CITARELLA'S PASSIVE-MAGA
Retvrn to vintage 2007-era tech CEO fawn response. Chris Smalls vs Joshua Citarella in their own words
1. ‘Thank you for reading my wikipedia bio.’
The other night I took some friends and students to a panel with the worker’s hero Chris Smalls.1 He spent ages 25 to 30 at Bezos’ warehouses, then unionized them from scratch, autonomous from the American political rackets. He’s endorsed a national climate emergency declaration and is launching a labor party.2
The evening, put on by the Russian Cosmism Circle, was titled Post-Doomerism, and Smalls was the headline guest.
His speaking time was slim, worked in between long presentations from the hosts, Joshua Citarella3 and Amana Fontanella, and sequestered for an offstage phone call with Code Pink.
The hosts had an intervention to make against the left. The intervention was delivered in spells of hippie-bashing. I could use terms like ecomodernism, growthism, state capitalism, pronatalism of the childless, Modern Monetary Theory, transhumanism, accelerationism, social democracy, even consumerism itself, to give you an image of what was on sale.
All this had been prepared especially for the night, with slideshows, words like ‘cringe’ and ‘based,’ and with memes dating to the first Trump term. The night’s agenda was space messianism, Fully Automated Luxury Space Hetero Communism (FALSHC?), a coalition with the ‘realignment right,’ and additionally the deliverance of the zoomer womb from self-ecotage.4 The first step, fellow kids, was to stop worrying and trust Sam Altman, author of one of the great bait-and-switches of our time.
hyper cruel sloptimism
-angelicism01
All the e-slang, to me outdated, conveyed this: that the force which they pretend to have obviated with their eleventh hour googling, i.e. ‘doom,’ has stuck them in time. This is why, for me, it feels strange to bother throwing out their ‘good news.’ Like it would to break an antique soviet toy.
Smalls has it different. He has, day in and out, lived within the externalities of growth, inside the workshops of these tech-assisted comforts. These places that injure people, drive them to suicide. And where some even die on the clock.5 So it was without mercy that he dismissed, one after another, the panel’s interventions.
I left the place wondering how all this had come together, and whether Citarella,6 king of infiltrators, had imagined such a hijacking.
It was also hard to have anticipated the extent of the hosts’ hatred of ecologists, their many plays at reconciling the audience to elite politics as it stood that day, the credulity given to the tech barons who have now merged with the Trump formation. Citarella genuinely sounded like Nick Land, enamored with his equivalent to ‘divine providence.’ That night, he was more of an economic nationalist than Peter Thiel, more of a corporatist in the style of Mussolini and of a national Keyenesian than a Marxist, literally more faithful in the ‘realignment right’ than Nick Fuentes, and more perturbed by the prospect of zoomer radicalism than by the destruction of Earth’s habitability. Even the Pentagon, where they wrote up the ‘Zbellion war games’7 has greater respect for the youth and for Earth Systems.
2. ‘Having more stuff makes you happier.’
An abridged transcript of the night.
The Russian Cosmism Circle, says Fontanella, hopes to promote optimism through study of the Russian Cosmists, who ‘believed that Marx did not go far enough.’ Communism was too modest a horizon, and, since there was no longer an afterlife, divine salvation had to be concretized. The Russian Cosmists sought the abolition of death and dreamed of becoming an intergalactic species.
Smalls has no comment on this. He notes that he grew up in New York, that it’s an unusually cold night, that we don’t have four seasons here anymore, and it doesn’t snow like it used to. Los Angeles was only then seeing the end of the two most destructive fires in its history.
The biggest problem with climate change is that the labor camps in Siberia that I throw all the environmentalists in are just… they're going to be warm now. They're not going to be cold enough. So that's, that's my primary worry about it. I'm 50% joking about that.
-Joshua Citarella.
