Oh!

I did not know that.

I mean, that’s why you restructure into a modular studio format during … basically a bankruptcy that just barely has not actually happened yet…

… Its so its easier to concentrate losses and non profitable people and things … and then lop them off.

Its almost certainly part of the ongoing lawsuit Valve is having with New York.

NY AG claims (among other things) that Valve knows their Steam Wallets and Steam Items and giftcards form part of a system which allow the proceeds of alleged gambling to be converted into real world money, and that Valve doesn’t do enough to stop this.

Valve claims they do their best to find and shutdown secondary markets (which are against their TOS) that facilitate that, and well now they’re just pulling the plug on another part of that loop, where all of it has to exist for all of NY AG’s claims to be true.

1] Makes sense, just in general.

2] Makes more sense, when these gift cards are a part of the case they’re currently fighting in New York.

If the gift cards … stop physically existing as potential ‘money’… well then that somewhat weakens the idea that Valve is pemitting the proceeds of alleged gambling to be functionally redeemable as a valuable physical object / semi-money.

Another whole big angle of the New York AG’s case is that Valve has just known the secondary market for Steam Items and Steam Giftcards exists, and has done nothing about it.

They’ve previously countered that they take secondary markets seriously and have put a considerable deal of effort into finding and shutting those down, and well now, if they’re also just pulling the plug on physical cards, that further makes them look like they’re not just belligerently and openly refusing to comply with the law.

‘War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.’

Niko Bellic

Yeah, being in the physically most prominent role, and being in the mentally dominant role… not the same thing.

You could also be a ‘power bottom’, where you’re receiving, but you’re mentally and physically dominant in the encounter.

You could also basically be bullied into being a ‘service bottom’, though I’m not sure that’s a widely used phrase.

Also, if you were doing something like cowgirl, as a service bottom… well you’d physically be on top of them.

You see this is all very straightforward and not at all confusing.

Gotta say I didn’t expect the Butlerian Jihad to happen in my lifetime… huzzah for living in ‘interesting times’, I suppose.

Now that’s gonna fuck with the AI trying to discern the difference between a male nipple and a female nipple.

In capitalism, the consumer need only care about two things: the product, and the price.

Not true, not since at least the 1950s, or at least incomplete and misleading.

The consumer also cares about what the object implies about them, how them having that object will make them feel about themselves and others feel about them.

Commodity Fetishism.

This is why almost nobody does the extremely literally grounded-to-the-product marketing of the 1800’s anymore, they all switched to selling emotions, identities, concepts… attached to the object, conveyed by the object.

Doing that, that literally is the old school definition of a ‘fetish’, an object imbued with extra, essentially magical meaning, considerably detached from the base material reality of the object.

Its why capitalist economists have for over a hundred years been plauged by things like ‘animal spirits’.

This, and other things like this, contibute to actors in capitalism being not actually rational, neither at a micro or macro level.

A vast chain or network of irrational decisions, compounded over time, is not what I would call flatly ‘efficient’.

JIT logistics are efficient in the short and medium term.

They’re catastrophic in the long term.

You can say thats because the externalities of all the fuel consumption are not properly factored in, I can say the predictable future price/cost rises in many forms of insurance that will be created by climate change are being irrationally ignored… because the logic of capitalism incentivizes that delusion.

Hopefully I do not need to explain that it is extremely obvious that capital markets are also not rational, that ‘efficient markets’ are … not.

"Guys lets spend $5 bazillion dollars on AI! Oh whats that? 90% of companies saw no to negative productivity gains from the largest reallocation of capital in human history?’

Capitalism may be efficient in the short to medium term, but its extremely inefficient in the long term.

Capitalism also has within it many forces and effects that redistribute and concentrate real wealth upward as it generates new real wealth.

Eventually, broadly predictably, the credit supercycle peaks and then crashes… and you get a mass immiseration, as the sum of years or decades of delusion must now be reckoned with.

Short to medium term efficiency and stability.

Long term, predictably inefficient and chaotic.

So basically, yes, commodity fetishism is part of what makes capitalism ‘efficient’, but that efficiency is short to medium termed, and it reliably produces delusion and long term instability… which I would struggle to describe as ‘efficient’.

No, its not a complete distortion.

A society that is abstracted away from the literal, material and human processes of production and trade… basically begins to treat commodities in a more perverse manner.

The specific neurological mechanisms that underly this and explain it more mechanically, in greater detail… yeah he did not talk about those because he did not know about them.

