The Luddite

In their video Cucksumerism: Why Pokemon Sucks, Boy Boy discusses how the pandemic-fueled rise in the value of Pokemon cards collided with the bizarre internet phenomenon of unboxing videos into a singularly deranged yet revealing online spectacle:

One of the most alienating forms of entertainment imaginable, unboxing, a genre of videos where people literally talk about boxes and styrofoam, how the boxes look, how they feel, how they smell... [U]nboxing videos revealed the extent of this addiction as we're even entertained by the spectacle of someone else unboxing a new commodity.

As the price of Pokemon cards rose, the ritual elevation of unboxing consumables into its own consumable content soon became popular among Pokemon enthusiasts. For Boy Boy, this trend reached its apotheosis when, at the height of their value, people purchased packs of cards, mailed them unopened to Logan Paul, and watched him open them on a live stream, during which he put each card in a special case with a holographic sticker.

I argue that this is a profound observation. It is the purest incarnation of a core internet pathology. Consider this post to Reddit's /r/PublicFreakout, titled "OG Karen gets tased twice after running and kicking cop."¹ The post is pretty typical for the subreddit. It links to a video in which a 65 year-old woman is pulled over for having a busted tail light. At first, the driver and the officer have a relatively friendly interaction, given the circumstances, though the driver is clearly a little annoyed. She admits that it has been busted for six months. We learn that she uses this truck to tend to her cattle. The officer even learns that he knows her son, and that he, too, has recently had trouble with busted tail lights.

Upon learning this, some might wonder if perhaps the problem here is not one a financial penalty is well suited to address, but this armed agent of the state doesn't seem particularly predisposed to this kind of philosphical inquiry. He instead points out that this seems to be a pattern with her family, as if broken tail lights were genetically inherited but poverty an entirely unknown phenomenon. He gives her a ticket for $80, asking her to sign. She refuses, complaining that she didn't even get a warning. She says, "I don't want to sign it because I don't think I deserve to pay $80 for something that is fixable." The officer then asks her to step out of the car and tells her she is under arrest.

From there, things escalate. He again asks her to step out of the vehicle; she refuses. He says, "I've given you a lawful order to step out." They continue to argue. She says, "Shut up! Fine, give me that and I'll sign it." In a moment of clarity, in which he lays bare his true motivations, he says, "No, we're beyond that now," missing an opportunity that would both de-escalate and address the supposed safety concern. Frustrated and angry, she drives off, at a regular driving speed, not endangering anyone, but also not complying with his lawful order. The officer follows, and things end with the police physically yanking this 65 year-old woman, who posed absolutely no threat to anyone out of her car, throwing her onto the ground, and tasing her two times while she screams. As the title suggests, she did get one kick in during the struggle, though it was extremely ineffectual. Still, good on her for getting one in.

As one might also gather from the title, in which this victim of completely unnecessary police brutality is labeled a "Karen," the people on this subreddit did not see her as a victim. Here are some of the comments:

These redditors are normal people, probably bored at their office jobs and scrolling the internet. They are much more likely to be the driver than the police officers, yet they delight in her humiliation. They pile on the cruelty, taking joy even in the multilayered perversion of her resulting medical bills, even though virtually every American will be affected by our predatory medical system. Likewise, we all live under constant surveillance by a militarized police force waiting and ready to respond with violence to any deviation from the narrow behavior society condones. This woman had a broken tail light and refused to sign a piece of paper; the resulting interaction required emergency medical services.

The narrow behavior in which we are allowed to engage is so normalized that we often forget just how strange it truly is. Some examples, like how in Massachusetts you can't buy liquor before noon on Sundays, are localized enough that those who visit notice. Of course, liquor stores comply. If they did not, if instead they chose to ignore the letters telling them to stop, the police would do anything up to and including violence to stop them. Most examples are less noticeable because they are the water in which we swim. We register our cars every two years, knowing full well that if we do not, this failure to file some tedious paperwork will lead to an encounter with an armed agent of the state. There are even loitering laws, which literally make it illegal to be somewhere without reason, presumably interpreted to mean without actively participating in some commercial activity.

Despite this predatory medical system, this omnipresent threat of violence, this criminalizing of our very existence if we do not intend to buy something, and these incredibly narrow lives we are forced to live, we do nothing. We are powerless. We wake up; we get in our properly registered and inspected cars; we go to a job we hate for most of our waking hours; we come home. We are completely robbed of agency. Since, as it so often seems, no one can actually do anything about it, we're not really participants in the world. We're only allowed to watch. We're cucked.

