28 October 2009: "Indie Bro Obsession & the Objectification of Female Indie Alt Celeb Musicians."

This post is about libidinal cathexes. An especially rich piece of theorizing from Carles, taking on narcissism, phallologocentrism, writing from the body, the balance of ego-cathected and libidinally cathected forces in the neurotic male subject, sublimation and onanism, the fantasy of sexual purification through art, inherently gendered criticism and its biases, archetypal hero worship, initiation rituals, the reproduction of patriarchal bias through subcultural formations, and so on.

Carles asks a question that has haunted psychoanalysts since the time of Freud, the master himself: "Does some sort of subconscious sexual desire impact the acceptance of all females?" Can male subjectivity be deemed "healthy" without the subordination of female desire, or does it rely on that subordination in patriarchy? Or in Carles' preferred formulation, "Will men ever see women as ‘anything more than a fuck doll’?"

Carles's primary thesis is that the subculture associated with independent rock music is dictated by the vagaries of male psychopathology, with celebrated female performers serving fundamentally as cathexes for excess, semi-sublimated libidinal forces.

Will an ugly/not cute girl ever ‘make it’ as an indie artist? It seems like indie bros who ’shape’ the indie world will always have trouble evaluating female artists. I think the first thing men look at is ‘how attractive is the female.’ That seems to be ‘the most important element’ when evaluating a woman in any profession (strippers, actresses, accountants, secretaries, etc).

The sexual role the female plays in the fantasy scheme of the male arbiters of cultural taste in this particular subculture occludes the appreciation of the women's efforts at sublimation; instead their artistic efforts are recast as estrual posturings. Though Carles concedes that it is "important for indie females to ’seem like they are real musicians,’ " this pretense serves merely to help men circumvent their own superegos in developing strong libidinal attachments. The artistic performance in the woman becomes understood as projection -- a reflection of the man's own talent, which is laid over (so to speak) the woman's primary carnality. The man can then achieve a purified form of narcissism, which routes his wish to love his own creativity through the woman, who is reduced to a vessel for the man's ego-defenses. Typically this plays out in the medium of music-fan commentary: "All blurbs about female artists by men are unintentional manifestos in which we ’search 4 a sexual identity.’" That is, sexual identity is secured through the cathexis with an idealized female performer, who is part male-performer-in-drag and part redeemed, nonthreatening sexual object.

All that matters, as Carles notes, is the "the level of ‘into-it-ness’ of her presence" -- the feigned commitment to the satisfaction of the desires of her male onlookers. The female indie musician becomes the ultimate example of the woman who forgoes her own orgasmic capabilities to protect that of the men who objectify her, and enable her to satisfy her own narcissistic needs to love herself as object qua object. She embraces this degraded form of alienated self-love in lieu of the capacity for jouissance, which is surrendered once her creative talents are injected/introjected into the commercial-art nexus. As Carles explains, her performance no longer emanates from her body authentically, that is, in a way incomprehensible to men. "It seems impossible for men to ‘actually like’ music by women, since many of the lyrical themes are coming from the ‘fucking dreamworld’ that exists inside of a girl’s head." But when men embrace a female performer, this is prima facie evidence that the woman has submitted to phallologocentristic imperatives.

Carles leaves many questions unresolved here; he is willing to grant that male subjectivty is derived from female cooperation with male needs, but does not explain why women consent to subordination, given their primary significance as cathected objects.

27 October 2009: "I AM CARLES shirts are ‘almost dead.’"

This post is about the identity function. Carles here reprises his gambit of objectifying his philosophy in the form of an ambiguous slogan embossed on a tee-shirt. In a stroke Carles reifies identity and commercializes it, commenting on precisely the intervention capitalism perpetrates through mass psychologization of identity formation in the crucible of consumerism.

The identity, that is the equation of two like parts in a logical statement, the S=S, is both reaffirmed and denied by the proliferation of the cogito-like slogan "I am Carles." But I does not equal I in all instances; "Carles" becomes a transitive term between subjects, producing a manageable intersubjectivity open to corporate manipulation. "Maybe there’s a lil bit of Carles in every1 of us after all," Carles explains.

By limiting the run of the shirt, Carles hopes to symbolically kill this form of interpolation, as the title of the post indicates. "R I P I AM CARLES. u were a good meme. u did ur best," Carles writes, offering his tentative assessment of this particular tactic against social homogenization.

