I’m not sure how else to put it. As an example, someone who cares about issues of LGBTQIA+, but when it comes to issues of capitalism pushing exploitative practices in video games, they are siding against the player and doing the “it’s on you how you spend” shtick.
I suppose another way to frame this would be “how do you deal with selective empathy?” Because that seems to be how it in some cases, that the person cares about the thing that personally impacts them, but otherwise, they’ll side with the exploiter in a heartbeat.
It disgusts me when I see it in action, so much so I almost wrote this as a rant post in the comradelyrants section instead. But I feel it’s a topic that deserves more discussion attention than that.
In general, the mindset that goes something like:
“So this company dropped some spikes on the sidewalk.”
“Well I think if somebody stepped on them, that’s on them. It’s really obvious that they are there and I went out and walked just fine and had a good time, I just walked on the grass to get around the spikes.”
The implication: individuals should be expected to change their lives to accommodate the careless, dangerous, or otherwise predatory behavior of others and if they don’t, it’s their fault.
Like what kind of poor excuse for humanity is this stuff.
I see Libertarians advocating for microtransactions as it is “how the consumer spends that benefits the corporation” bullshit.
Instead of Libertarians seeing capitalism advancing towards the usual notion of maximising profits, they just see as consumers helping the corporations and thus it should be perfectly legal to do so. Games become worse due to their “efficiency” (efficiency meaning to extract as much profit as possible) by laying off employees, replacing them with contract work, utilising microtransactions, especially if the game is Free to Play. Did this all happen when the consumer spend their game or was it due to the capitalist because he wanted to maximise profits?
The libertarians argue “They should just stop spending if they don’t like the company!” but this doesn’t explain why capitalists make a tendency towards maximising profits. Then they argue about " ““social”” enterprises " and whatnot. In other words, what they explain (i.e. the products consumers buy), doesn’t explain the general tendency of capitalism, nor political economy in general.
This means that these libertarians have nothing to explain. Their arguments don’t explain anything. They don’t explain capitalism. Selective Apathy is nothing more than ignorance. They don’t care about other people, they only care if they are not affected, or if this practice helps them in some way or another. This line of thinking of “I don’t care what you do” can be extrapolated to many horrible ideas that libertarians or liberals can cling on to. We can also argue this is an aspect of alienation, but I made my point. This is just another aspect of individualism.
Tell them to be consistent. Few examples:
I despise Tiktok because of how brain rotting the content is but this is nothing new. Social media in general has this problem thanks to capitalist alienation generating conditions for such damage to thrive such as forcing millenial parents to adopt iPad parenting out of necessity despite the clear damage it showed to Gen Alpha.
Another example is Shein and Temu. Much like Tiktok I despise both apps albeit for sourcing from slavery except Amazon, Shopee, Lazada, etc also does this. If you are against Temu and Shein for their use of racist slave labor, you need to condemn Amazon, Shopee, etc as well. There’s a reason why your wages and the prices there are deliberately kept low (refer to my sweatshops are racist post).
I loathe game journalism for how disingenuous they are when it comes to covering games and the video game industry but when you consider they are basically racing against the hype train and people who actually do a better job at covering, it’s practically “I have no choice but to post this bullshit article”. This same reasoning applies to tech journalism covering new technologies and especially tech bros, political journalism for parroting state department narratives, and business journalism for not vetting the companies they coom over.