But again, he didn’t need to know about them, in great detail, to observe and explain what I just said two sentences ago.

As far as I can tell, you have invented some kind of prediction that Marx made, relative to what we are talking about, commodity fetishism, that turned out to be wrong.

… What? What is this wrong prediction?

I genuinely do not see where you described this.

Marx objectively was wrong in his prediction that a socialist revolution would come out of urban/manufacturing cores… it actually largely came out of agrarian areas.

So yeah, there’s an example of something he got wrong.

But I’m not aware of how the second sentence of this comment has in anyway been shown to be broadly wrong.

Modern technology that hacks your brain’s dopamine pathways to make you feel more happy when you see a new thing … that could be yours! … that markets an identity or emotional state that will be conferred upon you when you buy the thing…

That’s a hypercharged form of alienation, directly furthering you and your mental framing away from the literal material and human reality of the thing.

Historical materialism was the foundation, the ‘priors’ that Marx worked from… look at the actual state of the physical reality of people and stuff and how they are related and interact, and that can tell you things about how societies will change.

That you can imagine a utopia with shopping malls or digital shopping malls, and also imagine that that could be socialist… that doesn’t make Marx wrong about how alienation produces commodity fetishism in a society.

I think that Marx would argue that…

You could live in a socialist utopia, and access to a diverse market of products or always-available acquisition (eg. an online marketplace) would still cause this problematic impulsive behavior.

… this is problematic.

I don’t think he would call that a socialist utopia, because I think he would find the concept of an online marketplace, as we have them now, massive in scope, totally minimized human to human interactivity, streamlined for your convenience… I think he would call that alienation, alienation that produces commodity fetishism.

I think Marx would literally call an American shopping mall from the 80s or 90s ‘a cathedral of capitalism’.

I think Marx could imagine a way that an online market place could exist in a ‘socialist utopia’, but that would be to the extent that it would be designed in such a way that forced human to human interactions, that it was stripped of manipulative marketing and dark patterns, that directly made you fully aware of the truth of the manufacturing and shipping processes, and all of the costs that go into all elements of that.

The entire point is that capitalism makes craft markets exceedingly rare, it makes that experience you describe more uncommon, it makes everything more abstract.

The commodity fetishism grows out of that, the more abstracted away the thing is, the more mystically and irrationally products are treated by people.

Hell, in the US right now, you can find tons of stuff at ‘Farmers Markets’ that are actually just some product of a massive corporation being rebadged, repackaged, and trying to get flipped for a margin.

That ‘authentic’, ‘small-batch’, ‘bespoke’ product? Yeah that’s just a marketing tactic now, in many cases.

Stanley cups? Beanie babies? Fast fashion? Pokemon cards? Fancy pantsy sneakers?

Perfect examples of fetishized commodities, consumed and ‘shopped’ for with essentially crazed, religious zeal.

Ok, then I can say that Marx could say ‘shopping is so fun’ these days… because the magnitude and number of ways that alienation is occuring has dramatically increased.

Yep, he had no understanding of neuroscience.

But he had a theory of societies and people in them, with causal mechanisms and observable consequences, with considerable explanatory and predictive power… that didn’t need neuroscience.

No, he did not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_fetishism

In the first chapter of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867), commodity fetishism is used to explain how the social organization of labour manifests in the buying and selling of commodities (goods and services). In the marketplace, social relations among people—who makes what, who works for whom, the production-time for a commodity, etc.—are represented as social relations among objects.[3]

In the process of commercial exchange, commodities appear in a depersonalized form, obscuring the social relations inherent to their production.[4] Marx explained the sociology of commodity fetishism:

As against this, the commodity-form, and the value-relation of the products of labour, within which it appears, have absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this. It is nothing but the definite social relation, between men, themselves, which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations, both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities, and is, therefore, inseparable from the production of commodities.[5]

According to Marx, the operation of commodity fetishism requires the owners of capital to actively ignore or maintain an indifference to the relational whole that produces a commodity.[6]

tl:dr, Marx described that capitalism produces a semi-religious veneration for and obsession with products themselves, as a byproduct of alienating the worker from the work, from themselves, from their humanity, and from others.

An extremely rough, modern, internet slang way to say it might be ‘you being a shopping addict is basically you just being kinky for capitalism, which is something captialism itself produces in people’.

Ya’ll need to read some theory and up your meme game.

My theory is ‘culling’.

They wanna find the diehards, refocus around them.

