November 13, 2023
Individuality and Capitalism: Lessons From Remaking my Website
For a long time I’ve been meaning to revamp Home for Fiction. When I put it together back in 2017, I was in the middle of defending my doctoral dissertation, and I had no time or energy for coding, so I simply picked a ready template. Recently, I finally decided to modify it, and the process was thoroughly revealing. From all things, it also taught me a thing or two about individuality, capitalism, and how society is becoming increasingly more dysfunctional.
Yeah, I know; all this from putting together some web pages?
But, in the end, that’s why we need to be experiencing the world around us before we write: in order to discover the connections that lie there unnoticed.
So, in this post, I’ll briefly explain my motivation in changing some things and, above all, what it taught me about individuality and capitalism. And we’ll begin precisely from this point.
Individuality and Capitalism: Two Strange Bedfellows
For reasons having to do with societal forces (a less conspiratorial-sounding way of saying “how to control public opinion”), capitalism has always been packed together with “being your own person”. The American Dream, freedom"Freedom" must be among the most misunderstood concepts of our time. As I have mentioned before on the blog, Cornelius Castoriades, drawing on Thucydides, has aptly explained how it is not possible to be both free and peaceful, and most people prefer not to be bothered rather than to be free. As Bill Hicks said in one of his stand-ups, assuming the persona of the government, "You are free to do as we tell you! You are free to do as we tell you!", do your thing, being an individual.
All these have been of course historically contrasted with “the other side”, the Soviet Union. Capitalism vs communism, freedom vs totalitarianism, individuality vs “the common good”. But there are some major fallacies involved here, strawman being among the first, binary dilemmas being another.
To put it simply, just because the Soviet Union framework generally obstructed individuality, that doesn’t mean the West, in a capitalist framework, doesn’t. It just does so in less overt, more sophisticated ways. Let’s remember Bertolt Brecht’s timeless words here:
Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat.
Bertolt Brecht (1935). Writing the truth: Five difficulties. Translation by Richard Winston, for the magazine ‘Twice a Year’. Collected in William Wasserstrom, ed., Civil Liberties and the Arts: Selections from Twice a Year, 1938-48. Syracuse University Press, 1964. Accessed on this page.
It’s the appeal to hypocrisy fallacy, basically. “Just look at how bad the Soviet Union [Cuba/North Korea/etc] was, before you criticize capitalism”. Such statements are missing the point to a sadly entertaining extent.
“You Are Special, Just Like Everybody Else”
Especially when you’re buying stuff! Capitalism needs you to be lumped together with other buyers, because that’s what maximizes profit.
Just go to the supermarket and see. There are 30 “different” bags of chips, only most of them feature the same few flavors. Why? Because companies have taught people what to like and treat them as a homogeneous lump. It maximizes profit.
Consider your mobile phone. Wouldn’t you prefer if it had this, this, and that quality, and lacked this, this, and that? Yeah, me too. But that wouldn’t maximize profit, so instead we need everything to be the same.
We face similar problems with movies and books. Most of my posts regarding genre on Home For Fiction point out the eternal dilemma: Are you an artist or a writer? Do you embrace your “failure” and live for your art, or do you chase marketing stats, ads, people-pleasing?
Citroën: A Warning from Automotive History
If you’re over 40 – and perhaps especially if you live in Europe – you have surely noticed something intriguing: The more time passes, the more cars of various manufacturers look like each other. I mean, if you’re over 40 and familiar with European cars, you remember how a FIAT Panda 80s looked like, how an Autobianchi A112 looked like, and, especially, how a Citroën 2CV looked like.
They all looked very different from one another.
They all had their quirks, their “personality” (certainly in terms of aesthetics), they were recognizable. Citroën, in particular, was behind many ingenious engineering designs in the 70s.
However, to look different is a problem in capitalism. The company (also as a result of strategic decisions and having to abandon the American market) was declared bankrupt and sold to Peugeot. Let’s see the repercussions:
PSA [Peugeot] gradually diluted Citroën’s ambitious, highly individualistic, and distinctive approach to engineering and styling. All through the 1980s, Citroën models became increasingly Peugeot-like […] In this respect PSA followed the worldwide motor industry trend of platform sharing which is a logical way to reduce costs whilst selling apparently different models. By the late 1980s, many of the distinctive features of the brand had been removed or altered. Peugeot’s conventional switchgear replaced Citroën’s quirky but ergonomic Lunule designs, complete with self-cancelling indicators that Citroën had refused to adopt on ergonomic grounds. The cars were “more banal and conventional”, but also able to break into new markets, like fleet vehicles in the UK.
Wikipedia. “Citroën”
Today, a Citroën looks exactly like a Peugeot, which looks exactly like a Toyota, which looks exactly like a Ford, which looks exactly like a Škoda. Yawn…
Here’s another interesting quotation:
[T]oday, basically every company makes cars for basically every country, and they’re not gonna add bitchin’ tail fins to one model just to sell it exclusively in Dubuque, Iowa. Cars are now designed for the broadest possible audience, across the broadest number of countries, to be manufactured in the most efficient possible way. In that way, cars are just like any other mass market product now: phones, movies, rhinoplasty, and such and such. [emphasis mine]
Road And Track
Onward! To mediocrity!
Individuality and Capitalism: Remaking a Website
With Home For Fiction, I don’t try to sell you anything. I hate ads, I hate “monetization”. I’m not perfect (hell, perhaps one could argue I’m not even good), but at least I don’t have any corporate masters.
