Privacy and Ownership are Woke

Communism is not a useful term.

Words derive value from how much we can agree upon what they mean. It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that political labels tend to be utterly fucking worthless, considering nobody can agree on anything in politics, anyway. Yet, even being well aware of that, dear reader, when I watched a video from one Trixie of the Golden Witch variety titled "are PRIVACY and OWNERSHIP woke??" I couldn't fucking help myself but yell out loud, "That's not what communism is!"

I had a few problems with this video. To be clear, Trixie's cool, I still like her, this has not changed that, but the video bothered me enough that I needed to write this out.

First problem, Trixie seems to subscribe to the idea that communism is when you share things communally and capitalism is when you own things. Again, communism is a useless word, technically this is as valid a definition as any, but it's also perfectly valid English to say, "Plums deify." Is it useful? No. When I talk about or identify as subscribing to communism (or socialism, which is generally how I describe myself), I and those I would agree with are concerned about ownership of the means of production, rather than ownership of individual products. This is far more important to the distribution of power. Those who control the production of food, for example, will have at least some control over you.

Next big problem I have, Trixie talks about how people were upset about Sony discontinuing physical media and didn't understand why woke people had such a problem with it, saying that you already have enough games. She did not mean this as in you have a massive backlog, she said this as if games were tennis balls, specifically saying that you can just get all GameCube games for free. I really shouldn't have to say this, but Metroid Prime is not the same game as Bioshock. If I was limited to what I could download and emulate for free, I couldn't play The Talos Principle, which, while it gets compared a lot to Portal, is a very different game. It's like saying we don't need new movies because you can still watch Casablanca, or you don't need new books because you can still read 1984. This isn't even getting into the fact that people are concerned because Sony can take away a digital file easier than a disc, something they don't like because on principle, if you pay to own something, you should fucking own it, regardless of anything else. Now, I do agree with Louis Rossman's take that we get too fixated on physical media itself, you have more ownership over a digital game bought on GOG than you do a PS5 game on a Blu Ray due to DRM and needing to play it on a console Sony controls, but that's neither here nor there.

To my next point, I take issue with the fact that Trixie in this video conflates trying to change people's lifestyles with changing political systems. If everybody lived like Trixie, they might not need as much stuff, but they'd still need stuff. If three families buy one spatula, they might be buying less spatulas, but they still need a spatula. Capitalism can still exist under these circumstances. Trixie herself might disagree with my read on this, might say that she also wants to change the rest of society along with people's lifestyles, but people still need to get things. That's why economics are even a thing. Will we go back to having blacksmiths manufacture our spatulas? Shall we just do away with mass production? Or shall every region have their own factory? How granular does that get?

Finally, I hate hate hate HATE when people think that natural equals good. I don't give a fuck if something is natural, and honestly, that term is entirely too vague, anyway. What is natural? If something is physically possible, it's natural. Oh hey, it's a useless word again! Trixie specifically uses bananas as an example, that it's not natural for bananas to be available everywhere. Bananas themselves aren't natural. Bananas were so selectively bred, they can't even reproduce on their own anymore. The only way we get new banana trees is with cuttings. Basically anything you eat on the regular is similarly not natural, unless you subscribe to my definition.

The logical endpoint of Trixie's argument is that we should go back to hunter gatherer tribes, back to when life was shorter, meaner, and just overall worse. Do I think Trixie actually thinks this? No, of course not. She even provides a caveat in the video (something along the lines of, "I'm not saying tribal society was necessarily better or anything..."), but what else am I supposed to take away from this if I assume that the video is about how the world should work rather than how you live your life?

I actually lied, the last point was not the final one. Woke, left, right, conservative, liberal, all political terms, all relative. Are privacy and ownership woke? Yes, they are. When those in power are trying to take that away from you, it is very much "woke" to want to stop them.

I'll finish by saying I was not fond of this video. To be fair, I don't think Trixie scripted this at all, she probably just did this completely off the cuff and gaffes are almost guaranteed when you do that. That doesn't mean I'm going to have any mercy, though.