Citarella takes over to say that he distrusts anyone ‘radicalized by climate change.’ These people, he believes, are dishonestly projecting their personal issues onto their politics. He worries, most of all, that ‘politicized’ young women ‘are having their wombs removed’ instead of bearing children. He’s read Mark Fisher, as well as the Accelerationist Manifesto. The opportunities of the twenty-first century lie in technology, which have now enabled cybernetic central planning. In fact, the amazing news is that we already live in a planned economy, thanks to large, integrated supply-chain platforms like Amazon. Any discomfort about this is dismissed as primitivism.
It’s now time for Fontanella to beat up on the degrowth theorists. She begins with Kohei Saito, though someone cheers him in the crowd. She says that these theorists have fabricated, retconned, in Marx, a concern for ecology.
Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias. Marx, Capital, vol. 3
Citarella interjects to add Cornelius Castoriadis8 to the pile. ‘They are disingenuous about their Marxism…they try to cloak this thing…they just don’t think that having more stuff makes you happier.’ So, yes, an honest Marxism requires we fetishize commodities. Citarella then announces his wish for his loved ones to ‘live as long as possible, and to enjoy as much time with them as possible.’9
Smalls is reclining, and seems to be looking at a corner in the ceiling from behind his dark glasses.
Fontanella reads skeptically from a Jacobin degrowth article, which argues for an end to overconsumption, to the imperial mode of living.10 She turns to Smalls to see if this resonates with him.
‘I worked at Amazon for five years,’ says Smalls, ‘and opened up three warehouses in the tristate area. New Jersey, Connecticut, and Staten Island, New York. And I never shopped there. I started working there at 25 years old, I’m 36 now, and I don’t understand what the fuck….it’s like a drug. It really is. It’s sad to say, but it really is like being hooked on a drug that people need to wean themselves off of. Even my own family…. I worked there, never understood the fascination of the shit that we are buying on Amazon… So Amazon has only been around for 30 years, and in that time it has changed society, and we allowed it. It closed down our main streets, it closed down our local bookstores, our local mom and pop stores… I believe that we do need to stop buying shit on Amazon. That’s a start.’
Fontanella gets stuttery. ‘Can I ask you a question Chris, so like, there’s a lot of people who, you know, are working several jobs, are like struggling, children, you know, and don’t have the time, like it’s appealing to just be able to like save that money.’
He smiles. ‘You’re talking to somebody with four kids that worked at Amazon, for sixty hours a week, and had a second job at MetLife stadium, working that giant stadium for five years. I’m saying I’m just like everybody else. I’m struggling, living check to check. And I still didn’t buy on Amazon… I used to go to the mall, I used to love interacting with people at the cash register and whatever… I grew up in a town where I could knock on my neighbor’s door and borrow sugar. A village raises a child, right? So the crossing guard looked out for us. The neighbor looked out for us. We could walk out the street at eight years old and get home fine. Nowadays, you can’t knock on your neighbor’s door without them coming out with an attitude, like, defensive, because of Amazon. It isolates people, and that’s the goal of capitalism, to divide people.’
Fontanella, for the third time, invites Smalls to join the growthist pile-on, asking whether consumption must really be reduced to mitigate warming.
‘It’s not gonna be the defining resolution for it. But it’s a start. In less than a decade, yall wasn’t even shopping on Amazon. Yall wasn’t. I know that for a fact…I don’t agree with technology because what if the wifi goes the fuck out? What the fuck we gonna do? We gonna have to go back to primitive things, growing, gardening, indigenous things.’
‘Do you really think we’re gonna have to do that?’
‘Of course! If we don’t grow some gardens now and an EMP goes through New York City, what the fuck are we gonna do?’
Smalls says the threat of nuclear war used to be taken dead seriously, and now we live as though it doesn’t exist, though the risk is still there. A comedian named Geo Yankey, also on the panel, joins in with Smalls in defense of community gardens.