What Carles intends is that the "bro-est" of times will indeed be in the past, and friendship via conformity and affiliation with any partivular milieu (all of which, as the Invisible Committee declared, are inherently counter-revolutionary and timidly self-protective) will be consigned to the dust-bin of history once all possible "I am..." statements must remain contingent is not perpetually incomplete.

26 October 2009: "Should I invade my local mall dressed as a ‘zombie’ 2 scare consumer tweens+mnstrms?"

This post is about the pharmakon. Carles looks at the contemporary trend of zombie adulation and, as always, moves beyond the obvious interpretation. One would expect the phenomenon of zombies at a shopping mall to prompt an analysis linking the rudimentary costumes to an inchoate expression of revolt with regard to the death-in-life of late capitalist consumerism. With every desire always already co-opted by retailing interests, our own libido is turned against us, and every new pleasure we imagine is a new trap to cage us into the prison-house of consumerist subjectivity.

Carles grants all that from the outset. "Is ‘consumerism’ bullshit?" he asks mockingly, knowing precisely what answer his readers will give. But Carles is testing a new problematic, in which consumerism is not merely a metaphysical enemy, a parasite on authentic humanity, but is insteada medium, a dialiectic opportunity.

Posturing as a participant in the retail zombie parade, he makes this cutting comment about current economic praxis: "It was rlly crowded. It made me feel like I was finally chilling with a group of like-minded people, who just wanted to break free of their meaningless existences and participate in an event that would generate an internet meme/bloggable photos/etc." Desire have prompted an endless pursuit of self-marketing opportunities, of public behaviors that will make this cohort resemble the products which materially manifest the circumscribed desires they are now limited to conceiving. This common impulse has made them all "like-minded" in that they are without mind, much like the zombies whose guise they have adopted. Rather than feeding on "brains" as zombies are troped to do in popular film representations, this retail zombies subsist on online attention, for which they will stop at nothing.

Carles then recounts in images the way stations of the American retail center and exposes them as lifeless, soulless. But this merely sets the stage for his true analytical insights. In a very important and deceptively facile statement, Carles declares in the persona of the retail zombie:

I felt like I was a part of something larger than myself. It felt good to transcend this space that was meant to ’sell personal branding tools’ 2 humans.

Here we see Carles attempt to assimilate the parasitical discourse of branding and marketing and sublate it. He argues that identity as such can be purified through a devotion to the its prostitution in the cash nexus. By embracing mass consumerism as a kind of living death one is paradoxically freed from its vampiristic drain Thus, though "the vampire brand made us lose 23% of our fan base [via post-Twilight]" Carles believes "the zombie brand is still strong".

The zombie, overdetermined as both brainless and full of brains, alive and dead, animated and lifeless, is reminiscent of the figure of the pharmakon, as theorized by Derrida, drawing on the seminal works of the Greek philosopher Plato. Self-zombification is both poison and remedy to the retail sickness; it is presence in the midst of absence -- an absent presence, or as it were a present absence. Of course, as Derrida asks in "Différance"

are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determination of différance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought within the horizon of the question of Being, still intrametaphysical effects of différance?

That's easy for Derrida to ask, but less simple to resolve definitively. Carles would perhaps agree that the ontic-ontological difference implied by zombies vis-a-vis living creatures, vis-a-vis living creatures simulating zombies, is the "transcending" space imagined in the shopping mall -- the blissful utopian fantasy of eternal life and eternal desire -- much like the striving gods of Keats's famous Grecian urn -- dreamed by late capitalism itself. "I guess in a way, antiquated indoor malls are kinda like zombies…" Carles surmises, suggesting that both are liminal spaces and fatal strategies simultaneously, occupying an uncertain and indeterminate status in the current socioeconomic striation.

18 October 2009: "Is Target ‘ripping off’ American Apparel?"

This post is about la perruque. Important French sociologist Michel De Certeau defined la perruque in his seminal 1974 work The Practice of Everyday Life as "the worker's own work disguised as work for his employer" -- a way for labor to reappropriate valorized capital from within the site of exploitation, wresting away from capital the control of time. Carles admits, confronted with the collapsing of hierarchies of social capital within the sector of branded retailers, that he is "having a huge crisis." The nature of this crisis can only be understood as a cry of concern over the way in which the site of everyday life for the consumer has become a contested battleground over la perruque, that is to say, the disciplinary locus upon which the full scrutiny of capital, in the form of brands and symbols and their discursive distribution, is brought to bear on the individual, guilty or not, forcing a fatal self-awareness of corporate intellectual property, up to and including not merely the trademarked language with which fashion our identities but those very identities themselves. By freely adapting the look and language of branded products to self-promote, we have been pirating in the semiological sea. We commit the crime of trying to tout our own personal brand at the expense of those from which we construct it.

