Societyiftextwall: Longer Meme
Everyone is always like “We live in a society.” Like umm ok Joker? And? Margaret Thatcher said society doesn’t exist. So there’s that. Got any more genius insights?
This page interrogates the above scenario. What happened to society? What happened to society if we all sang a song together? Society if we all hold hands so we could go to the moon and back 9 times? What happened to society if Portugal didn’t invent the caravel? Society if Disney lost the culture war to Studio Ghibli and we lived in a world of forest spirits instead of a neocon hellscape of the fully atomized, antisocial society described by Margaret Thatcher in her 1987 interview for “Woman’s Own”? Like, what if society if Descartes just shut up and didn’t publish his treatise of dumb questions that laid the foundation for an entire scientific method based on the false assumption of human supremacy? Like society if you and I are slonked up silly style on a floating island waiting for Jake Sully to bond with the great Toruk? And society if English lords were never able to enclose the commons?
I started societyiftextwall in 2021 as a personal project to counter the depressive ultra-irony pervasive in the memesphere that I felt produced an attitude of an anti-sincere depression olympics where everyone was competing to be more schizo and blackpilled. Over the years, societyiftextwall has grown to encompass a syllabus of sorts of all the texts I've found since then that address the utopian impulse, the systematic removal of spirit since the enlightenment, the snake-oil of green capitalism, and many other topics.
Societyiftextwall is a utopian project of spiritual affirmation, an antiantiutopian prophylactic used to treat endemic capitalist realism. It is a graphic syllabus for the collective reclamation of a utopian worldview. After over 2 years of production, the same question persists behind every post: how did we get here? How did we stray so far? Where did we go wrong? Was it the steam engine? Monotheism? Maybe it was agriculture. Or was it language? Do we have to go all the way back to that fateful bite of a forbidden apple that cursed us with self-awareness? And to continue the biblical metaphor, were we ever truly in the Garden of Eden?