60
Get Your Bread but Eat the Rich: An internal monologue of living in late stage capitalism Ah, the joys of late-stage capitalism. Everything essential like food, electricity and housing is becoming disastrously expensive. Everything that appears free comes at a cost — usually your privacy. Every single purchase, subscription, moment your eyes linger slightly longer on your screen embeds you deeper into the system. In the morning and each night before bed, I check Facebook, scroll on Instagram and get lost in TikTok. I’ve tried deleting each of these apps multiple times, but something always draws me back in. Even if you’re not always receiving messages on these platforms, just seeing the lives of other people, receiving a like or hearing others speak, provides a form of pseudo-socialisation that we become dependent upon and addicted to. Even knowing my privacy is being breached and my attention being sold in the name of making some neo-liberal corporation billions of dollars, I still use social media, watch videos on YouTube and listen to podcasts. Why? It’s entertaining, it’s free and it makes me feel connected in an increasingly disparate, polarised and disconnected world.