‘The knee-jerk reaction of the left is localism,’ complains Citarella, adding that ‘the IWW is fucking based and hippies are fucking cringe.’ He rails against libertarian farmstead autarky. ‘We have a claim to each other’s labor.’
An unexamined statement, in this setting, from Citarella of the laptop class. The present already grants him a claim to the Amazon worker’s labor, for which the laborer will be compensated fairly, in Citarella-labor (or Citarella-scrip?): the planting of Mark Fisher memes. Interviews with personalities from 6 years ago and with teenagers. The labor of looksmaxxing his muscles. Out of the question to waste a mind like Citarella’s on the Amazon fullfillment lines.
He and Fontanella turn to the Green New Deal. They comment disapprovingly on Greta Thunberg’s criticisms of the GND.
Smalls interrupts. ‘Shoutout to Greta. I was blessed to meet her personally. She stands on business, she’s someone who sat outside that parliament every week.’
‘For me,’ he continues, ‘everything from the government you can take with a grain of salt. We print money…The two party system doesn’t care what the fuck you ask for. Whether it’s Green New Deal, medicare for all, student debt? You ain’t getting none of that shit. Anything on the left that you expect to get passed through a bipartisan decision, good luck. We lost the house, the senate and the presidency. That means, you can forget about this Green New Deal.” He announces his project, ‘Labor party, 2028.’
Before taking a call with Code Pink, he leaves the audience with this message:
‘Going up against Amazon, trillion dollar company. People wanna know, how the hell did we defeat a trillion dollar company. It wasn’t money… No union support, no politicians none of that. It was just the power of the people. So when we think about technology, Amazon surveils us, they have five thousand cameras in that building, they use the NYPD, they used every surveillance thing they can think of.’
‘They followed me home, they hired private investigators, they probably tapped my phone, they definitely watched my social media…. So let me tell y’all. It wasn’t money or technology that helped us win that victory. It was literally the power of people, the people to the left and the people to the right of you. That was the only way to get it done. We had to educate ourselves, for eleven months, three hundred days, I spent at the bus stop across the street from the warehouse, talking to people, every single day. It’s the power of us. Community like we were saying. We build a community and a culture that Amazon cannot calculate. They don’t know shit about love or solidarity. They only calculate their profit, how much money they make, and how many people they fire.’
With Smalls away for his call with Code Pink, Fontanella tries to get a bit wonky about energy. ‘The way we produce energy is straight out of the stone age.’ For example, gas stoves. Instead of going into ‘small scale hippie globalism,’ we must innovate out of the fossil fuel era. Thankfully, she says, ‘Silicon Valley are investing in developing fusion energy.’
She reads off a list of the largest US government spending programs. ‘Covid is a really good reminder that despite having a plutocrat landlord billionaire president, during COVID like he stepped in and made sure everyone had stimmie checks, paused student loan payments and foreclosures, and made sure that everyone had a vaccine. The government funded an accelerated vaccine production program called Operation Warp Speed. So I think that we should, in a very grim and depressing situation that we find ourselves in, we should take some comfort in the fact that we have faced a global crisis, and we did see how our government reacted…’
She points in her slideshow to the money printer go brr meme. ‘As this meme rightly captured,’ says Fontanella, ‘there’s a fucking money printer and it can just go brrr.’
This approach is called Modern Monetary Theory lol.
Now she flips to an image of Sam Altman. ‘This guy is the CEO of OpenAI and he gave us ChatGPT, blah blah blah. As I’m sure most of you are aware, AI requires huge amounts of energy. Most environmentalists and like, most people are like, oh no, this is really bad. Cause it’s gonna like accelerate climate change. Of course this is true. I’m as concerned as everyone else.’
‘However,’ she continues, ‘it’s also true that because it’s like, causing consumption of energy with this voracious appetite among Silicon Valley, they’re having to, like, innovate and find new sources of energy, like rapidly. And one of the areas that they’re most excited about and investing a huge amount of money in is actually fusion energy.’
