I guess I sorta figured they'd haul a bunch of these fucking warlocks onto Zoom and yell at them for a while, and that was gonna be it. It wasn't. And then, when we started talking about writing a strip about it, we laughed ourselves hoarse because it turns out our entire workflow winds through Google's intestinal tract.
There's a lot of odd dialogue that surrounds this stuff, like if you hate the naked exertion of monopoly power you're just hating the player or some shit. That you have a problem with people winning or something, issues with the concept of profit fundamentally. What an incredible rhetorical dodge! We're not talking about profit, and even if we were, it matters how the profit was generated. What we're talking about is a Draconic hoarding of wealth, collected in a vessel made from illegal mergers and filled by illegal acts.
The Coronavirus is auguring directly through the center of the economy, and it's doing this in a bunch of ways. Many businesses leverage the physical world, large swathes of which are off limits currently. Some businesses are simply impossible to execute under these conditions. Some can limp along. But at the metagame level, it's transforming the country into a kind of buffet for vultures. It was already bad. I can barely stress this enough. But if you don't constrain this power in the ways we literally already did in the past and have progressively dismantled, the commonplace horror of Business As Usual is only enthroned further in the world we live in now.
You can't really make the case to younger people that "capitalism," broadly writ, is gonna do shit for them. I have one of these in my house, and they simply don't buy it. Elders called what my cadre felt toward all this machinery Apathy, but it never was: we just knew it was a lie. That's an overlap we have; I can work with that. And they aren't wrong on this point: if money is allowed to pool like this, devils grow in it. If you don't fucking govern, if you don't moat these things in a circle of salt, they will invariably become something uncontainable - something too big to fail, part of the walls. It needs to be made absolutely plain that the people have something in this sheath. Something sharp. And that means killing the occasional dragon.
(CW)TB out.
