A short smart brilliantly obvious essay on why and how our world got to be so ugly.
First and primarily, the answer is that uglification is a by-product of Americanization.
Toward the beginning, there’s an appropriately brief acknowledgement of the nominally positive concepts and themes the America could have and perhaps did at times, stand for: liberty and equality first and foremost.
But then there is the waking nightmare of how Ugly got to be the Reality.
Modernism. Colonialism. Globalization.
The virtualization of Community, a phenomenon that has exploded with technologies like social media, and omnipresent smartphones.
Leading to increasing surveillance on the one hand and censorship on the other.
Capitalism, perhaps most of all.
And the weird reactive flavors of it that happened in places like Soviet Russia, and now China.
Notions of Property and Ownership themselves.
America stripped its own ecosystems and populations bare, and went forth across the world, sometimes enforcing its own profit and ideologies with hard power. (“Making the world safe for Democracy.”)
But all the different cultural forms of soft power were far more insidious and effective in making the planet what it is today.
And now, when even that was not enough to satisfy the appetites of Moloch, America began to eat itself from the inside.
How The USA Is Destroying Itself From Within
In the comments section of the Ugly video, someone says:
“It’s not Americanization. It’s the Corporatization.”
And in turn I say to you, fellow toxified virtual citizen: You’re missing the point.
What we label it doesn’t matter much.
If you want to keep thanking the troops and waving Old Glory and believing the big lie, retrospectively worshiping the Founding Fathers, or the Greatest Generation, while putting the blame for the disaster that is your world on Corporations, well, fine … you’re not wrong.
Just foolishly limited in how you’re thinking about this place and what we’ve been doing to it all your life and all of mine.
And if you want to try and convince me, or yourself, that what “We” stand for is still mostly Good and Right, at least on the blue side of the captured aisle, you can waste your time thus, sure.
Just don’t expect me for one minute to buy that shit like a good cultist, or consumer.
To join you in your addictions to prosperity and optimism.
‘Cause I was born at night, old son, but it wasn’t last night.