She contimues. ‘So, this guy, Sam Altman, he was at Davos. So OpenAI wants to buy vast quantities of nuclear fusion energy. He’s personally invested $375 million in what he hopes will be the first viable fusion reactor which is run by a private company called Helion… He’s not the only one betting on this, Bill Gates who’s a business partner of Sam Altman in OpenAI also thinks that nuclear fission and fusion will help solve the climate crisis.’
Ok. I’m sorry, godspeed, but who cares what they think. There are many better-funded and further-advanced fusion installations all around the world. The American state has been trying to reach fusion for the better part of a century. It’s spent $3.5b on an experimental fusion facility and $380 million a year on its operation, with another billion to top it off last year. If the world is on the verge of replacing its power generation and all combustion engines with tens of thousands of of plasma reactors, bringing us from a 10°C warming equilibrium11 to, say, 5°C, the technology may come from anywhere. So why the focus on Sam Altman?
Major American cities now teem with educated young people whose political avowals coincide perfectly with, are wholly redundant to, existing billionaire-regime priorities, like massive vaccine investments and energy-for-AI. Not just priorities, sometimes they turn out to be consummate scams. I noticed a version of this already, anticipating the SBF cancellation.
Fontanella asks the comedian if he trusts the government to finance a transition to nuclear fusion. The comedian says no.
Citarella responds, ‘The good news is that we don’t need to trust the government. The superpower competition within the twenty-first century, Chinese state capitalism, is extremely productive. They have gargantuan growth rates, that outpace the rest of the world. They have a different innovation ecosystem compared to the United States… We are no longer the world hegemon… and we are slowly learning that the Chinese model is vastly more productive than the American one. The way that China, the Nordics and Singapore…. fund innovations, they also own a piece of the company. Like they own stock in the company, so as those profits accumulate, they go back to the government…’
He goes on with more good news. ‘The good news is that competition with China is forcing America to get in order. What is most surprising about this is that this is being led by what is called the realignment right. These are people with deep commitments to capitalism that are lifelong conservatives… these are not the people that you would expect to be in a coalition with, but they are so attached to making a functional model of capitalism, that they’re actually starting to reel back [faulty U.S. innovation models]. So when we talk about this stuff, we’ve gotta get over a lot of bad reflexes that you learn from being on the left…’
Citarella appeals for the crowd to place some unqualified level of trust in American venture capitalists as they promise to develop nuclear fusion, in the hope that some undefined portion of the surplus created by increased productivity will, through undefined means, be ‘shared with the workers.’ Lol. He’s been speaking with a right-wing economist who lobbies the government to onshore U.S. jobs.
He says that there is now a unique opportunity to throw billionaire CEOs in jail, but that it isn’t even worth trying to tax them, because all their money is offshore. He professes a ‘high degree of faith in just regular capitalist competition to put the American economy back in order.’ Lol. He’s optimistic that, once Google and Peter Thiel launch their healthcare startups, this will bring down the cost of healthcare in America. A new coalition, he says, though uncomfortable, will have to be made (by ‘the left’) with American venture capital. Lol. This will somehow redistribute the surplus more fairly. Yes, more fairly, perhaps a pareto-efficient sliver for the worker and more superprofits for the transhumanist split-off. Retvrn to vintage 2007-era tech CEO fawn response.
This approach is not Honest Marxism, it’s called corporatism lol.
The panel breaks for questions.
3. Whitepill of the will, blackpill of the intellect.
Honestly, what was the point of this event? America has rejected and reviled environmentalists since the Carter years. The good news is we’ve got the FBI on the case too.12 Nobody is stopping this. Pure consumerism is already the only social contract operative in this country since the Nixon years. No degrowthist is stopping that, only the Trump tariffs might. The other good news is that the tech lords already have unfettered resources, both human and pecuniary, to seek out their transhumanist dreams. Nobody is stopping them. In more good news, the money printer has been going brrr since the Vietnam War. Nobody is stopping it. When the money printer goes brrr, all the money it prints ends up with the rich. That is why nobody will put an end to that either.
