Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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“neoliberal” feminism often pays close attention to questions around representation (e.g., the gender demographics of corporate boards) while all but ignoring issues of class.
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It doesn’t, however, mention the pay gap or the amount of difficult unpaid labor women have to do
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it’s a movie that is packed with social satire. What it will not touch is corporate consumer culture or capitalism, because ultimately, as we have seen, Barbie is a device for Mattel to sell products.
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Barbie is a kind of brilliant work of selective subversion, biting everything except the hand that feeds it.
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corporations are at their root devices for turning money into more money. The corporation’s job is not to serve the social good, to practice certain values, or even to make toys. It is to serve the interests of its owners. So a Mattel Barbie movie does not come about because someone has a deep artistic vision for a Barbie movie. It comes about because the corporation “sees the growth opportunity in these franchise deals as ‘exponential.’”
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What is perverse about advertising is that it is built on dishonesty and bad faith. It says “you value freedom, the product embodies freedom, thus you should buy this product,” but the person crafting the message doesn’t care a lick about freedom. They just know you do, and that they can make money from your values by pretending to embody them.
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When Bud Light made the “mistake” of supporting a transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, creating an insane conservative backlash, the executives responsible were quickly placed on leave, and the company made zero effort to support Mulvaney as she was menaced with public hate.
✏️ Example of the shallowness of a “woke” company 🔗 View Highlight
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Money, not morality, determines corporate behavior.
✏️ quote 🔗 View Highlight
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corporations manufacture desires through propaganda (for instance, by convincing people that they are cooler if they wear a certain brand of more expensive shoe), it’s crucial to analyze and understand how our culture itself is shaped by the profit motive.
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I believe in a democratic economy where industry operates for the benefit of all, and is owned by all, rather than being operated to serve the narrow private interests of a small class of capitalists. But there’s much more to my socialism than moving wealth and ownership rights around. Let’s think, for instance, about cigarette companies. One problem with cigarette companies is that they use propaganda to try to convince people that smoking is cool, but their product is ultimately deadly and kills many of its customers. You could change the ownership structure of a cigarette company, so that it was owned by its workers. Or you could put a cigarette company in the hands of a sovereign wealth fund, so that the public at large received dividends from cigarette sales (like Norwegians and Alaskans get from state oil revenues). This might create “socialism,” in one sense of the term, since it would be collective ownership. But you would not have touched the problem of an institution that makes its money through ruthlessly manipulating people into slowly committing suicide.
✏️ A distinction I need to dig deeper into. It’s not enough to just think about the means of production and say, hey if we share the wealth and ownership, we’ve achieved socialism. What about the products and consumption itself? What about the propaganda, the manipulation, selling things that are deadly to people, commodifying cultures in the process, etc.? 🔗 View Highlight
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I’d like to see a lot more leftist analysis of architecture, art, theater, children’s toys, YouTubers, talk radio, pulp novels, museums, religion, television commercials, graphic design, board games, and pop songs.
✏️ It is an interesting thought and challenge. Would it be possible to analyze more pop culture stuff in the lens of socialism, systems of oppression, propaganda, etc.? The key is to show it’s not about ripping the fun out of the content, but critiquing the inherent power of propaganda (especially when the creator doesn’t explicitly realize they’re doing it, but rather just reflecting the zeitgeist or cultural landscape of the moment). It’s about being an active, engaged and embodied consumer, not a passive one. You can still be having fun all the same. Preserve your agency; don’t give it to the systems in control. #insight 🔗 View Highlight
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Become too critical, and you become like the World Socialist Website, scolding Jacobin as “the voice of the affluent, complacent ‘left’ petty bourgeoisie” for enjoying Barbie.
✏️ Such a fine line to tow.. we have to examine everything, including product, consumption, owners, systems; critique the biggest and the smallest/trivial things; but not to the point of being so serious and un-fun and telling people they can’t just enjoy things. Reminds me of what I just heard in the Movies Vs Capitalism podcast about not wanting to overexamine everything and come off as saying that one shouldn’t enjoy a movie or like it. It’s more about being aware of what a movie might be doing (even when the creator wasn’t intending it, but reflecting something all the same). Art has power to influence greatly, and it needs to be examined, else we’re just being controlled and acting with zero agency. #insight 🔗 View Highlight
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I think it’s just as important to discuss how people can be manipulated into suddenly wanting to wear something pink as it is to discuss whether the feminist message of the film landed. Part of the job of left criticism is to dig deep and figure out how corporations can cause us to want what we want and do what we do.