GenZedong

Reminds me of this: https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/

But where the other person posits capital as like a god, Indi presents it like an artificial intelligence.

I do think it's a clever way to challenge individualist thinking. In particular, lines like these:

Asking people to go beyond White supremacy is OK (that identity is made-up and obviously rotten), but asking them to then go beyond human supremacy is a lot. Yet this is the central insight I'm talking about.

We live, in our daily lives, in a very human-centric model of the world. While working for corporations, dying because of corporations, and being surrounded by their predations, we still think we're the apex species somehow, because we can kick other critters around.

The curious thing is, I'm not sure it would stand out if we saw the world through a collective framework already.

The crux of a lens like this seems to be something like: Individualist society did not abandon/escape collective controls somehow. That is, the inertia of collective action and systems are still there, whether your society acts individualist or not. What individualist society did do, in the form of what Indi calls White Empire, is it created an indirection layer in order to maintain the ruse of individualism (the primary layer of indirection being the Corporation, whose job is to manage Capital). Through the Corporation, the chronic parasitic behavior of a minority ruling class is reframed as serving something more nebulous than themselves and can include the gainful employment of people who aren't members of the parasitic class, so surely it can't be all bad, right? The exploitative operations of the parasitic class are, in true parasite fashion, latched onto the operations of the exploited masses. The parasite cannot live without the exploited masses and in their current state, the exploited masses are made dependent on the framework of the exploiter's systems; but they are also enabled to have some manner of seeming freedom of movement under the Corporation framework en masse, which is presented as liberty, when the reality is that no matter which tendril of the Corporation they work for, they are still dependent on its exploitative framework.

The Corporation then becomes both weapon and means of control. It is an adept and fluid tool of mercenary work. The parasitic class doesn't need any single corporation to continue to exist, only that the whole collective of corporate control, the capital C Corporation stays intact. The parasitic process is, in a way, decentralized, which could fast lead to exhaustion if you chase after the tendrils, but also means corporations will fight among themselves, not only work on a shared goal of exploitation and it means that with empire in decline, they will more fall prey to an "every corporation for itself" mentality; like how Canada is not quite in lockstep with the US anymore. By contrast, western Europe seems hellbent on maintaining organized exploitation, which perhaps makes sense, as they are the original prominent colonizers. But the material realities of their situation does not match the fervency of their dedication to organized exploitation.

And it circles back to, we have to go to the root of the problem as we learn from revolutionaries like Lenin. Seizing the means of production and distribution. Or understanding, like Mao said, that political power derives from the barrel of a gun. And also actively changing the framework (not expecting a change in base to automatically translate to a change in superstructure).