Carles doubts this specious form of existential reasoning by which we can misrecognize our own motives and thereby realize a surplus -- not of capital but of meaning, which may, in Carles postmodern view, assume a greater significance in terms of who controls the drift of the socio-politico-economic sphere. Considering the perruque-like practice of buying discount goods and passing them off as authentically branded gods, he remarks: "I started to wonder if these knock-offs would enable me to achieve the same brand goals." This is not because the knockoffs are inauthentic, but the because the authentic goods are always already knockoffs. The perceived inferiority is internal to the system of signs and bears no material trace on the physical goods themselves, which is to say the "work" of improvement has been performed not by the manufacturers who seek to reap the profit from it but by the cabal of meaning-makers who enhance value through the certain circulation of ideas about what is socially relevant, popular, necessary.

Thus Carles recognizes that given the current interpenetration of signs and meanings, producers and consumers, we "just don’t know what belongs to who, and what type of ‘intellectual design property’ can really be owned." When we attempt to appropriate the meaning of a brand, are we annexing our own labor or someone else's, and is that attempt to steal itself another iteration of semiotic work, adding to the value of that which we seek to harness for ourselves? Is the gesture of piracy simply a moment in circulation, another instantiation of valorization for that lump of cultural capital? When the ledger of cultural meanings is drawn up, who's bottom line is assessed? Who signs the profit-and-loss statement, and is it signed with the blood of the consuming classes? The seeming struggle between corporate entities over specific design motifs merely masks the real battle between corporations and consumers. The perruque is inverted and turned against itself.

Those, who as Carles notes, "need'branded logos’ + scribbly shit [via Ed Hardy] on their t-shirts to make them look like they are rich/fit-in," may yet escape the crucible of sign production and valorization. The hope lies in manufacturing a deliberate plethora, of a surfeit of signs, of, in Carles's metaphor, "creat[ing] files that make it on to as many computers as possible." The near-costfree replication and dissemination of signs in "viral" online culture could produce precisely the disease necessary to stagger the corporate blood-sucking beast. Kill it with a cancer, an overproliferation of signs being produced from within its own factories. The perruque of the perruque -- disguising corporate work as personal to subdue to corporate and subsume it within the personal

12 October 2009: "Not sure if I ‘get’ the goal of ‘magazines.’"

This post is about ritual orgy. Carles notes that "Magazines seem like they ‘try too hard’ to generate discussion" -- that discourse has a generalized forced felling as if it is being produced to mask the expression of a deeper truth. He may have in mind the transmogrifying libidinal economy, considering the covers he choose to illustrate his point.

In L'erotisme Bataille explores the crisis of coitus: "Sexual activity is a critical moment in the isolation of the individual. We know it from without, but we know that it weakens and calls into question the feeling of self.... The material basis of the crisis is the plethora." By this, he means the "superabundance of energy" that initiates sexual behavior and seeks its own expiration, in the process annihilating the boundaries of the self in the surge toward reproduction, destroying the illusion of continuity and providing the foretaste of death.

Carles may have Bataille in mind in his concern with the flood-tide of pornography, now spilling into other graphic arts in a high-profile semi-pornographic magazine. IS this the accursed share de-eroticized through a radical conflict directly with sexuality's commercial equivalent? Sexualized sexuality, a cartoon of sexuality, already its own fetish in a vetiginous recursivity, a plethora of plethora that seeks to destroy the excess by channelling the super-abundance into a more sterile form of viral socio-sexual image production?

searched the internet for nude pictures of the Simpsons, and happened to find a ’shit load’ of cartoon porn. Like graphic pictures of tons of characters doing ‘the kraziest shit possible’ to one another. It seems to indicate that there is already a niche of fans who are interested in seeing the Simpsons nude/performing sex acts.

Nonreproductive sexuality is taken to its logical endpoint -- voyeurism vis-a-vis representations of sex among cartoon characters -- as a defense against the reproductive, self-annihilating nature of the sexual impulse. Carles asks rhetorially, "Are cartoons for people who ‘live in a fucking dreamworld’ (no matter how trendy & progressive they are)?" A dream world of fucking, not progressive but transgressive, anarchic, an overabundance that surges beyond the containing mechanism of cyclical fashion distractions. The fucking cartoon, an oxymoron or a koan?

