Anything threatening to be a subculture is commodified before it can walk (2014)

From Thinkgeek to the BSL to megacorps from the military-industrial complex cosplaying rms (Microsoft shipping VSCode) while ignoring software freedoms, this seems to me to be plainly false.

While Disco Elysium gets a pass for it as it's meant primarily as an entertainment product (and the ridiculousness of the sentence might serve as a parody of the idea, which would be incredibly on brand for the game), I've found Mark Fisher's analysis in Capitalist Realism to be incredibly surface level and either wrong, or so vague, as to be meaningless, and it revolves around Fisher's obession with pop culture, and failure to distinguish between images of the thing and the thing itself.

Obviously dyeing ones hair green does not constitute a meaningful attempt to subvert capitalism. In order to combat capitalism, one must first decide what capitalism actually is, what's actually bad about it and how to combat it.

Let's say the evil of capitalism is that it allows an incredible concentration of capital, therefore the enemy are the rich, and the solution is to raise social support for taxing them. Wearing a t-shirt saying 'tax the rich' is a hilariously inept mode of delivering said message in an impactful way, and serves more of a low-effort consumerist way of supporting the good cause, rather than geniune activism. Yet it can't be dismissed entirely.

If someone wrote a book on why the rich must be taxed, and said book became popular and influential, and influenced the tax policy in the end, you can't say capitalism won in the end, because people paid money for the book, or the author is a hypocrite because he got rich off of royalties.

As for the bit about the British Museum, it's utterly nonsensical - what does a state's military dragging away cultural artifacts by force, and displaying it in a state institution have to do with capitalism?

> adult-themed books more about personal problems with sci-fi on the side

I'm not sure I agree with this. I love the sprawl trilogy, but my feeling has always been that the entire plots are excuses for the big set piece events. The characters exist so that he can write vivid scenes and try to paint a picture, everything between is just so they get to the right places for him to do that.

> it is actually part one of a number of book with the same character (e.g., Count Zero).

I don't think there's were any character overlaps between Neuromancer and Count Zero, are there? Mona Lisa Overdrive certainly does.

>Innovation would suffer, but 80 million is sufficient for a diversified modern economy.

This is laughably naive. Not only would "innovation suffer", but it's pretty doubtful that current technology could be maintained with a population as small as that. Humans are a (weak) hivemind intelligence, and everything we have now is only capable with a population as high as we have it currently. Sure, there might be some inefficiency going on, but it's tens of percent, not hundreds of percent.

>In a depopulated world, the average persons labor is the same,

In a depopulated world, we don't have double digits of one-in-a-billion geniuses. We don't have 1% of the population doing agriculture work, because they can't spare 500,000 people to build and maintain agricultural mechanization. Because they can't do that, they'll actually need to employ even more people doing it with less automation and more manual labor. These things don't scale linearly. (Even if they somehow caught on that the ag mechanization paid dividends, their version of John Deere can't do the same thing because all of the other industries that make John Deere possible don't exist). Regressing back to lesser forms doesn't work, because back when John Deere was making 50,000 small tractors a year, there was demand for small tractors.

And that's before we even get to the part where if those 80 million have the same demographics that we have now, with an excess of old geezers...

I suspect strongly that if we could somehow go do the Star Trek thing and visit countless alien worlds that show a variety of (human-like) aliens, their technology level strongly correlates with their global population, and that in instances where global population somehow declined, so too did their ability to retain that technology.

Runaway consumption is bad. But it increases profits quarter after quarter. You're right, people will not give it up. Neither those who want to consume more and more, nor those who profit from and foment that cycle.

Consumption under capitalism is therefore a problem, because it creates and reinforces rampant consumerism, which is destroying the habitat.

We will drive society all the way into the ground before we give that up. I understand that. But I will not contort my mind into convincing myself it is either natural or ok.