everything i am is covered in blood

Everything has converged so that you can say ‘there is no ethical consumption under capitalism’ as a joke in a conversation among friends, because most of us heard phrase a million times over by now, like yeah we know we know we get it.

And i wondered where that phrase comes from, and it’s so fucked.

Not fucked, like, the origin of ‘there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism’ is some clever branding slogan from Nike or whatever. Not like someone said it after the Triangle Waistcoat Factory Fire. i mean maybe they did, but i’m pretty sure it didn’t.

But okay, i wondered where it came from, so i Googled it. First result is:

“The origin of the phrase 'there is no ethical consumption under capitalism' stems from a meme-led backlash on Twitter and Tumblr against a 2014 Elle UK fashion campaign.” from some Quora-knockoff website i never heard of that’s creatively called Parlia. Which of course cannot be fucking true at all. C’mon man.

Then there’s some simple explainer articles on sites about the underlying concept behind the sentiment. And then there’s this 3-minute TikTok video that i almost didn’t watch all the way through because my brain is fried from all this shit and i can spend 20 minutes scrolling through Instagram Reels on my phone but i can’t handle 3 minutes of sustained thought right now.

Anyway. Guess what? it’s true. i mean, sure, the sentiment has been around as long as capital ground someone down to dust. But the phrase really took off a decade ago, after people found out the $45 shirts in this big ‘This is What a Feminist Looks Like’ fashion t-shirt campaign were made in a Mauritian sweatshop factory. And while that factory actually wasn’t as bad as some others out there, you know. Still not a great look. Then Twitter and Tumblr meme’d the hell out of it, and here we are.

Here we are. And man, what a fucking place ‘here’ is right now.

Every publication that never hired me as a staff writer is dying or dead, and for the rest it’s just a matter of time and CEO whim. Most every remaining publication is, at best, Grade A Okay, while everything else online is sinister or untrustworthy or shitty, or sinister untrustworthy shit.

So we all keep on spiraling, and one of the ways that manifests itself for me is thinking about how every single fucking thing in our lives is just blood.

The obnoxiously loud mechanical keyboard i’m using to type this is made of plastic. The Macbook, the external display monitor, the data centers that made it possible for me to send this to you—you get it. There is no ethical consumption etc etc etc

Something is almost always killed or poisoned or abused in order to do almost anything else. Every single day. until the whole thing finally gets around to us. i’m no ‘It used to be so much simpler and purer’ person because "it" has never been either of those dumb concepts. But obviously there were times when nearly every action or event wasn't predicated by a violent harvest. There are places out there that weren’t built on bones.

(((EC)))