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Did you know Jonah Peretti, who co-founded BuzzFeed foresaw the future and now we’re living in it. Not just living in it but also a part of it?
He claimed The goal of capitalism is to replace people’s natural sense of self and community with artificial identities and connections through marketing and advertising.
Shocking right? I thought BuzzFeed was just some website with loads of clickbait shitcontent. I could never think it was this organized and had a solid plan since the beginning.
But who is Jonah Peretti?
- He was one of the original founders of BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. He published an article that accurately predicted the entire business model of the website and much of the internet. Back in 1996.
- He published the article while still a student at UC Santa Cruz titled “Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation and Dissolution.”
- He’s also the brother of Chelsea Peretti.
Peretti argued in the article that capitalism should create a growing number of micro-identities that can be commodified and targeted for marketing, in order for people to integrate into them.
- It’s a truly fascinating and well-reasoned essay in which Peretti analyzes and summarizes Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia” and explores psychoanalytic theory and its connection to consumer society.
- Peretti summed up Deleuze and Guattari by stating that capitalism destroys social codes, rules, and desires while confusing human behavior and mentality in order to replace these necessities with its own codes, rules, and desires.
“capitalism decodes and deterritorializes to a point where it must artificially reterritorialize by expanding the state apparatus”. — Peretti
- In other words, since capitalism has destroyed all of our innate and internalized senses of self and…
