BuzzFeed & schizophrenia

Is there a cure to capitalist realism

During my research last year one of the participants sent me a link to a text by Jonah Peretti, CEO of Buzzfeed, who in the late 90s was an academic studying Marxist theory. The text itself is a teardown of consumer capitalism named "Capitalism & Schizophrenia" which points schizophrenic position of the consumer under late capitalism, that the flickering nature of our consumption is never able to stay focused on one object

"In Lacanian terms, consumer capitalism needs subjects who continually reenact the infantile drama of mirror stage identifications. These subjects must oscillate quickly between schizophrenic consciousness and idealized ego formations"

The text by and large is okay, it's a review and a synthesis of a number of different positions on mental health and consumption, looking critically at culture. What's interesting isn't exactly the text itself, but Peretti. The future tech CEO goes from his extremely cynical position on capital and mental health, outlining the schizophrenic affect of existing as a consumer to years later imbuing it. Buzzfeed's business model scans as though Peretti looked into Marxist cultural theory only to later capitalise on it, Buzzfeed's clickbait articles utilise the schizophrenic nature of mind.

Peretti brings in examples of slackers as an anticapitalist force, anti consumerist 90s youth who refused to identify with the products but still enjoyed the tv. Despite talking about slackers and protests against this identification with buying and engaging with capital in his conclusion in which he describes a world of marrying the egotistical with the identificatory.

"A successful contemporary politics has stakes in defining the rhythmic flow between schizophrenic and identificatory impulses. Hopefully, alternative rhythms can challenge, or at least syncopate, the accelerating rhythm of late capitalism."

Rather than try and engage this two states of mind in protest, as his lionised slacker would, he built a means to sell to those people at bang on the right time. Buzzfeed launched 2 years after facebook and followed its rise to success, allowing the schizoid mind to constantly refocus on this new constantly oscillating rhythm. Facebook's platform allowed users to move between looking at what your nan's doing, atrocities in the middle east, and Buzzfeed's What Is Your Inner Potato https://www.buzzfeed.com/kimberlywang/what-is-your-inner-potato?bffb=&utm_term=.wrwK94jVdg#.wxQYPQ0Jjr

One year on from Peretti's article, the film Cure by Kiyoshi Kurosawa was released. In the film the protagonist, Detective Takabe, is chasing a hypnotist who has become a vessel of death, able to convince people to act on their most awful fantasies. The hypnotist, Mamiya barely exists as a person, constantly not knowing where he is or who, just a husk that operates with an aim to kill. The scenes in which Mamiya convinces his victims to carry out crimes are long, drawn out and hypnotic.

In Kurosawa's film, the detective on the hunt studies mesmerism, and in chasing down the hypnotist, Takabe becomes able to use the powers available of mesmerism himself. In the film's climax we see Detective Takabe speak for a second to a waitress at a cafe. The film's protagonist is able to hypnotise quickly, saying only a few words to a person to make them act on their most evil desires. In his obsession with confronting Mamiya, Detective Takabe becomes a better vessel for this evil.

Peretti's knowledge and understanding of the schizoid mind comes from Deleuze, his intentions were clear however the appeal of a 120 million IPO and being on the front page of tech crunch got the better of him. Peretti went from being a student of the alienated mind of late capitalism, to a purveyor of it. Peretti recently has turned union buster, being overwhelmingly *unmarxist*, of the many stories, the following is the most egregious: In 2021, Jonah Peretti personally informed his workers at Huffington Post that they were fired on a call which used the password "spr!ngisH3r3", the password itself being a joke about spring cleaning at the expense of the soon to be let go writers. The Writer's Guild of America, of which HuffPost Union is an affiliate, stated the lost jobs amounted to a third of their local union membership.

Capitalist realism is forever in search of a host. Where Takabe in Cure becomes a vessel for evil, Peretti has become a vessel for capital. Takabe in the movie is the character with the greatest propensity for evil, being a police officer and respectable and so the parasite moves to him, Peretti has the greatest potential for capital, being in the west coast in the early 2000s at the boom time of social media with a full understanding of distraction as a consumerist tool. Peretti's study of Delueze made Buzzfeed the perfect clickbait website, deriving capital from every click, with texts generated by low paid journalists. However it's the union busting that is crushing, this is where the corruption that happens with proximity to capital shows. Jonah Peretti, is there really no alternative?