class; where intensive use of land in existing settlements under gentrification follows a predictable pattern of exploration, exploitation, expropriation, and transfer to large investors. state violence is not the end-all and be-all of this legalized theft but it is always present and always on the side of capital and its agents.
and the american innovation, the core of the american experiment, is that if you have enough money you’re as good as god’s vicar on earth. it worked for washington and it works for your landlord.
happy fourth of july, everybody!
advertising is fascinating and I hate it in that shitty “corporate drones turning us into zombies” way, which sounds like something right out of fight club and so I hate myself for hating it for that childish and condescending reason but holy shit let’s talk about advertising
the thing is though that it doesn’t turn us into zombies, advertising works by emotionally arousing us and making us feel. it’s actually the opposite of being turned into zombies and if we ever feel that way it’s because the hyperstimulation of advertising has made real life seem hollow and empty and false, and also exhausted us and made relating to how we spontaneously react to real emotive stimulus seem strange and wrong
Eh, for all the colorful trappings it was a pretty common dynamic that happened among an unusually brilliant and intense cream-of-the-Internet crowd; past that it’s funnier at this point to keep it Noodle Incident vague
some startup names in the large spreadsheet of investment data I was manually finding duplicates in
– Rentlord: this sounds like a slur socialists made up
– Researchgate: sounds like the hashtag for internet discourse about the replication crisis
– Epistema: caught my attention because it’s a gorgeous name! they do something not obviously cool with data analytics.
– read a row with the startup name ‘storefront’ right above a row with the startup name ‘stormpulse’ and vaguely registering ‘hey, isn’t that a white supremacist website thing?’ for a second
Rentlord, it’s like Uber but for feudal aristocrats
For all those handmaidens who haven’t found their feudal lord yet
it’s like Tinder, but swiping the wrong way signs you up to a lifetime of vassal servitude
“Rentlord”. You know what that reminds me,
A bit before going full moon mom cult, monetizeyourcat was clearly taking the term “house-proud” out for a trial run
in a Pope/Chief Inquisitor relationship with maggotmaster, who was rumored to be the original source for the word “shitlord”
(guess who made a big pretentious show of backstabbing when the tides turned)
So the take-away is
A) I’ve been on tumblr too long
B) so long that
C) things that would count as communist trans cult memes at the start have been processed as today’s avant-garde capitalism
100% accurate
two things monetizeyourcat (PBUH) said that really stuck in my head are
1) a good way to tease out the political commitments underlying various comfort-loving centrisms is to ask the (historically accurate) question of whether you would support a communist revolution in order to preempt a fascist revolution, and vice versa
2) that men judging, instructing, correcting others, esp. women and children on how to think, feel, and be is in fact a genuine expression of care for others parallel to women’s acts of comforting; that men, as an owning class in patriarchy express as management what the laboring class of women express by emotional labor