The Addiction Economy Seeks to Create The Perma-Tweenager: Modernizing The 'Theory of The Young-girl'
Fortnite. Digital Currency. Mommy's Credit Card. French/Italian Ultra-Left Publication Tiqqun. The Gamification of Money Contiguous With Hyper-inflation. We Are Being Whittled Into The Ideal Buyer.
The governing relationship with anything in the digital age is one of feverish addiction. As postulated in my prior entries to The Dispensary Chronicles, I believe this is the age wherein the addiction economy reigns. It is an economy that makes bastards of us all. It is an economy that can no longer run on the fuel of moderation, if it were ever comfortable running on temperance to begin with.
There is great tragedy here, for I believe in the benefits of cannabis just as much as I do digital technology. I am not a techno-optimist, but I do think we are damned to try and make hay with the infernal devices that we have constructed. Both of these are fodder for the worst aspects of our modern economy, market forces driving us into the arms of unhealthy habits by necessity. Products are bought in an unhealthy manner because the marketing encourages unhealthy conduct, let us not pretend that a salesman has our best interest in heart. If this precept is true in the dealership, why wouldn’t it be true on social media? Instagram is a car dealership of human bodies and there are no sticker prices, only hidden fees. Millions of followers makes you a verified seller, a top rated purveyor of para-social vibes. A product who often sells products as well.
Responsible usage almost always is equated with moderate usage. Moderate usage means the gaze of the customer being affixed to the product for only a certain amount of time. As many digital cowboys and entrepreneurs are quick to define, their semantic definition for the digital panopticon is the catchy term of “The Attention Economy.” But how does one keep the affixed gaze of the eternally staring eyes a la the billboard in The Great Gatsby? Well, that part is simple, they just have to get you hooked. They have to tamper with the motherboard we like to call your brain.
More. More and more. More and more and more importantly the feeling that nothing is enough. Is this not the poetic truth endemic in the perma-doom-scroll? The perma-tweenager is a person (digital subject) who is hypnotized into always craving the teat. The Freudian dimensions of oral fixation have been expanded for a non-cigarette age, where the image of Steve Guttenberg reaching for his pack of cigarettes upon first awakening in the film Diner has been replaced with the unhealthy habit of blasting your eyes with blue light before your first neuron is jumping.
For those who had moved beyond the teat, the ‘lack’ in the subject must be recreated by tailoring content in a manner that releases Cortisol. Your insecurities will be probed. You will compare yourself to others. You will wonder what your friends really think of you. You will wonder why you saw your friends hanging out and they did not invite you. Are these not the politics of the lunch-table?
Tech-jockeys seek to reintroduce that childish dependency, the vulnerable insecurities of youth we were once told we had the luxury of working beyond at some point. Such pimple clad and middle school notions of incessant worry about what others might think of you, the nigh insatiable need for comfort through media and its usefully haunting notion that you ‘do not belong.’ You are so very special by yourself. You could be the chosen one who hasn’t figured out how to use their powers yet.
This is no longer the narrative fodder of young adult media, this idea is sold to the 30-50 year old demographic just as much if not more than the 12-18 demographic. In the absence of peer-reviewed sources, I will gesture broadly towards the cultural dominance of Marvel Movies, and how both frigid liberals and cryptonazis will use Harry Potter books as their intellectual touchstone of understanding politics. The dumbing down is by design.
In the ideal world of the perma-tweenager, digital currency is the perfect symbol of worth for the ideally wanton spending of something that is your life blood. It is an uncontroversial opinion to suggest that there is the encroachment of digital currency, be it in the form of crypto , businesses using digital currency to gentrify and segregate purchases, and the ever present conspiracies continually being promulgated about The World Economic Forum and its dastardly goals. As the US dollar becomes more precious to you, as its worth becomes more and more inflated, gamification will be used as a stratagem to further bypass hesitation. Crypto-currency scams such as the one promulgated by Logan Paul are but one example, and the profit of irresponsibly managed digital money is a boon to aspirants who seek to siphon off more of the money we need to survive.
The reason scams seem ubiquitous now, is because they always have been. Scamming has never been easier, that is why it operates so unmitigated in our time. Snake oil is the order of the day, as the digital sphere has reintroduced the wild west. As our ancient lawmakers are unable to litigate the new frontier as it continuously adapts, chameleon schemes of wealth extraction pop up and traverse the dusty trails of the internet.
The image of the Fortnite fan grabbing mommy’s credit card is a self-evident proof of this concept. Even if the money is forced to be refunded there are 1000’s of transactions which are not. As such, an immense amount of profit can be generated from the economic participation of children, who have no sense of what currency represents, or the toil of trying to obtain more of it. In a Baudrillardian sense, how different is the Fortnite specific currency of ‘v-bucks’ from the near meaningless numbers on the screen of your bank’s online account management system? Just take this lecture from Yanis Varoufakis where he says himself, as a man who was head of The Greek Finance Ministry, that banks invent numbers out of thin air. The board game Monopoly comes to mind, and paper money certainly could already be portrayed in this fashion. At the very least cash has a presence in the physical world, even if its represented value becomes more and more illusory.
In Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl, an anarchist publication, we witness a postulation on how the superstructure of capitalism can warp us into better customers. It is extremely sexist, but functions as an interesting poetic explication of the atomized and alienated subject under the auspices of consumer society. A more fitting and modern adaptation is to use ‘perma-tweenager’ as a substitute for ‘young-girl.’ This updates the critiques and makes them far more applicable.
“The Young-Girl offers an unequivocal model of the metropolitan ethos: a refrigerated consciousness living in exile in a plasticized body.”
Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl page 47.
*EDITOR’S NOTE, I do not agree with the overly gendered and sexist conceptions of femininity that this publication traffics in. Although the book tries to play this off in the introduction, it is hackneyed and corny. Everyone is capable of being controlled, and the slavery to a consumer system in the manner the writers' believed was unique to girls is not unique to any gender. Some of the most feverish and vapid impulse purchasers I know are middle aged men who act like children.*
‘Plasticized’ is a pointed word usage. Not only is our body growingly more plastic due to micro-plastics, our lives dictated by credit cards which are financial plastic, our women pressured more and more to have tits that are plastic, an island off the coast of Texas that is plastic, face stretched and flayed open to tighten and render taut; to give the appearance of plastic. Plasticine egos that can be moulded by unseen hands into the delusional peaks of narcissistic mania, and the aching lows of cataclysmic depression, this change in attitudinal elevation contingent upon one thing; profit of course. If you would like to celebrate; buy something. If you would like to forget; buy something.
“The incompressible agitation of the Young-Girl, in the image of this society at its every point, is governed by the hidden demand to render effective a false and pathetic metaphysics, whose most immediate substance is the negation of the passage of time, and the obscuring of human finitude.”
Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl page 33.
When one considers their own mortality, you start to reach out and wonder about what you will be upon your death. What matter of life is it when we all recognize the semiotic power of the age-old idiom that noone on their deathbed has said that “they wished they worked more.” Yet by the day to day churn of our waking hours, one is present inside the office as if they will always be there. Currently I am interviewing for a position that has a probationary period for healthcare. Apparently if something happens to me in that window of time, it is acceptable to the company that I could be in debilitating medical debt for the rest of my life. Yet this isn’t the core of what I see to be the issue, it is that I am someone who is perceived as having to sell themselves as if they are some immortal vessel of the hustle. You can work weekends. You can work on the holidays. You want to advance in the company. You have no interests outside of generating more surplus value for the business. The only way I have advanced in any interview is by telling all these lies, like I am some aspirational demigod of capitalism-worship. In the addiction economy, not only are you being whittled into an addict as a customer, you are being whittled into having to portray yourself as someone who is addicted to work. Don’t have kids, don’t get sick, don’t look for better opportunities, just toil and pray that one day you will advance to the point of being the one committing the abuse.
The Young-Girl's desire to convert herself into a sign simply expresses her desire to belong at all costs to the society of non-belonging. It signifies a constant effort to remain in harmony with her visible being. The challenge explains the fanaticism.
Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl page 72
Fanatically, we pursue some sort of stability in a financialized and digitalized world sphere. One where we are ‘alienated’ from the tasks we do in a Marxist sense. A perpetual feeling of non-belonging is characteristic of Middle School, regardless of gender. Consider modern fanatics of belonging in our postmodern world; the religious fundamentalist, the sports hooligan overturning cars for a bunch of CTE damaged individuals who don’t know them, Twitch streamer simps who beg for recognition from their Waifu via e-prostitution adjacent monetary donations, etc.
It is through the Young-Girl that capitalism has managed to extend its hegemony to the totality of social life. She is the most obstinate pawn of market domination in a war whose objective remains the total control of daily life and "production" time.
It is precisely because she represents the total acculturation of the self, because she defines herself in terms fixed by extraneous judgment, that the Young-Girl constitutes the most advanced carrier of the ethos and the abstract behavioral norms of the Spectacle.
Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl page 107
At the tweenage liminal space, you could become anything. You remain malleable into all different kinds of consumer. “Why not be this way forever?” So say the zealots of profit. This idea, directly in contradiction to ‘human finitude’ as quoted above, makes the participant in ‘The Spectacle’ a ‘Spectacle’ unto themselves. As such, the behavioral norms as described above reflect the ability to transform into the next stage of membership and belonging that is sold to us.
