Our Rage Will Not Be Commodified

How late-stage capitalism sells our anger back to us — and how we actually fight back.

A neat trick of late-stage capitalism is to infuriate you with your lack of agency and then sell back your righteous anger to you in the neutered forms of film, television, and music.

Dystopian television shows like Severance — a show about the alienation of man from his labor — produced by Apple — a company that puts nets outside its sweatshops so their workers, driven to suicide by the drudgery of their labor can’t effectively kill themselves. Once they are caught, it is back to work to make the technology we in the west need to watch, yep, Severance.

Rage Against the Machine — a great band forced to dilute its anti-establishment message completely because they have to go through Ticketmaster to perform. Ticketmaster — a monopolistic, predatory company — knows how profitable it is, the anger we all feel, so they charge us $500 to mosh against the system we are hopelessly ensnared in.

“Fuck, you, I won’t do what you tell me.” Unless it is Ticketmaster telling us . . .

The astronomically expensive live performances from Rage Against the Machine undercut the band’s message, which is, of course, the point. To make our rage performative, exploited, and ultimately useless.

All our rage can be commodified with the algorithms purposely trained to make the proletariat distrustful and hate-filled towards immigrants, meanwhile the men who control the algorithms get unfathomably wealthy. Our rage is endless — both in its justification and its commodification.

This chapter of our history, of the oligarchs pissing us off and then making money off of it, I think now, finally, is drawing to a dramatic close.

Direct action is how we fight back. Not through the refracting prisms of social media where our beams of hate for the oligarchy can be shot off in a misguided direction at minorities or MAGA.

No, we are angry at you JD Vance, we are angry at you David Ellison, and you are going to hear about it from now until forever. There is no commodifying a crashed gala, a ruined campaign rally. We are done hearing from you, it is time you heard us.

Climate Defiance is trying to make artifacts of protest, moments of time immortalized by video to show how powerful it is to stand up to the CEO class that works every day to immiserate the people they deem less than them. We are indeed trying to piss you off, we are indeed creating content to mirror the rage you feel inside,

We are not here to commodify our anger, we are here to act on our principles. The 90s and early aughts were characterized by musicians and authors like Marilyn Manson and Bret Easton Ellis who were more than happy to rage against the system until it accepted them — and then they take that righteous anger, and profit off of it.

Terrible men with made fortunes off of the impotent rage so many of us feel inside

Climate Defiance is not here for that.
Climate Defiance is here to make the rage potent.
To make change inevitable.

There is no brand deal worth our principles. We aren’t here to talk to you about the uselessness of the Democratic Party leadership then turn around and sell you Blue Chew. We aren’t here to talk about the fascism of the Republican Party and sell you Kamala Harris’s book. We are here to fight back and hold the wretched few to account for what they have done to the precious many.

No Kalshi partnership worth our conviction. Besides, even a betting man knows, the odds are 100% that things will fall apart if coal ash was sprayed into the air. It doesn’t take a prediction market to see that under the current trajectory we are all doomed.

There will be opportunities presented to us along the way to try to mollify our message. Save our pastures — sponsored Babbel Cheese. Save our skies — sponsored by Raytheon.

No individual carrot is worth more for us more than the great collective scythe coming for our heads. We know what the fortune 500 means. 500 people thriving, all the rest enslaved or dead.

Climate Defiance will set ourselves apart from the Environmental Defense Fund and the seemingly inescapable whirlpool of late stage capitalism. We will paddle with all our might against a current designed to overwhelm.

Powerful people are beyond reproach because they are powerful? Who says? Not us.

If they want to rule over us from on high, let us be their subjects who refused their rule and met them at the summit, refusing to be bought off along the way.