Informant38

notes:
Transactional parasitism. Getting in between the subject and the object of desire, and retailing the gain. So that the relationship has to be initiated by the subject. So they take responsibility for it; it diverts the resentment back toward the self.
I noticed this years back when I'd played, I thought, particularly well for a month or so, and realized it was the new weed I'd been smoking. So to get to that place where I could play like that I'd need that weed. So then whoever had that, unless I grew it myself, also had the music I wanted to play. So they owned it, or they owned the path to it.
This is most effective when the subjects and their objects of desire are marginal to the culture in general. Creating a cultural milieu where blind obedience is the norm will mean virtually everything else is marginal and vulnerable to that template of commodification.
Prisons, these days especially, work this way. Witholding what are termed privileges until cooperation, and submission, are demonstrated. Getting in between you and what you want. Transactional parasitism.
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It works on anything, not just electives or luxuries. Getting in between hungry people and food can be enormously profitable. Creating desire is productive as well, that segment of the transaction has become pretty much the modus operandi of American business life. It's helped tremendously that there is no traditional memory now, that history, what little most people know of it, is entirely a record of large-force conflict and political transformation; this is augmented by a kind of subliminally-conditioned scorn for the old - the stories of the old, what they remember of what they've seen, are valueless generally, so that the only living witnesses to how things were 80 years ago are discredited before they speak. We know nothing of how people lived their daily lives 100 years ago - we as a common, shared public. Our collective memory is amnesiac, colored-in by sanctioned details supplied by what's now the only valid voice of our elders - the television. The television sits in the place in the home our grandparents once occupied, central, revered, carrying the stories that teach the young about the world, and the television is the voice of retail transactionalism.
Spam, that anyone with an email account despises and complains of, is a handful of gravel compared to the avalanche of commercial hook and promise the television saturates our homes with. But we're used to that, and the young don't know any other world. The parasite is on its way to symbiosis.