As the consumer becomes more tweenage, why not the worker as well? Since we are all children now, why not get them to build the billion dollar game and have the only reward be Chuck E. Cheese tokens? There is a bill in Florida that is attempting to erode child labor laws, walking back some of the last vestiges of labor protection that exist in The United States. We have always bought toys built by slaves, yet at a certain stage the benefit of Capital obedience meant that the suffering was stratified. It was thought that only the brown hand of a slave child would be the only one suffering, a denizen of the unwashed masses that American life encourages us to deny the existence of. In March of 2023, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill to erode child labor laws. Roblox, as evidenced by the video above, has created its own digital Ouroboros of capitalist production, a simulacrum where the company store is inside the very product that is sold. If all of us can be rendered ageless, limitless, plastic, and busy with the denial of the flesh, then we can be more easily wrung out of our maximum profit generating potential.
The insignificance of the Young-Girl certainly reflects a situation of infantilization and oppression, yet she also has an imperialist and triumphant quality. This is because the Young-Girl fights for Empire, her master.
Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl page 108
I agree with Vladimir Lenin’s assertion that Imperialism is the highest stage of Capitalism. It is no wonder that often the cultural treats offered by Capital help launder the crimes necessary to possess the treat in the first place. The Perma-tweenager believes unequivocally that the stars and stripes worn on Captain America’s chest mean the concepts of freedom and liberty and hamburgers to everyone on earth equally. It doesn’t matter who procured the cocoa, what was done in its acquisition, what governments were propped up by imperial management to depress the value of the cocoa; what matters is that it has arrived in the butter variety for you to administer to your face and look younger with. It doesn’t matter the cravenness of the product so long as it has the crave-ability to help you shave off your frontal lobes, to make you live in your life in denial.
The Young-Girl has declared war on GERMS.
The Young-Girl has declared war on CHANCE.
The Young-Girl has declared war on PASSION.
The Young-Girl has declared war on TIME.
The Young-Girl has declared war on FAT.
The Young-Girl has declared war on OBSCURITY.
The Young-Girl has declared war on WORRY.
The Young-Girl has declared war on SILENCE.
The Young-Girl has declared war on POLITICS.
Preliminary Materials For A Theory Of The Young Girl page 108
The fronts of the war for the perma-tweenager are wherever the urge needs to be led. In one minute it could be in the comments of a brand who posts something intentionally inflammatory to run up engagement, a la the Wendy’s Twitter incarnation. They are goaded to shame others who do not speak when it is necessary to advance the narratives an amorphous Public Relations apparatus wishes to boost. In the aftermath of any attack on Israel performed by The Palestinians, the immediate calls for condemnation of Hamas as a pretext to further Israeli aggression were intentional. Any loss of life is a tragedy but as the demanded hyper-fixation on Israeli victims indicates, the feverish insistence was the declared ‘war on politics’ on behalf of the Perma-tweenager. It was made to become a Manichean Marvel movie where the good guy must defeat the bad guy, and this is the end of the investigation. After all, without Israel there would be no Soda Stream; how would we go on? A childish worldview assures that the customers will be frequent and the workers of the world are so busy shoving everything in their mouth that they do not pay attention to their unfreedom.It obscures the idea that what is being done to Palestinians is for many Americans our very own reality.
The Perma-tweenager answers this query with a feverish insistence that it is because of the west’s superior way of life and its rationale that elevates it above the rest of the world.
For the Young-Girl as for all other Blooms, the craving for entertainment is rooted in anguish.
Preliminary Materials For Theory Of The Young Girl page 122
Is there anyone more desperate to laugh than a depressed alcoholic who attends the comedy club every weekend? Amorphous, plastic, genderless, could ‘bloom’ into anything, impulsive, insecure, wanting to belong in something, wanting to stick out from something, in the end it is immaterial. You will still be condemned to your parents house, as is the fate of all people who are 12 years old. Welcome to an era of stagnation necessitated by the demands of capital for an infinite consumer appetite, a postmodern hell understood by all as a time of degeneration and acceleration in equal part. They are unwilling to name the culprit, the one who happily reveals themselves after each body they preside over in the aftermath of murder. This is the decrepit reach of capital, the demonic proclivities of gluttony and greed that are necessary tools of keeping the enterprise afloat. It is about fear. Its about what the supposed ‘adults’ in the supposed ‘room’ want us to do now.
Splendid insights into the Addiction Economy. I've always been astounded at the urge most Americans have to fall deeper in debt just to acquire more possessions or vacations or prestigious automobiles, although our disgusting health care chaos is a different story entirely with its debilitating costs.
Thank you so much for addressing Roblox and its exploitation of its own consumers! The only coverage of this (aside from one specific situation involving a streamer and a founder of the company- which on its own is deeply problematic and should have raised enormous red flags for parents) comes from the UK. There is virtually no attention paid to this HUGE platform millions of children under 10 spend hours playing games on unsupervised. I learned enough and saw my child in tears too many times due to unsupervised players deliberately destroying hours of work she'd done in multiple games (not for the developers but playing the game) solely for the purpose of being dicks. And honestly that's some of the least toxic garbage on Roblox. She's never expressed an interest in Fortnite which is good because I wouldn't have allowed her to play it. There is literally zero value to that game I can see. Less than Roblox by far and Roblox got shit canned by us over a year ago.