Capitalism is…

…the weed with roots 6 feet deep, that looks so attractive on the surface, but eventually blocks out the sun, as well as the neighbours. The most wholesome apple pie you have ever tasted, with pharmaceutical ingredients. The sexiest person you have ever seen, naked, that turns out to be a hologram when you get too close. Poorly designed obsolescence. The spiritual shopping mall open late on Sundays. The thousands of dollars and thousands of hours of exhausting moderate pain you are expected to suffer before your insides can be fixed, or if you live in a poor country, the thousands of dollars you yearn after but will never have, and the worsening pain you will suffer because of it, until you die. The millions of air miles spent on observing rare flowers, which therefore become rarer. The illusion of YouTube greatness. The fact that you cannot remember the important things and cannot forget the trash. The way we, of whichever gender, find some kind of cool way of subverting the patriarchy, only to be commercialized to support the patriarchy. The fact that most people still perceive anarchism as about chaos and throwing bombs, though it has been over one hundred years since the 1890s. That the internet did not truly democratize publishing, despite appearances. The seemingly infinite ways we could get rich if only we learnt the right strategy (on YouTube) and learnt the right way of obfuscating the existence of suicidal sweatshops. The way that companies are trying really hard to audit their supply chains, so that they can begin to work out which parts of those chains are too immoral to be effectively spun on Netflix. The way you think she / he / they looked at you, when actually, your wallet / purse or those of your parents, are always the prime concern, whether consciously or not. The fact that things are pretty good, for most of the time, for enough of the people who are supposed to matter and the people who validate those people by wanting to matter in exactly the same way.