Too Big To Fail?

Social Media, Monopolies and Capitalism

Morning Comrades and welcome back to your first of two patreon-only dispatches this week. To those of you that are new here, the publishing schedule is as follows. Everyone gets a piece on Monday ( usually ) and the patreons get two additional dispatches a week, usually on Wednesday and Friday. It’s 5USD a month from which I get about 3 after substack take their cut, and it helps me, well, with everything. Sop story pitch over, hit the link below for a free 2 week trial. Smooches.

Initially, I had a piece semi finished on reformism vs revolution but we are going with something else for today- granted the subject does play into this piece and by now you all know which way I lean.

A few weeks ago I received an official last warning from our tech overlords over at Meta that my IG account would be deleted for continuously posting “content” that goes against their “community guidelines” etc. etc. and after 13 years on their platform I quietly resigned that whatever digital “home” that account was, it was dead, is dead, for a matter of fact. There is a back up account and one day I will find the energy to download all the art from the old account and that will be that. Not going to lie though, the fact that a 30K community got zucked for whatever reason ( I am not interested in that conversation ) did and does piss me off. Not for the imaginary social capital related to my own ego but just the blatant censorship and audacious motive to want to monetize on my potentially bruised ego - the sheer blatantness of it all, the audacity of their actions just enrages me. IG sent me a prompt this morning telling me that I could reach more people if I paid them and that’s essentially the emotional prompt for this dispatch.

The more logical thought that was prompted from this fuckery though is what today’s dispatch is about. Have these social media become “too big to fail”, become an integral part of the capitalist class’ narrative monopoly and are we all just subject to a natural process in capitalism, the creation of monopolies in whatever industries and why reformism, electoral democracy as we know it fails at its most basic premise here as well, why monopolies are anti-democratic and a genuine threat to freedom - all by leaning heavily on Marx and Harvey.

"The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few monopolistic corporations undermines democracy and perpetuates inequality."

- A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey