Popular culture is constantly changing. It is not rigid and doesn’t fit into a box. As such, !popularculture@hexbear.net is a place where we can post entertainment/culture events that we are each interested in, but are not necessarily news stories.
Because popular culture changes with time, that means the content of this community will also shift with those changes. Currently, a lot of pop culture today is internet-related.
Examples:
- Ben Cohen (co-founder of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream) is a pro-Palestine activist. He’s been arrested at multiple pro-Palestine protests.
- Roger Water of Pink Floyd is another activist for Palestine.
- Pedro Pascal (actor) wore a t-shirt supporting transgender people. It said “protect the dolls”, with dolls meaning transgender women.
- Ishowspeed (an internet celebrity) did a tour in China, which was promoted by China’s government.
- Ms. Rachel (an internet celebrity who makes children’s shows on YouTube) advocated for Palestinian children. This past week, she did some modeling in fashion magazines.
Not everything happening in pop culture is good. There could be dunk threads.
Examples:
- Jerry Seinfeld being a Zionist and donating money to Zionist students on college campuses.
- Quentin Tarantino lives in Israel and has fully embraced Zionism; his wife is a vocal Zionist.
- Thom Yorke, lead singer of Radiohead, is massively Zionist and regularly crashes out about people’s criticisms of him.
- REM (a 90’s rock band) did a fundraiser supporting US/CIA propaganda.
- More recently, Martin O’Donnell, the producer of the Halo game soundtrack, has been supporting ICE on social media.
- Dr. Phil going on ICE raids.
- Dean Cain (the actor playing Superman on TV in the 90’s) said he would become an ICE agent.
Sometimes in popular culture, the drama between two popular figures isn’t politically or ethically clear, but entertaining or interesting to talk about regardless.
Examples:
- Like the beef between Bill Maher and Larry David. Bill Maher is nonreligious, a Zionist, and very islamophobic. Larry David is Jewish and doesn’t speak much about Zionism, but probably Zionist (?). Larry David wrote an essay where he compared Bill Maher to a Nazi after Bill Maher had dinner with Trump.
- The pope’s brother is a chud and met with Trump and traveled with JD Vance to meet with the new pope. This pope is supposedly not a chud.
- Bill Burr has said things in recent time that seem left leaning, like supporting trans people and lifting the embargo on Cuba, saying that billionaires should be “put down”, but also last year he defended land lords. He very recently went on a comedy tour in Saudi Arabia, where he was required to tailor his act per the Saudi Prince’s demands while getting paid handsomely for it. He doubled down, saying he was doing it for “the people” but historically has mocked and cursed Beyonce for doing the same thing, saying she was taking “blood money”. As a result, he has recently started losing numerous podcast listeners.
Other Examples:
- Elon’s transgender daughter, Vivian Wilson, is kind of a radical liberal. She said something about hating tankies. Also, it’s funny because she talks shit about Elon. She was also on Hasan’s live stream. Etc.
- Luigi Mangione recently said that he’s listening to music by Taylor Swift and Charli XCX (the musician who made the Brat album, which was very popular) in prison.
- Destiny Orbiters have been trying to smear and slander popular streamer Hasana Piker for all kinds of things, including recently, fabricating claims that he shocks his dog based on a very uneventful clip of his dog yelping, to the point where JD Vance refrenced this event in a recent interview.
- Streamer culture and drama broadly.
These are some examples of events and happenings that are culturally relevant but also do not fall into a specific category of entertainment.
We all have our interests; we’re all fans of some brand or figure who might do or say cool or stupid shit or get into beef or drama with other figures. There is no one topic from popular culture that this community is about. I don’t understand what “girlypop” is, but that doesn’t preclude you from posting about it, especially if it’s something you’re interested in.
This extends out to things like “hobby drama” as well. You’re probably very invested in that drama if you’re aware of it, and someone might be truly interested in reading about it. Just because your niche hobby isn’t living in the same stratosphere as Talyor Swift doesn’t mean it isn’t jucy and full of good drama.
Someone (maybe even you) might be reading this and think, “Isn’t pop culture vapid and a waste of time?”. Some of it, yes. However, each user should try to post things they are interested in. Even something they are invested in. Something they might even be able to info dump about.
As readers, try to upvote and post on things that you also think are interesting. Then the vapid things will fall out of the algorithm if posted at all. Obviously, if you are not interested in this kind of content, feel free to block the comm from your feed.
PS: I have to give credit to @dead@hexbear.net for most of this write-up; I simply cleaned it up and expanded on it some.
The shape of the nature of communal work will take whatever the material conditions demand, but what needs to be true first is that we’re organizing our work around the right ideals and goals. We do that by subordinating the productive forces of society to those goals instead of trying to coax them to those goals like we do now. Automation might be the right solution to the productive process of a given necessity; human labor might be the appropriate solution if automation isn’t sufficiently capable. The boon of our current system is the division of labor and the socialization of labor. That is to say, the revolutionary innovation and progressive force of capitalism is reorganizing labor such that we break down the productive process of any given item into smaller processes that join together to produce a single output. Instead of a handycraftsmen working many hours to build a chair, lathing every spindle, every leg, and every seat, each of those components is produced individually, creating the same chair in a significantly reduced amount of time.
The regressive side of capitalism as a political and economic organization is that it retained feudalism’s private ownership of the means of production. The tools necessary to produce any given necessity. The handycraftsmen owned his tools; he owned the workshop in which he created his crafts, and in the migration to a socialized production model, he retained the ownership of those tools and workshop, and hired peasents to split the productive process into smaller processes. They used his tools and his workshop, but they retained no ownership over what was produced and, as a result, had no authority over how their output was distributed.
To answer your question more directly: “So if I understand correctly your point, you assign all that work to a community and we share the benefit?”
What you’re describing here is a plan. Currently, the productive forces are subject to no plan, just the whims of those who currently own those productive forces. There is no plan that outlines what needs to be produced, what needs to be focused on, to deliver that shared social benefit. Getting to that place is the challenge we face right now. To reach these goals, we have to have a political system that can, and should, place the productive forces that exist now in a kind of cage. One that dictates to the productive forces the priorities of the community.
“Do I work as an employee, do I work as the business owner, or do I work directly for my needs without need for that much money.”
I don’t see how these are at all mutually exclusive; that someone within the community wouldn’t be any of these things over another. Again, the socialization of labor is the driving force of our productive capacity. That, in turn, will require those who perform tasks across the productive process. Some of those tasks are organizational; others are skilled; some require academic theorizing and experimentation. The thing that we’re seeking to remove, however, is the corceon from the system, where someone is compelled to work a job that they are not interested in or fit to perform. How that is organized is one that follows the material conditions of the community. That organization could support “business owners” given that those businesses are not exploitative to workers. However, if the community is well enough organized, there would be no need for an individual to “own” the “business”. Take for example, trash collection. This is a service that is obviously needed, but does it require someone to “own” the “business” of picking up trash and transporting it to landfills or processing centers? Not likely. Trash management is something that was for a long time a service provided for the community by the municipality, county, or state, province, or “regional government.” The more you begin to ask these questions of different sectors of every day life, the more you might find that you do not need a “business owner”.
But again, that really depends on the material conditions. All things are interconnected, and so those conditions are often contingent on external conditions as well. Global material conditions will need to be shifted as well, before we might see more and more of our everyday lives be transformed into communal ownership rather than private ownership by a “business owner”.