Level Up:Some Humans never grow upA buncha whiners, the whole lotIf they can’t get what they adoreThey throw a tantrum on the floorAs if the world’s their toy storeTo keep the Young at bayI have a stay-away sprayIt’s unattractive to remain a childYoung… as infantile—Little Women:When I grow up, I’ll be fifteenA fully-fledged nubile queenYoung, soft, supple and sexyI cannot imagine being…
He chose to not commodify hair and said so. ‘I do not commodify hair’ he said, and he felt better for having said it. He now knew where he stood. I suppose if you have to sell naked images of yourself to please an employer then that’s what you have to do, he thought, then moved to listen to something kind and helpful. Instruction from Buddha Dharma. He had links to it via his mobile device. Was lithium ion use damaging earth? He didn’t know the extent such trends of consumption were having upon the planet’s environment. We would find out soon enough. All choices have their residual effect. All current decision making matters to us.
The Silicone Sunset (Item #404)
The neon blinks in 4K resolution,
(Error 404: Authenticity not found)
I am buying a new self at 3 AM
on a smartphone manufactured by a ghost.
Add to cart. Add to heart.
The aisle stretches into an infinite loop—
canned laughter, organic anxiety,
synthetic sunlight. “You deserve this,”
the screen whispers, “You are unique,
just like everyone else.” Swipe left.
Swipe right. I am wearing
the brand-name skin,
but the barcode won’t scan at the kiosk.
The simulation is breaking.
Liz: ( Inspired By Andy Warhol’s Silk Screen Paintings, 1963-65)
Portraits with vibrant blocks of colour,
Often with heavy eye makeup and bold
Lips, represent the public persona
Of Elizabeth Taylor. O they cloak
Her inner thoughts and feelings, so she is
Merely an everyday commodity;
Colloquially referenced as Liz,
Despite the glamour and the glossy dreams!
[…] a commodified narrative is fetishised in its current shape, denied evolution and effect, and used to sell you stuff. And it blocks you too, putting you to something else’s work: promoting their brand instead of growing into you life’s task.
-Really, can there be a ‘gift economy’ in a commodified mythscape?
Insurance is an industry, traditionally, that draws on the majority of the community to respond to the needs of an unfortunate minority. In the villages we lived in centuries ago, families, religious groups, and neighbors helped look after each other when fire, accident, or illness struck. In the market economy, we outsource this care to insurance companies, which keep a portion of the money for themselves and call it profit.
As insurance companies learn more about us, they’ll be able to pinpoint those who appear to be the riskiest customers and then either drive their rates to the stratosphere or, where legal, deny them coverage. This is a far cry from insurance’s original purpose, which is to help society balance its risk. In a targeted world, we no longer pay the average. Instead, we’re saddled with anticipated costs.
Cathy O'Neil (Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, pages 170-171)
Is it a crime to turn the inside of another’s body and head, their every motivation, every creative thought, into a product for someone else’s career path?
Is to have your life become the ownership of another’s whim an illegal act?
Is this process of managing possession the legalisation of slavery?
is to have your every thought and every appreciation
commodified to service another’s gain
a wrongly developed occupation?
(commodification is the process of transforming inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people, or animals) into commodities, or objects for sale)
“Anyone who raises a question about the legitimacy of IVF and surrogacy is vulnerable to accusations of being meanspirited or even of denying the humanity of the children born through these methods. My answer to such criticism has always been that I do not deny the humanity of such children but, ironically, the procedure itself encourages society to think of children as commodities. In the eyes of the law, they necessarily become analogous to pieces of property, to things, as the law must intervene in the many complicated situations that arise as a result of divorcing reproduction from its traditional context. When the surrogate child has Down syndrome, for example, who has parental responsibility? Those who donated egg and sperm, or the woman bearing the child in her womb? If the people paying for the process want the child aborted, do they have the right to demand the surrogate does as they desire?”
— Carl R. Trueman: “When No-Fault Divorce Turns Children into Commodities”
It’s 2025, baby. Why read(yuck) Brave New World, that’s going to take like One hundred million hours or something, when i can read the summary on Blinkest in the time it takes me to take a shit(I’m actually going to scroll TikTok the entire time)
looking for cross-continental videos is genuinely so frustrating and i’m sure its a sentiment many people share. like Beyond the fact that all these ideas are translated into different titles or cultural meanings, fucking. i’m sure many of east asian descent have issues with the Commodification of their cultures. the like. death when someone Cares about your culture so much it suffocates the identity is genuinely. it’s more than heartbreaking.
i’m not east asian, but people still see like my mom’s home as some foreign oasis that’s simultaneously poorer than dirt. instead of the videos about my culture or fuck Someone Else’s, I get some floridian tourist vlogging their stay, gawking at all the Exotic food and man. what the hell
in the digital age, we should be getting access to as many voices as possible but they’re all lost in the fucking sea, buried in everyone else’s shit.
No cus actually the TikTok commodification and capitalizing of pagan cultures is disgusting, like I’m glad people are having fun watching anime and reading tarot and decorating their room with crystals and signs that say “witch bitch” but like they are a bunch of thieves.
Welcome to commodification of, well, everything. Today, it’s not enough for you to do something, that something needs to be a moral statement, and more importantly; it needs to be a lifestyle companies can use to sell you products so you can feel good about yourself for supposedly ‘doing something better than other people who eat processed bread, which is crap’.
Yes, some people make bread, cause they like it, others do it to preserve their culture (like if you know anything about French cuisine, they take preserving it extremely seriously, especially their baked goods), but a lot of the moralizing happening on the internet is just pointless dick measuring over who’s better.
I can go on about how this merging of artisanal bread making with the tradwife culture is just another way to glorify wealth, and demonize poverty but that’s another can of worms I’d rather not get into.
Critique of Destination-Volunteering
Destination-volunteering often preserves expat comfort, accelerates gentrification, and avoids complex local needs. This is my critique of destination-volunteer culture, centred around Nosara as a main example.
When there is a high rate of expats that come to live and volunteer here, I think we have to consider what benefit this actually has to the…
The aesthetics and commodification of destination volunteering
I have these two friends that I know that are quite similar because they really love animals. One friend got a dog a few years ago and unfortunately her dog had some health problems and it was very hard for her. I reached out to her during this time and we both cried about it, and I was very, very moved by how much she loved this animal and what a deep connection she had. the thing about her is…
On the subject of monetising hobbies, hustle culture really feeds into the commodification of friendships.
I meet someone at a cooking class, we bond over a metal band and 19th c. literature, and we become friends. Even when we don’t share in a particular hobby, both of us are happy to listen to the other talk about it.
Then they publish a self-help book, or start selling dog treats or essential oils for extra income. Our dynamic changes from friends on equal terms to include seller and potential consumer.
Our nonmonetised hobbies, shared or otherwise, the very things that brought us together, are affected, too. Common interests were enough when we were bonding over a free activity, but now there’s a price attached, the expectation is that a good friend, someone who cares, will pay it.
Is it enough to buy the ebook instead of the paperback? Do I get a pass on buying dog treats if I don’t have a dog? If I have no money but I tell five or ten or thirty people about their essential oil range, am I being supportive? If I buy a similar product elsewhere, even if I’d been doing so for years before we even met, am I actively sabotaging their livelihood?
Am I a good enough friend? Am I a good enough consumer?
One thing I have learned from Booktok, Booktube, etc. is reading more books than I own is a good thing.
I just watched a girl DNF the first book of two series. Guess what? She owns the entire series. The special editions of the series!
That’s upwards of 150 bucks spent on a series she probably will not finish and can’t get a refund because she bought them, god knows how long ago. The real kicker is she owns 300 plus books that haven’t been read and buying more. That’s thousands of dollars spent, and you don’t even know if you’re going to like half of them or if they’re even worth owning.
I saw another girl giving away all of her books because she’s in a “permanent slump,” and I felt bad for her, then I watched her go from room to room packing up at least a thousand books a large chunk of them looking unread. Of course you feel this way, you’ve stopped reading for fun and have turned it into trophy collecting. You’re surrounded by thousands of books that you bought because the covers were pretty or they have painted spines or just because you heard they were good (not that you might actually like it).
All these book content people are posting their home libraries, and they’re really grave yards of potential.
Unearned trophies.
Then there’s another insidious layer. They’re buying the physical books they’ve read on digital justbto have visible proof they read it.
This is the commodification of reading.
I say this as a person who was buying books just for them to go unread while reading other books only to get around to a those long ago purchased books and not finish them or wish I never owned them or just no longer interested in them staring in my face.
The craziest part is that these are people who read hundreds of books a year, so how are the tbrs that long?
We often use art to escape the world, but the most powerful art holds a mirror to it, forcing us to confront the uncomfortable truths we’d rather ignore. Armando Heredia’s piercing poetry collection, The System Says, does exactly that. Through three distinct but thematically linked poems—”Dirty Filthy Heart,” “How Upper Echelon of You,” and “What they want”—Heredia conducts a searing critique of…
The System Says: A Poetic Mirror to Our Hypocrisy and Commodification
The Price of Identity
Dave White’s Sell Yourself and Kiana Jimenez’s Self-Worth reveal a stark meditation on value, vulnerability, and commodification. Fragmented human parts paired with currency echo the poem’s haunting verses of selling oneself piece by piece. Together, they confront the devastating cost of undervaluing identity, leaving us questioning what our worth truly is.
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