Essays in Idleness

If you wait long enough, most of the world will come around to your “point of view” (or “POV” to cite the standard abbreviation), on the largest and most important things. Even the belief in God — that there is one, that He is not dead — has come to be lazily subscribed by whatever proportion of the population constitutes an insuperable majority. Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, &c — the main articulations of satanic atheism — have become much more dead than God, although their mechanisms and tenets continue to be used by very evil people. For practical purposes, the chief one is the principle of non-ownership.

There is God and there is you. God’s ownership is very subtle; it comes from having created Everything, or rather, everything that can be identified. That he did not create Nothing is something we can know, if we have a brain and a penchant for thinking. The most disgusting creature in nature — and we may disagree on its identity — will at least realize that it is alive. That death “has no dominion”; that there is no such thing as a dead man, only a decaying body; this can be observed.

I am curious to see even a computer wizard, specifically Steve Wozniak (who has a genuinely creative mind), grasp the capitalist implications. If you do not own something, you have nothing, or at least, not that thing. Under contemporary rules of ownership, a corporation can take away anything you have paid for. “Big Tech” in effect owns you. Google, or any other supplier, charges monthly fees directly or indirectly, which are deducted ultimately from your credit card, and can arbitrarily cancel anything that you paid for. Once anything is transferred to a cybernetic “cloud,” it belongs to them, and like a cloud, it can disappear.

Under the old arrangement, that pertained even to computer companies, you owned what you bought. Wozniak: “For the first two decades of personal computers, you bought a product, you owned it, you set it up your way, and it always ran that way. … It was yours.” You did not have to pay for it again and again; it was not a rental.

But the consumer, being stupid (or “braindead” as we say), is not even slightly bothered by this. He knows that our economic “progress” depends on increasing enslavement, and he buys in.