Carles is dismayed to see this ultimate psychological defense mechanism co-opted by media companies whose preveious efforts to siphon off the surplus have lost their effectiveness: "Playboy appears to be utilizing this Simpsons gimmick just 2 try to sell magazines to ‘people who usually aren’t interested in Playboy’ since showing C-list celebrity breasts no longer makes the Playboy Brand a valuable asset/resource to our society." Appropriating images of human sexuality, Carles suggests here, no longer suits the post-human society of late capitalism.

Bataille predicted this: "In the human sphere sexual activity has broken away from animal simplicity. It is in essence a transgression, not, after the taboo, a return to primitive freedom. Transgression belongs to humanity given shape by the business of work." Hence Carles asks the natural question: "What’s the ‘kraziest shit’ u’ve ever tugged off to?" The answer is not pertinent, what matters is that we think of sexuality in terms of extremity rather than generation, and with a diligent perspicacity. "Wild cries, wild violence of gesture, wild dances, wild emotions as well, all in the grip of immeasurably convulsive turbulence." What could these worlds of Bataille possibly signify, Carles implicitly asks, other than a media-cartoon orgy?

11 October 2009: "Should Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam be deported/blacklisted from The United States of America?"

This post is about the dialectics of liberation. Carles takes advantage of some provocative comments by a popular multi-ethnic hip-hop artist M.I.A. to investigate the possibilities for countercultural revolution within the given hegemonic power structure, the so-called pax Americana that has prevailed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc alternative. Americans are burdened with the albatross of globalization and proselytization of their supposed exceptionalism: "We can never forget who we are as a nation, and our special mission as ‘the best nation in the World.’" In order to challenge this habit of thinking, Americans must be woken from their dream of dominance carefully, must be brought to accept cosmopolitanism without reawakening a dormant tribalism forgotten as unnecessary in their supposed supremacy. We are backed in a corner with few choices for self-actualization: "You are either a patriot or a terrorist–there is nothing in between," Carles notes ruefully.

Carles points out that M.I.A.'s comments about Barack Obama's having won the Nobel Peace Prize suggest she is "talking mad shit" that displays her ignorance. On the face of things, it apppears Carles is criticizing M.I.A. when he states that "It seems like M.I.A. is ‘trying to take a shit’ on our nation/our leader/etc."

Bu that would be a superficial understanding. Carles may have in mind the problem of developing organic intellectuals without alienating would-be fellow travelers on the road to revolution. As Theodore Roszak noted in The Making of a Counter Culture, "The young, miserably educated as they are, bring with them almost nothing but healthy instincts. The project of building a sophisticated framework of thought atop those instincts is rather like trying to graft an oak tree upon a wildflower." Carles is asking, How can we follow M.I.A.'s crude lead in questioning the American hegemony without alienating the Americans whose cooperation will be necessary to change that country's politics? "It seems like making anti-Obama statements might diminish her appeal to liberal alts," he notes.

In order to engender truly epochal revolutionary change rather than the "peace" -- the maintenance of the status quo -- for which Obama has been amply rewarded, we must learn to subvert awards, detourn them along the lines of Debord and the situationists, as Carles recommends: "Think I might start an ‘awards system’ for some sort of alternative genre, and maybe it will appear to be ‘more real’ over time." The very idea of an award will become indubitably contested to the point in which it connotes honor and opprobrium in equal measure.

At that point we can honor ourselves for patriotism by undermining the supremacy of nations, and M.I.A.'s dream of disengagement from the institutionalized community of peace manufacturing and its ideological props and award ceremonies will become superfluous. Prizes will mean everything and nothing, they will be open to our interpretation and consumption as memes rather than memories.

2 October 2009: "Will a crocheted penis take my male brand to the next level? #cock_crafts #crocheting"

This post is about phallologocentrism. Carles' concern about the patriarcal order always reverts to the dilemma presented by the supposed aggressive evolutionary quest for mates in the male: "Feel bad for women in 2day’s society since a lot of men just see them as ‘fuck dolls’ without realizing it. Sad that men just think with their peters and hurt women and hurt themselves." But is this biological imperative in fact a phenomenological apparition, a product of the perception of an epiphenomenon in the wake of promiscuous expression?