Some take this further. They go to Reddit, and they read /r/PublicFreakout. In this forum, they watch videos of people refusing to sign their traffic ticket being dragged and brutalized by a strong, armed man in uniforn. They cheer that man on. They insult and degrade the victim, who could just as easily have been any of us, and they relish it. They want her to respect the officer. They'll say he was patient with her, and that no one should give her any pity, that she was bad, that she deserves to be punished. And they desperately want to watch. Millions log on to watch the powerful, merciless officer punish her hard, preferably even harder. They'll watch it every time it gets posted, and after they watch, they'll be satisfied. "Man," as that commenter said, "that was a good one." Our lives, and our society writ large, become a Cucksumerist experience.

There are many subreddits like /r/PublicFreakout (/r/ActualPublicFreakouts, /r/FuckYouKaren, /r/JusticeServed, /r/trashy...), and they're very popular. In these subreddits, redditors upload Cucksumerist content, often videos of the worst moments in someone's life, and millions of others take joy in their suffering, furthering and immortalizing their humiliation and shame on the internet. There are many subgenres of this kind of video, and though not all of them display this pathology, many of them do.

These freakouts often take place in situations that none of us should tolerate. The rest of us do not react — because we are cucked. It's no surprise that one of the most common subgenres of these videos is people freaking out on airplanes. Flying forces us to degrade ourselves; we are digitally and literally undressed, all while uniformed officers watch, then we are shoved together with as little personal space as is necessary to comply with regulations. Not only do we pay for the privilege, but whenever airlines ask us to, we Americans pool our money and give it to them for nothing. When, in this madness, someone like this poor person finally snaps, we film them in crisis, post it on the internet, and gleefully mock them.

That person is clearly and obviously in crisis. I believe they're yelling "GOD YOU'RE MY SAVIOR" over and over. They're doing it so quickly that I can barely make it out, yet I had to scroll past many comments mocking her before finding those with any empathy. It's as if our own shame in tolerating the intolerable is transformed into the most base satisfaction by mocking those who, for whatever reason, can't or don't. Whether the satisfaction comes from reveling in our own humiliation, or hiding it by mocking someone else, the result is the same — we're thoroughly cucked by flying.

Though human beings have long been subjugated, dominated, and oppressed, it is only now that the internet allows us to thoroughly document and watch, sometimes with perverse pleasure, that our cuckolding is truly complete. The Cucksumerist internet is not an accident. It is a choice the tech industry has made. They know that forces outside our control dominate our lives entirely. Since most of our time is not our own, and none of us plan on doing anything about it, they don't make tools that actually help us do anything; they make tools that let us watch. This is why it seems every tech billionaire is recreating their own version of Twitter this year.

Twitter is as cucked as a technology can be. We are artificially restricted to a couple sentences, making it virtually impossible to actually do anything, but that same constraint makes it very easy to watch many other people. We don't even really get to decide what we watch on Twitter. We gently suggest by following, but we are shown what Twitter wants us to see, and we cannot get enough. We are algorithmically cucked. We even used to take pride in having blue checkmarks. Our domination is so complete that we want others to see that we're good boys and girls. When Musk changed the blue checkmarks to be something you could pay for, he destroyed the appeal. We don't want to buy Twitter's approval; we want to earn it.

Even Twitter's supposed demise is being watched on its own platform. Elon Musk bought the company, and continues to make the platform worse and worse. Twitter users continue to dunk on Musk and his bad decisions, retweeting all the clever takedowns and insults hurled at its new CEO, but they're doing this all on Twitter.² So complete is our domination that users are unable to take even the slightest agency by simply using one of the many available alternatives. Twitter users give Musk the power to dominate so much of our online lives, consuming Twitter's own service in a farcical Cucksumerist spiral.

As I was editing this post, Musk rebranded Twitter to "X," which he envisions as the "everything app." X, the symbol, is traditionally a placeholder. On its own, it is meaningless. In this case, it stands for the value that we have to provide, which a stronger, richer, more successful man will take from us and use for his own purposes, all while we watch and do nothing. X is the perfect encapsulation of tech companies trying to take everything from us and sell it back as a service, for which we thank them with even more money and influence. This is the modern, Cucksumerist internet.

Cucksumerism is now taking its final form in the AI hype. Companies are scrambling to invest in generative AI, which can generate images and text that look plausibly made by humans. Those are exactly the things human beings are good at. Were tech companies looking to make technology that could actually help us do things, they wouldn't pour all their resources into precisely the things we don't need help doing. Instead, they've chosen to take away one of the last things we do, forcing us instead to watch. Generative AI is the perfect example of a backwards digital technology. It is so backwards and so unhelpful that they hope to create a completely Cucksumerist internet, in which human beings are no longer participants. They imagine an internet entirely generated by computers, and all of us at our pointless and menial jobs, sitting at our computers, powerless and watching.