Why Silicon Valley wants to privatize your genealogy
We all belong. Whether we know it or not.
Yet the technocrats of the capitalist world tell us we are interchangeable, identical consumers. This is a lie. We are all contingent; we are all someone's child. We are born in a specific place at a specific time. Even before we are named, we are rooted. Each and every one of us is bound up in a history. We are the result of tribes, clans, villages; every one of us is the cumulative result of thousands upon thousands of years of migrations, wars, alliances,
We are rooted creatures. In the old days, we knew this: we kept our ancestries in Bibles, in Torahs, and in oral tradition. To know our past meant to know ourselves.
Nowadays, modernity asks us to believe a different story. Under the regime of late capitalism, identity is determined not by your community, but by your choice of brands. A community, a political cause, a church, a nation, a tribe, a family: these are all threats to the supremacy of capital. They are its rivals.
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