29/8/25

“I am nothing, no one, nobody, no more.”

– Zack de la Rocha, 1999

As our sense of self becomes endless streams of data, we become non-discrete. Traditional notions and structures by which we define ourselves become liquidised as capital streamlines them for marketing purposes – For better or for worse, a ceaseless sandpaper ever smoothing over rough edges. As we have been pushed into every box, crushed to a pulp, Bruce Lee told us: “Be like water”. 

Passive non-self aids the mechanical working of a non-human system, greases its cogs, allows for more efficient marketing twinned nihilistic consumption and defeated apathy. A sense of self that is defined by nothing, or defined out of existence, allows the neoliberal subject to lay down more peacefully. Responsibility is dissolved into the system.

Clawing for some sense of self is not the solution, however. In the grief left by a lack of significance, the real destruction of imaginary notions, lies fascism. The solution comes not in creating a false self and staking it on impermanent structures. The solution comes from identifying oneself in processes. Where market forces reduce the scope of conversation, narrow optics, rob the world of significance, anti-capitalism must exist outside prescribed scopes. 

We live in the wake of capitalism. Our beings are necessarily structured by it. We can only attempt to identify with its post-capitalist forms.

A world of significance robbed us of insignificance.