zenosanalytic reblogged
tumblr: we are a capitalist running dog and
dennys: your memes must be seized and redistributed to the people? on it.
tumblr: the rupture which denny's took care to interject in the middle of tumblr's meme should be seen for what it is - an elegant example of Marx's dialectic - but also for what it shows us in plain sight-- accidental commentary on the relationship between the working class and the bourgeoisie. Tumblr expended labor to produce something that satisfies a use-value: a meme using humor, irony, and a clever reversal to call into question the commodification of online culture by brands trying to put a quirkier appearance to increasingly unpopular business practices inherent in capitalism; in denny's most immediate case, ongoing racial discrimination lawsuits. The rupture in the chat marks the point where Denny's alienated the finished product (the meme) from the workers who made it (tumblr), and used that interruption to separate the political content the workers wanted the meme to relay (the racism and exploitation inherent in a capitalist enterprise like denny's), from the quirky apperance that Dennys depends on to increase the number of positive impressions for its brand (the language of the meme sounds archaic to capitalist ears, which a stunted capitalist outlook would deem 'novel' and memeworthy). After stealing the product and processing it so as to resell it as its brand, Denny's spat back at tumblr what it spits at its customers: a bland reproduction bereft of the flavor and humanity of the original, be it humor or food. Marx's General Formula for Capital can be seen in how memes (and culture as such) relate to the laborers who make it as much as it "applies" for the cook or the waitress, and especially the third world labor further down the supply chain, so it should surprise few of us that Denny's PR team would inadvertently reaffirm its bourgeois character in an attempt to negate attempts to characterize it as bourgeois by commodifying the product of someone's labor (the crux of the critique levied at denny's, and capitalism writ large); a different, less technical analysis would be that since, like fish, we are so submerged in capitalist ideology that we would sooner believe ourselves to be like fish for capital, itself as natural as the sea, than to venture beyond what we've been told are our natural limits. but that is still nothing novel. what's a surprise even to me is the dogged persistence of the fundamental law of dialectics - the unity of opposites - to assert itself even in Denny's, a quirky milennial brand occluding hyperexploitative business practices online; in reality, a racist greasemonger stealing from its employees and an audience it tries to convince it's one of them by stealing from them.