To rephrase in the terms Carles chooses to explore this thorny question, is it inherently patriarchal to write of the penis in the context of craft, traditionally the preserved domain, the liminal space in which femininity blossomed free from predation by masculinist lawgivers? Domestic crafts such as crochet flourished in the gendered space set off by the sexual segregation predominant in Western bourgeois society. The yarn phallus is at once a parodic taunt at the patriarchal order and a manifestation of its hegemonic grip. As Luce Irigaray wrote in Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un, "It is only through the pleasure of the 'body' -- of the Other? -- that [perpetrators of the phallic economy] might articulate something. But men would understand nothing about it, because what they enjoy is the enjoyment of the organ: the phallic obstacle." The crochet penis, as Carles has adroitly observed is the material sign of that obstacle and its trace. "It’s always a good sign when u wonder if something could make ur life better," he remarks about the phallus, cleverly punning on the word "sign." And the wonder at the sign's usefulness, whether it effaces the body or lifts it to the level of meaning within a phallologocentric libidinal economy, whether the yarn phallus itself inscribes us into language objectively and subjectively, is a "good sign" indeed. But the question is a pregmant one: is our entrace into subjectivity via the phallus an "improvement" over the prelingual state conceptualized by Kristeva and lauded in The Newly Born Woman (La jeune née) by Cixous and Clément in these terms: "We know this perfectly well: it happens that women talk, that they step out of their function as sign...woman is in a primitive state; she is the incarnation of origin."

Carles is certainly thinking of these words when he proposes an inverse penis envy, in which one yearns not for the world-ordering phallus to anchor meaning in a biased language but the artificial phallus that can unfix meaning and free it to circulate, enabling the return of lalangue and pure expression -- the abject, the onanistic, the polymorphously perverse and the joyous scatology of the prenatal: "It’s chill to have a ‘real penis’, since u can do stuff with it like urinate or ‘tug off’, but sometimes I feel like there would be less pressure on men if they had some sort of yarn-based art+craft generated penis." Out from under the onus of the phallus, men would rediscover the body as it exists outside the domain of inscription/proscription. "I think life might be better if we could have some sort of ‘replica peens’/sexual organs." This would usher in the possibility of the conception of an egalitarian order beyond the Law, since "Most men just see penis size as a social status symbol."

After pointing out the metaphoric cancer that the genital sign system imparts to human society, Carles concludes by drawing together the stray threads of his argument, linking phallologocentrism with consumerism and the post-ironic pursuit of signifiers that retain their power to denote the self in the shadow of the Other: "Much like ‘unEarthing a buzzband’, early detection is critical." But we can only find a mirror in our critical scrutiny, and a return to the primordial substance, the earth. And the Earth mother?

7 October 2009: "Horrorcore is bad for society/humanity. Horrorcore must die."

This post is about the powers of horror. Carles contrasts two musical subcultures to investigate two possible escape routes available to disaffected or disenfranchised groups who either will not or can not abide conventional mores and the expectations of citizens in a consumer society. One might suspect that those who reject mainstream identities will have done so to avoid being implicated in its social class structure, but Carles demonstrates that the attempted mode of escape from the mainstream is perhaps more decisively indicative of class aspirations.

On the one hand there is the indie culture that Carles frequently documents (and subjects to critical scrutiny), which here he chooses to laud as a "healthy form of expression, celebrating ideas and themes the right way." The "right way" is a loaded term, redolent with hints of entitlement and class privilege, a point that becomes abundantly clear when indie is contrasted with horrorcore, which Carles veritably describes as anti-indie music. Horrorcore, Carles notes, is one of those "musical genres" which "are bad for society/inspire terrible people to perform terrible things". That is, it maintains coherent identity by setting itself in opposition to society, helping that society clarify its own values and strengthen their general appeal at the expense of the volunteer outcasts. This makes the would-be rebels dupes, useful idiots for the mainstream, which is why Carles confidently declares that "only ‘very stupid people’ would listen to [horrorcore]".

So indie music is in fact a distillation of mainstream values that allows people to internalize its codes of success without feeling coerced, or as though they have sold out and conformed. Horrorcore, though, is a moronic rebellion that props up those values while denying the success they offer to those propping them up. Horrorcore adherents become sacrificial lambs, which helps explain their lyrical preoccupations with gratuitous murder. This is the obverse of their own freely offered self-sacrifice, removing themselves from society so that it can function better in oppressing people like themselves.

