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Quote by Alison Phipps

“Media markets, like all markets, are profoundly nihilistic. Clicks, likes and shares are a multi-denominational currency. As long as they accumulate, as long as visibility (and revenue) is gained, it does not matter why. In other words, the media using sexual violence as clickbait does not imply support for feminist goals.”

Quote by Alison Phipps

Book:Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism
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Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism

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Alison Phipps

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“If I had to tell you how humans made their way to Earth, it would go like this: In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears. Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder.. But mostly it didn't, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn't tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they'd never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness. The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn't fall. She spent the rest of her time holding onto whatever scraps she had left.”

LifeStars
Author:Jodi Picoult
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“The imperatives of a market that valued people as commodities interposed a nearly impassable gulf between captives and any community that might claim them as new members. Captives learned that when they reached the littoral, their exchangeability on the Atlantic market outweighed any social value they might have. The price put on their persons pushed most captives beyond the possibility of eventual reintegration as members in any community. The crisis of captivity on that coast, in other words, was that only with great difficulty or great luck could the prisoners’ ‘commodity potential’ be masked or converted back into social currency.”

CommunitySlaveryDehumanizationCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“Undoing their objectivization as goods to be bought and sold, therefore, required not only that captives escape the physical hold exerted on them by the forts, factories, and other coastal facilities used to incarcerate them but, more difficult still, that they reverse their own transformation into commodities, by returning to a web of social bonds that would tether them safely to the African landscape, within the fold of kinship and community. For most, as we have seen, distance made return to their home communities impossible. The market, they learned, made return to any form of social belonging impossible as well. If they managed to escape from the waterside forts and factories, their value resided not in their potential to join communities as slave laborers, wives, soldiers, or in some other capacity, but rather in their market price. For most, the power of the market made it impossible to return to their previous state, that of belonging to (being ‘owned’ by) a community—to being possessed, that is, of an identity as a subject. Rather, the strangers the runaways encountered shared the vision of the officials at Cape Coast Castle: the laws of the market made fellow human beings see it as their primary interest to own as commodities these escaped captives, rather than to connection them as social subjects. More often than not, then, captives escaped only to be sold again. As Snelgrave’s language articulates so clearly, the logic of the market meant that enslavement was a misfortune for which no buyer needed to feel the burden of accountability. Indeed, according to the mercantile logic in force, buyers (of whatever nationality) could not bear the weight of political accountability. Buying people who had no evidence social value was not a violation or an act of questionable morality but rather a keen and appropriate response to opportunity; for this was precisely what one was supposed to do in the market: create value by exchange, recycle someone else’s castoffs into objects of worth. Thus, then, did the market exert its power—through its language, its categories, its logic. The alchemy of the market derived from its effectiveness in producing a counterfeit representation; it had become plausible that human beings could be so completely drained of social value, so severed from the community, that their lives were no longer beyond price: they could be made freely available in exchange for currency. The market painted in colors sufficiently believable as to seem true the appalling notion that ‘a human being could fail to be a person.”

CommunitySlaveryExclusionCommodificationSocial Death
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.”

EfficiencyRationalizationDehumanizationProductionCommodification
Book:Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora
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“In my approach, each racialized person counts the same, as racialized and therefore commodified. There is not in this approach some conceptually privileged racialized group (some uncommodified racial group), either on account of access to power or proximity to suffering. To be racialized just is to be commodified.”

Race And Racism In AmericaCommodification
Book:Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism
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“We're seeing the world through a prism now; digital capitalism has refined the algorithm to monetize out attention. Peace, contentment, nuance, subtlety, cooperation - all of these things are list as algorithms filter our online communications for maximum engagement. What holds away, of course, is hyperbole, shock, outrage, sensationalism.”

CommunicationCapitalismAlgorithmDigital MediaCommodificationDumbing Down
Book:The Analog Sea Review: Number Four
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“We dwell in homes or work in sites that once displaced animals, we pay federal taxes that legalize the slaughter of animals for profit or pleasure, we travel in cars with leather seats over roads unfenced to prevent roadkill, we attend schools that allow animal experiments in biology classes, we take drugs once tested on animals, we buy newspapers that carry adds for the meat, egg, dairy and fur industries, we shop in stores that profit from the sale of animal products, we vote for politicians who pass laws favoring the meat, dairy, egg and hunting lobbies, we pay the salaries of federal and state judges who interpret a constitution that says nothing about the welfare or rights of animals and we embrace religions that give humans dominion over animals; and it’s a rare sermon where the sacredness of animals is sounded. ~ Colman McCarthy”

AnimalsCommodificationAnthropocentrismHuman Animal RelationsHuman ExceptionalismInterspecies InequalitySystemic Exploitation
Book:Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex
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“Bizzaro Time by Stewart Stafford I took dawn selfies on a bridge, Geneva worms conferred in slime, A woman's dog slithered serpentine, It snapped and hissed in bizarro time. A businessman's briefcase in flight, Went public in a philanthropist sky, Umbrellas blossomed into trees, Peacenik pigeon medal caught the eye. Coffee shops served liquid light, Brewed up pagan code of yore, Pedestrians' morphed molten form, Glass-blown in tangerine pour. We shared loop shrugs, muted pleas, Sober intoxication's escapist twist, A uniquely-marketed Tuesday morn, Dreamt up to commodify every tryst. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

TechnologyAuthenticitySatireDystopianSurrealismSocial CommentaryAbsurdismCommodificationSocial Commentary HumorSocial Commentary Satire
Author:Stewart Stafford
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