The world is so fucked and nobody has any answers. In 1844, the bavarian king Ludwig something raised the price of beer by one cent. 2000 citizens of munich picked up pitch forks and torches and rioted for five days. The king had to concede and retract the price hike. Not even 200 years later and we are lethargic zombies, accepting pretty much anything the new kings of the world throw in our faces, we just eat the shit they serve us and even say thank you.
I’ve recently been on a four hour flight that didn’t offer free water. I bought a ticket for the subsequent train ride and the machine asked me if I want to sit on my six hour journey, a privilege for which I have to pay extra. The 150ml squeeze bottle of barbecue sauce I bought is 4€. Finally home, sitting down for dinner, feeling safe from the transcending consumerism that wants to sell me air in bottles at every corner, I discovered that the sauce has a mechanism in the lid, which sole purpose is to prevent me from squeezing out only a little amount.
Hostile infrastructure, slowly sneaking into every corner of our existence, to the dinner table and even the bedroom. We standardised, franchised and commercialised physical intimacy and called it pornography. In 2002, residents of the besieged city of Ramallah turned on their TVs and found porn being broadcasted on all channels instead of the usual program. Porn is so bad for our brains that it’s used as a weapon of psychological warfare. Yet for some reason, we just accept that our children grow up with it, the second they get access to the internet. Which is early these days and there’s nothing even aware parents can do about it. From destroying a city because of a marginal hike in beer prices to this catastrophic lethargy in less then 200 years – what the hell happened?
Well, in the early 20th century a very smart man named Edward Bernays developed a nifty little concept called propaganda. He described it as a tool to manufacture consent. Humans are social animals, we find comfort in hierarchies and tend to trust authority. Mr. Bernays exploited this mechanism by approaching opinion leaders. Actors, lawyers, doctors, had them recommend whatever product he was tasked to sell and spread those recommendations all around the country with the means of modern communication. The famous, culturally deeply rooted american breakfast of bacon and eggs? A creation of Edward Bernays, a creation of consumerism. The Nazis used this tool very successfully, Bernays‘ books were found in Goebbels‘ desk and the name propaganda was burnt. So Mr. Bernays rebranded it and called it public relations. It is, by his own admission, pretty much exactly the same concept, the new opinion leaders are influencers.
But it was still not enough. In the 1970’s and 80’s, Europe was shaken by a powerful wave of protests of people who dared to dream of a better world. But then the soviet union fell which, while far away from perfect or even good, at least offered the promise of an alternative to the all consuming ideology of consumerism. It broke the spirits of the utopist parts of my parents generation.
And then the crown of consumerist creation was born: the internet and a little later, smartphones. Oh the possibilities. Why do we accept all this bullshit like paying extra for the privilege of sitting on a train ride? Because it’s not a human feeding us these ever new hostilities anymore, it’s a machine. We sit in front of a computer booking this ticket and there’s simply no point in yelling at a machine. And whenever our free soul and common sense tries to wake up and rebel against this outrageous unfairness, the phone vibrates and sucks us back into the filtered world we created in our pockets. Pushing a little button in our brain, giving us a tiny peak of reward and dopamine, before capturing us again in the doom and dystopia of the perfect little fake world of social media, slowly rotting our brains away. Or we buy another useless product that we don’t need, but hey, this great influencer recommended it passionately and we are so sure they are sincere…
Step one of waking up the Anarchist is turning off the phone.
Disobedience 
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