The horrorcore fans both serve as the abject, as theorized by Julia Kristeva, for society and confront the abject at a more fundamental level in their practices. Carles notes that their "cries for understanding/empathy are ‘completely retarded.’ Probably ’subhuman’ cries for attention, since they are not yearning to be in touch with humanity." They grapple with the liminal to shore up the definition of humanity and in the process surrender their own. As Kristeva writes, "the more or less beautiful image in which I behold or recognize myself rests upon an abjection that sunders it as soon as repression, the constant watchman, is relaxed." Horrorcore activates that repression for the rest of us, inspiring a repulsion we direct against the abject residue within our own psyche. Note the vehemence of Carles repudiation: "These horrorcore songs really make me ‘feel ill’, I think.... I even find the Dirty Projectors to be insanely more listenable than Horrorcore."

The cartoonish Kabuki corruption and evil of horrorcore -- so amply illustrated by the Juggalos that Carles carefully documents -- functions as a distraction, a mask for the inherent corruption embedded in capitalism and embraced as bourgeois values by the respectable classes. Horrorcore is Celine for the 21st century.

4 October 2009: "Is ‘bullying’ natural selection?"

This post is about Martin Heidegger. Unusually earnest, Carles declares that "in this blog post, Carles will controversially suggest that bullying is natural selection," but longtime readers of his should immediately comprehend in his third-person self-reference his favorite distanciation strategy -- of all the characters rhetorically adopted in his philosophical investigations, none is more of a fictional device than "Carles." His intention here is to show how an otherwise sensible thinker might be drawn into endorsing a baldly fascistic ideological position championing violence as a means for purging society of weakness and striating society into castes.

Purporting to draw inferences from nature, "Carles" proclaims that since "animals in the wild are ‘bullies,’" it is a matter of adherence to natural law to "find a way to intimidate the weak, kill them off early and eat them 2 stay alive." Species survival is thereby conflated with sadistic cannibalism, but Carles does not suggest anything so radical, though it would be the logical end of the assumptions he is testing. Instead he offers a strategy similar to that which guided the interment of the Jews in 1930s Germany: "It seems like we might need to keep the bullied alive so that they can perform ‘menial jobs’." But unlike the Nazis, who pursued a program of racial extermination under the auspices of species "purification," Carles maintains a more utilitarian line, picturing a Brave New World style system where different castes are prepared for different unpleasant but necessary fields of social work. "They learn how to ‘take shit’ so that they can prepare for being at the bottom of society when they are older/are trapped in their lives’." The view Carles espouses here is in some ways worse than the Nazis' murderous program in that it presents violence as serving somehow for the victim's own good. Though he is not afraid of adopting Nazi propaganda techniques, demonizing those singled out for abuse with loaded epithets that are somehow proved by the unwarranted attacks directed at them: "It seems like it is reasonable to conclude that all of these kids are ‘fucking pussies’ or possibly ‘fucking fggts."

But despite the obvious Nazi overtones, Carles demonstrates that peer violence flows not from a wellspring of inner fascism so much as it comes from anti-egalitarianism, a tribalistic fear of cosmopolitanism: "If every1 had money/the same colour skin, the world would not be a better place–there would be way 2 many issues 2 deal with."
In other words, the same fears of urbanism and modernism that led Heidegger to Nazism threaten to make anyone who thinks seriously about identity issues in contemporary capitalist societies, with their mandated but inequitably distributed division of labor, become a bit of a fascist, endorsing violence as expedient and usual as the ultimate form of branding. "Seems like sometimes u need to ’step on other people’ to make sure ur brand is strong + authentic." This helps explain the enduring appeal of the swastika as insignia, carrying with it the inherent power relationships embedded in branding within a stratified society. It also presents bullying as convenient: "Is it really cost/time effective to ‘worry about EVERY1’s feelings’?" Bullying works to streamline our emotional economy.

Carles then sees the argument through to its ultimate conclusion, bullying should be branded, since it is a profitable and necessary social service proffered by private firms: "I feel like my internet website might be some sort of bully. Perhaps a ‘cyber bully.’ Maybe I should ‘trademark’ that term since the internet is about to get really popular so that I can ‘make mad money’ in case it becomes a catchy buzzword." What Carles is concerned with is the ease with which he can make plausible arguments in favor of fascism and its modern consumer-capitalist equivalents. He sense defects in his own philosophical practice that greases the propagandistic sleds. He asks a serious of questions at the end of the post, but these only intimate the question he doesn't ask but which is everywhere posed, as it were, in the shadows of his discourse: Can he continue to speak? Can he ever speak in his own voice? Or is it too dangerous?