But for Citarella and Fontanella, the problem worth organizing a panel over is that there remain voices in what they conceive of as ‘the left’ that can still be heard wishing to stop all this, and who don’t take Davos or the Guardian for badges of credibility.
The night came through on its promise of optimism, on account of the beers I drank before the panel, and of Chris Smalls’ optimism of the will, so consistent it built a union of thousands out of a bus stop, and so strong it survived the pessimism of his intellect, its realist outlook on the nightmare trajectory of Earth.
Contrast this with Citarella’s extreme optimism of the intellect, an accelerationism that can hardly wait to reach the techno-redemption that the coming century guarantees, with a Spielbergian impossibility of anything other than a happy ending ex machina, and its corollary pessimism of the will, which limits itself to the act of meme-planting and trusting the plan.
We end up back in the paradox of do-nothingism, the way the passivity suggested by the post-doomer program, by every variety of accelerationism, clashes with ‘doing nothing’ as synonymous with degrowth.13
We will only know that our condition is terminal when we see it, when it’s too late. Until then, we’re expected to sit and listen to a podcaster as he delivers the good news, the good news that Google, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Sam Altman and the ‘realignment right’ have the American economy, hell, the Earth, taken care of.
The good news is that whether we lay our faith with them or not makes little difference. Our world and our lives are now theirs to denature beyond restoration. In spirit they take after space debris, dead and unburied halfway to Mars.
His name was on the winning side of angelicism01’s third Retard List in 2022.
Citarella worries that zoomer women have become so anxious about global warming that they’re reportedly deciding to sterilize themselves. I couldn’t find the article he projected on his slideshow, only reports of Indian women made migrant workers by climate devastation who get hysterectomies in order to and labor in the sugarcane fields, uninterrupted by menstruation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amazon_fatalities
Citarella is on the losing side of angelicism01’s first Retard List.
https://theintercept.com/2020/06/05/pentagon-war-game-gen-z/
“We ought to want a society in which economic values have ceased to be central (or unique), in which the economy is put back in its place as a mere means for human life and not as its ultimate end, in which one therefore renounces this mad race toward ever increasing consumption. That is necessary not only in order to avoid the definitive destruction of the terrestrial environment but also and especially in order to escape from the psychical and moral poverty of contemporary human beings. It would therefore be necessary, henceforth, for human beings (I am speaking now of the rich countries) to accept a decent but frugal standard of living and to give up the idea that the central objective of their life is that their level of consumption increase 2 or 3 percent per year. For them to accept that, it would be necessary that something else give meaning to their lives. One knows, I know, what this other thing might be—but obviously that does not mean anything if the great majority of people do not accept it and do not do what must be done for it to be achieved. This other thing is the development of human beings instead of the development of gadgets. That would require another organization of work, which ought to cease to be a drudgery in order to become a field for the deployment of human capacities. It would also require other political systems, a genuine democracy that includes the participation of all in the making of decisions, another organization of paideia in order to raise citizens capable of governing and of being governed, as Aristotle so admirably said—and so on.” Castoriadis.
“We see a world in which no one ever has to say, ‘If only I’d known sooner.’ A world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon.”-Elizabeth Holmes.
https://www.versobooks.com/products/916-the-imperial-mode-of-living
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889#:~:text=Equilibrium%20global%20warming%20for%20today's,most%20equilibrium%20warming%20from%20occurring.
https://www.the-trouble.com/content/2019/3/9/silenced-spring
Incredible political imagination on that citarella lol
Josh’s main move in his work online is, seemingly, to look at something politically interesting and then to steer all the way through it without having a single emotional reaction. It makes some sense that his political project would identify the people having too many feelings as the problem.