Don’t Let Them Make You Fear Your Neighbor
Capitalists hate it when we get along. Dividing us makes it feel like we’re reliant on them, and it’s ruining our world.
Jeff Bezos doesn’t want you to borrow my power drill.
He wants you to order your own to be manufactured overseas by exploited workers, shipped here using fossil fuels, inventoried by robots and overworked underpaid non-union Americans in his distribution centers, then sent out in gig workers’ private vehicles to your doorstep. An incredibly inefficient, wasteful, and antisocial alternative to making a friend. With several layers of — mostly his — for-profit businesses taking a piece off the top along the way.
I hate that Douglas Rushkoff — the one who coined the term “Team Human” — is into AI bullshit now, but he’s right about the whole “borrow stuff from your neighbor” topic: Borrow a Drill, Save the World
If it bleeds, it leads.
Your feeds want you to hate everyone else. TV news may not want you to call the cops on your neighbors, but they don’t care that their tactics for getting you to watch their ads encourages it. None of this stuff on its own should be surprising:
- American traditional and social media are all about stealing your attention to sell ads.
- Insurance companies want you to add more coverage or invest in them.
- Surveillance capitalists want to sell you home security products with subscription fees.
- Police unions want constant budget growth through our tax dollars.
- The military-industrial complex wants to sell them expensive equipment.
- Big businesses use that surveillance data to find ways we’re vulnerable to price gouging.
- Private equity buys out every step along the way and gouges prices to extract it all to Wall Street.
Unsurprising individually, but when taken all-at-once it becomes a huge cultural influence on anyone plugged into where they spread their propaganda and marketing.
Engagement
Fear and anger are the driving emotions they want to keep us engaged in to sell us all these products.
- This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit — Tobias Rose-Stockwell
- How Corporate Propaganda Makes Us Fear Sensible Social Policy — Nathan J. Robinson interviews Nick Hanauer
It results in our cities looking more like prisons.
With cameras and barbed wire fences facing inward at innocent residents. With boring colorless buildings built as cheaply as possible. City budgets strangled for any ability to provide housing, education, food, clean air and water, because the entire budget was eaten by police and prison infrastructure.
Do something radical. Say hi to your neighbor.
Impose upon them. Ask them for small favors. Invite them to the movies. Offer them some of your latest batch of baked goods.
Obviously, don’t be creepy. Take rejection gracefully. Don’t be too persistent or pushy. Use tact. But let yourself be vulnerable. Make it feel safe for them to do the same.
It’s one thing to tell everyone (as I’ve done plenty) to touch grass.
These feeds and media are a tractor beam dragging us into isolation, depression, and the real danger that our fear will create as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Call bullshit on it all.
If you can, leave social media behind. I promise you: your life will improve once you get used to being human again.
Believe in your neighbors.
These are people who chose to live in the same area you did, probably for similar reasons. They may be new there and love the same struggling small business you do. They may’ve moved there years before you and know all the best spots. We have so much in common just by living in proximity.
Queer and BIPOC Folks too!
Yes, we’re at more risk. I’ll be the last one to diminish that. But we’re not any safer if we stay isolated. Find safe spaces. Don’t invite people who aren’t “fuck yes” level safe. But do congregate. And do it in real life. It’s much less scary and confrontational than your Discord servers and comment sections make you think.
Make new friends. Keep making new friends and meeting your neighbors. Some of them will be the ones who actually show up for us when the cops either won’t help or will be the ones coming for us.