I know I bump heads with some types of people here because of my unorthodox views that some might go as far as to call heterodox, but even if you’re the most by-the-book follower of Marx and Lenin, I hope you can hear me out here:

I’m definitely not alone in thinking that the Situationists were on to something, respect for them seems wide across the entire spectrum of leftism. It’s just a shame that the idea of detournment was more or less constrained to the realm of literal conventonal forms of art. What WSB has been doing with Gamestop can fit quite easily into being understood as a detournment of Hedge Funds, Speculation, and the Stock Market in general. This “Prank” has seemingly shaken more common everyday people of the legitimacy of the stock market and perhaps their faith in capitalism itself. Compare the effectivenes of that with something like Occupy Wallstreet.

People hate being told what to think. Even if its absolutely true, they’ll be resistant to it. On the other hand, if people think that they came to a belief with profound implications all on their own, they will champion that belief with unshakable passion, particularly if they think they are unique in having “figured it out”. See Qanon and their cult-like thinking that has hardly any basis in reality. In 2021 its not enough just to tell people that capitalism riddled with contradictions and iherently unstable. You need to pull back the sheet and let people make that realization with their own eyes.

I’ve been thinking of other forms of action this could take, and honestly I haven’t been able to come up with much, but I’d hope that other people who are more creative than me might have better ideas. One idea is to create a social network, something like facebok or twitter or the like, but have the users get a percentage cut of the returns whenever their personal data in particular is used as part of a sale. This would even be gamified, to encourage users to add more personal information to get more cash. This is probably the only way to get people to sign up to a new service en masse due to the current monopolization of the market. It’d also lay bare the fundamentals of the industry as the other big players attempt to react with their products. My only other idea is kind of stupid and I think has been tried before without much success. But the basic idea would be to start a consulting firm that presents itself as getting a leg up on the competitor without quite using the term “corporate sabotage”, but the interesting bit is that it would be accomplished by attempting to unionize that competitor’s workplace. So instead of the board deciding to hire a union busting firm for their business, they would hire a union-organizing firm to essentially salt their competitors or otherwise agitate for a union drive.