“It's hard…to keep one's illusions
about anything in Paris. Everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is
manufactured, even success”
[Balzac/Hunt, 1837/1971: Lost
Illusions
“There are some persons who may do
anything; they may behave totally irrationally, anything becomes them, and it
is who shall be first to justify their conduct; then, on the other hand, there
are those on whom the world is unaccountably severe, they must do everything
well, they are not allowed to fail nor to make mistakes, at their peril they do
anything foolish”
[Balzac/Hunt, 1837/1971: Lost
Illusions
“These are the prisms through
which I have come to know myself. I tried to undo their acts of refraction.”
Jia Tolentino
A
staff writer for the New Yorker since 2016, Jia Tolentino’s book is a
collection of sophisticated, semi-insightful, and well-written essays on subjects
including religion, drugs, feminism, the cult of the difficult woman, and the
Internet.
While not quite at Michel de Montaigne’s intellectual level, Tolentino mirrors his attempt to understand the world. She joins a growing number of young women writing about their experiences. Some have done a better job than others.[1]
What
sets this book apart from the rest is Tolentino’s attempt to place her own life
and the subject matter she writes about in a social, economic and political context.
It must be said that it has become unfashionable to do such a thing. While
certainly not a Marxist, and unless I am mistaken, Tolentino has not read Karl
Marx but does have a certain amount of intuitive insight. Also, she highlights
the relationship between base and superstructure on a very limited basis.
As
Marx beautifully wrote, “men (and women) inevitably enter into definite
relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production
appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of
production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the
economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and
political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general
process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness
of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that
determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the
property relations within the framework in which they have operated hitherto.
From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into
their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic
foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense
superstructure.”[2]
Perhaps
one of the most interesting essays concentrates on the huge number of scams
that are now part and parcel of capitalist society. The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams: presents
a damning indictment of capitalist society. While concentrating on a few obvious
scams, Tolentino ignores a large number of prominent scams, which could
probably fill another book. It would be interesting to see her thoughts on
economic cons like the Wirecard Scam, which shows the true nature of capitalism.
As Peter Schwarz writes, “the political establishment and the media are trying
to portray the Wirecard scandal either as the result of the machinations of a
brilliant impostor or the failure of state institutions, which can be corrected
by some administrative changes. Wirecard is not some terrible lapse but shows
the true face of capitalism in the 21st century. The accumulation of wealth and
assets has completely detached itself from the real economy for a long time.
The result is unprecedented social polarisation and the criminalisation of all
sectors of the capitalist economy.”[3]
Another
scam left out of the book is that of the so-called “romance scams”.[4]In
2020 I wrote a series of articles on one aspect of this nasty scam which has conned
many people out of millions. After two years of research, certain things can be
said to warn others. The first job of a scammer who proliferates the various
online dating sites is to get their prey off the original dating website and
onto sites such as Gmail and WhatsApp. Gmail is a favourite hunting ground for
your African scammers. It is a simple scam.
They
send you a picture of a gorgeous voluptuous woman usually lifted from a porn
site. Most men think, yum, I am in here. They don’t ask why this beautiful
25-year-old woman would have anything to do with a balding middle-aged man. Unperturbed
most men would want to see this hot girl on video chat. This is the first part
of the scam. To see this beautiful woman, you need to purchase an Amazon card
or other such items for them to get an internet connection for the video call. When
they finally agree to your demand to see them in the flesh, you do not see the
beautiful young thing in the flesh, but a rather clumsy video these amateurs
have somehow managed to upload onto Gmail. On one occasion, I could see the
real person behind the scam as his hand slipped, revealing his real identity.
Suffice to say; he was not a gorgeous blonde woman.
The
second great scam not touched upon in the book centres on the launch of the
Facebook dating app in 2019. This free dating app was a means by which Facebook
sought to promote the launch of its own digital currency Meta. Facebook is
riddled with fake profiles. In the first quarter of 2022, Facebook removed 1.6
billion fake accounts. This is down from 1.7 billion in the previous quarter.
In 2019, in one quarter alone 2.2 billion counterfeit bills were removed.
Their
dating app was full of fake profiles, and
these people were allowed to act with impunity by Meta. The few that were real
promoted the use of cryptocurrency. Many counterfeit profiles, although not all,
came from China, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore.
These
gorgeous-looking Asian women were not interested in dating. They used Facebook
to lure punters into a Cryptocurrency scam. They would take your money, saying
they will invest it in Cryptocurrency. The reality is that they take the money
and run along with their uncles. It was amazing that all these girls had
fantastic relatives willing to help others get rich. When yours truly
threatened to report these scammers, he was on the receiving end of some very
nasty death threats and one ugly video threatening DECAPITATION. Facebook
turned a blind eye to the whole scam. After all, a significant number of these
Asian scammers were promoting Facebook’s digital currency, Meta. We all know
how that turned out.
Some
of the strongest pieces in Trick Mirror deal with the commodification of the
self or, to be more precise, the commodification of sex. Jia Tolentino writes in the book
that “commerce has filtered into our identities and relationships.”
To
her credit, Tolentino is critical of sites like Tik Tok and Instagram, whose
main purpose seems to make money out of a large number of scantily clad men and
women shaking their bits. To be brutally honest, sites like Tik Tok are nothing
more than glorified soft pornography.
Pornography,
as Emanuele Saccarelli so perceptively writes, “is the commodification of
sexual relations; a more modern, sanitised, impersonal, and therefore more
peculiarly bourgeois form of prostitution. Instead of accepting the moralistic
posturing of the defenders of the status quo, one must consider the possibility
that, far from being a perverse deviation from the dominant values of a
capitalist society, pornography might, in fact, be the most logical and limpid
translation of bourgeois values into the sexual sphere. Acts and relations that
are natural and spontaneous are turned into commodities to be purchased and
sold.”[5]
While
it is wrong to over-generalise about Tik Tok, there appears to be a significant
connection between the sexy videos on the platform and outright prostitution. While
researching dating sites, one girl offered to have sex with me if I paid her
£300. This was very tempting given that she was a gorgeous Brazilian beauty.
Her main mistake was to give me her real name and photo. I did a title and image
search on Google. Low and behold, it turns out that aside from having a loud
voice, she has 2.6m followers on Tik Tok. Apart from making money as an
influencer, she was a part-time hooker earning £300 for two hours of work. A
case of life imitating art or art imitating life I am not sure which.
There
is not much point in recommending this book as it has already sold many copies.
It is worth reading and is packed with a significant number of essays that
require further reading. Tolentino could have done with a little more study of
academic papers on her chosen subjects, and the scams she chooses, while
interesting only scratch the surface of the criminality of life under
capitalism.
Further Reading
Pornocracy
Generalized: Fetishizing the Body and Selling the Process as Empowerment-Fouad
Mami-
A comment
on the viral TikTok “Devious Licks” trend-Renae Cassimeda
6 October
2021- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/10/07/tikt-o07.html
[1]
See -A Lot of Sex But Not Much Revolution-Unmastered:-Katherine Angel 10.99
Paperback 368 Pages / Published: 03/07/2014-http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/p/problems-of-everyday-life.html.
See Also: My Body by Emily Ratajkowski's-Hardcover – November 9 2021-A Quercus
publication. http://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/p/problems-of-everyday-life.html
[2]
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
[3]
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/07/27/wire-j27.html
[4]
https://keith-perspective.blogspot.com/search?q=maia
[5] A comment on Boogie Nights- www.wsws.org/en/articles/1998/07/boog-j04.html