Minimizing costs and maximizing returns is the literal specialty of the new head of Xbox. Data Analyst wonk, excelled at figuring how to max the profitability of online store fronts.

She has literally 0 experience with video games, which is good in the sense that she’s a pair of fresh eyes, but is bad in the sense that she has no real motivation or predisposition toward keeping anything old around just because it is the way things have been done.

Expect more, or at least more clever dark patterns.

MSFT is losing a fuck ton of money on all their AI investments, CoPilot being the biggest fuckup yet in their history, and their coziness with the US/NSA is basically losing them enterprise grade stuff in Europe.

They need to counterbalance this by turning other segments of their business into as profit-y profit centers as possible.

I still think medium term, they’re gonna end up as basically mostly a library of giant, big name IPs, that you most easily will be able to access through some kind of MSFT … Netflix but for Video Games, type of thing.

Its possible they keep making hardware beyond this last shot at a next gen … some kind of hardware.

But if the whole thing isn’t profitable enough to offset their losses everywhere else, I think they just drop down to minimal possible costs, and basically just become an IP dragon/gatekeeper.

Yep yep!

I lost my main PC a while back, and have just been daily driving Bazzite on my Deck, with a dock, keyboard mouse, etc.

Works great!

As … immensely ironic and basically ideologically cruel as it is, we should absolutely emulate this attitude, learn from them.

They get starved and blockaded, we get flooded with hypereffective digital marketing, insane overproduction of single use garbage, horrendously overpriced cars full of more factory defects than a t34 from 1942, that is half illegal to repair on your own … while almost no one makes anything built to last any more.

Again, very ironic, but this actually results in a very similar situation for most normal people, at least once all the credit cards stop working.

… I am quite sure they will call me ‘some sort of crazy person’.

Ok so you’re fine with paying money to Google.

Got it, you willingly fund an immoral corporation that’s on many different boycott lists of many different organizations, for many different reasons.

Sure, ok then.

I on the other hand value my moral nonhypocrisy more than you do.

Guess we just have different preferences.

Thank you, but my writing ability, in this sort of way, is nothing in comparison to… Charlie Chaplin.

To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…

https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-The-Final-Speech-from-The-Great-Dictator-

I still cannot watch or even just read this without being moved to tears.

We need a new story to believe, now that the ‘American Dream’ is so thoroughly broken.

We need hope, placed in the right direction… in ourselves, and in each other.

Now this is unironically what I think of when the tiny, near-dead embers of patriotism in my soul get a whiff of oxygen.

Great Depression 2.0 is here, what did we do back during the first one?

Well, lotta people fuckin’ starved and died, got terrible diseases, died before the age of 2, or in child birth, etc.

But, we also formed co-ops. We took a random sad sack of broke and broken people, and their stuff, people with no proper wage work available to do, got em together and said ‘anything useful you can do, for anybody else, is better than nothing’

We talked to those people. We commiserated. We built solidarity with others, face to face.

We fixed shit, we jerry-rigged shit, we made things that were completely broke into things that were only slightly broken.

We took shotguns to local foreclosure auctions, and not so subtly implied to anyone other than someone who’d promised to just gift the home back to the homeowner, that the shotguns were loaded.

Nowadays… call it recycling, upcycling, right to repair, what the fuck ever… stop wasting your money on stupid shit that won’t last a year or even ever be used by you once.

You don’t know how expensive food or fuel is gonna be in a month, 3 months, etc. Could triple by next year, who knows.

Build your life around trying to plan for that.

You got a storage unit full of shit? A walk in closet full of stuff you ain’t worn in a year?

You don’t need it.

Somebody else probably could use it. Figure out how to find that person, and get it to them, with as few or at least as fair middlemen involved as possible. You get a fair price, or maybe even a haircut or week of babysitting, fuck, a pound of flour… they get some barely used clothes.

Every random plot of possibly usable garden space, make it bloom. Fuck your yard of useless grass that literally is a traditional offshot of nobility having so much land they could show off making some of it not productive.

HOA in the way? Learn their bylaws and just investigate them by way of malicious supercompliance. Chances are high they’re doing some kind of money laundering or fraud.

… We’ve done this kinda shit before, our grandparents at least.

Most people actually get joy and purpose not from accumulating wealth, but from feeling like they’re actually some kind of important, in the service of others, in some kind of real and tangible way.

The system has failed us, in every possible way…, it will eat us alive if we do not build our own.

In the words of Adam Savage:

“I reject your reality, and substitute my own”.

We do not have another choice.