All this matters because I don’t need to do all sorts of stuff others do to please their audience. I don’t need to show ads, I don’t need to sell subscriptions, and I certainly don’t bombard you with “please subscribe to my newsletter” pop-ups. I also don’t need to kiss your ass responding to asinine feedback – just go to Google Play or the App Store and see all the poor dev(il)s bending over backward.
From the perspective of designing a website, it also means that what works for others doesn’t work for me.
Individuality in capitalism is problematic because most ready solutions are mediocre. That is, they end up being quite literally average because they try to please everyone.
(Re)designing Home for Fiction
The irony is, from your perspective not a lot has changed. The main site should look more or less the same, with some minor differences. What has changed is that it’s now designed exactly as I want it, without all sorts of useless (to me) extras that are meant for selling stuff, tracking visitors, displaying ads, or offering social media buttons.
The differences on the blog are less drastic – I envision the day I’ll find the energy to design my own theme or, better still, set up a headless WordPress solution – but you’ll notice the front page is far slimmer and (a subjective view, to be sure) aesthetically more pleasing. Hell yeah, now the entire blog is revamped! Read how I found the motivation to code it line by line in less than a week.
From a purely technical perspective – I’ll limit the details to this paragraph alone – what I did is that I simply created a bare-bones HTML frame and used JavaScript (with some Ajax calls to a few PHP scripts that fetch images) to populate it with elements dynamically. Even some of the CSS is placed in the “document.ready” block. All this means it’s much faster to load, as it lacks all the needless extras I had no use for.
But would any of this be possible if I didn’t know coding?
Individuality in Capitalism Is Hard
Let’s be honest about it: The problem of mediocrity – the lack of true individuality – in capitalism is also a benefit: The very reason societies exist is to make things accessible. Otherwise, we would need to hunt and cook our own food, make our own clothes, put up our own defense against predators or enemies.
To put it bluntly, how much can we afford to complain about things we couldn’t do ourselves?
It’s a complex issue; just because I can’t design and make my own clothes doesn’t mean I should not demand more ethical products from the manufacturers. Just because I rely on supermarket chains to bring fruits and vegetables from faraway lands doesn’t mean I should blindly accept their less-than-ideal practices.
Yet ultimately, our ability to rebel against such conditions relies on our ability to find alternatives. That is, there comes a time when we draw a line on the sand and (provided we have the backbone to avoid confirmation bias and other cop-outs) we say, Either you fix this or I stop using it.
Stopping leaves us with two branches: Either we learn how to do/find it ourselves, or we simply don’t use it anymore. Redesigning my website was something I could do on my own. For most other things, there is no alternative but give up on them.
7 Comments
Comments are closed for posts older than 90 days
Coding websites is on my list – there are only several thousand other things more important above it. No time, little brainpower and physical stamina most days, and things I want to write.
I don’t get bored – I get felled.
So I try to do the thing I want to do, and as little of the rest as possible, and still fail most days. But I make a little progress some days, and, what else would I do with my time?
IF and ONLY IF you are 1) still tweaking, and 2) open to requests, I would love a black text on white background option – I know it can be done, because a few sites let ME choose. Older eyes. There’s an option with Safari (I think) but it removes EVERYTHING, so I use it only when desperate.
Now that you’ve removed the junk – was it worth YOUR time? I assume you wouldn’t have started the project otherwise, but things have a way of catastrophizing between good intentions and finished product (which is what would happen to me). Just curious.
Also, since you know what you’re doing, why is the new way to leave name and email address in wordpress tantlizing me with my own data (email address neatly typed out, etc.), while then immediately deleting what I didn’t personally type so I have to go back and type it again? Some sites have this working, but most don’t. I don’t get the point of offering something and then snatching it away.
If, as I suspect, you refer to the blog (rather than the main site) when you mentioned black text on white background, it’s one of the reasons I’d like to eventually move to a headless WordPress or at least design my own theme. Currently, there is code from a dozen different sources, and the whole thing – even with my coding knowledge – is a mess of dependencies and correlations. To put it simply, what on the main site would be a change of a single line (plus a couple for the button/menu option), on the blog is far more complicated.
Changing the page’s colors should be much easier on the client side, i.e. your browser. I’m not familiar with Safari, but at least on Firefox and Chrome there are add-ons that allow you to override a page’s colors, like these: Chrome, Firefox.
As for whether it was worth my time: I don’t even feel I’ve dedicated much time; the main task didn’t take more than 4-5 days, with several days tweaking and correcting afterward. In any case, it was worth it a million times over, not only because it’s technically better now (no junk) but first and foremost because I know exactly how it works. I have full control of “my product” rather than feeling alienated from it, to use Marxist terminology. From beginning to end, the main site is now exactly as I want it.
Unfortunately the comments issue is beyond my control, because it’s Jetpack deploying the comments section. The variations you see between blogs probably depend on how each blog deploys the comments – some use Jetpack, some use the native WordPress comments form, some use another plugin. It’s one of those reasons I want to change the blog as well, because I hate it when there are things that don’t work exactly as I want them. Overall, I hate relying on external code, precisely for issues like these.
Bertrand Russell attempted to demonstrate that people have little room for manoeuvre in capitalism. He compared our influence in society to that of a small shareholder’s stake in the corporation, or indeed the individual’s stake in government. He wrote, in the 1930’s “A battleship is public property, but if, on this basis, you were to exercise ownership, you would soon be shown your place.” Similarly small shareholders would face the same if they tried to influence the company’s strategy.
This permeates all levels of society now. I rather see our world as a sort of democratic plutocracy, under threat from religious and political dictatorships, all of a sudden (ie, the last few years)
Addendum to last message. Russell’s “The Scientific Outlook” is a very revealing book in this respect. The last several chapters were virtually copied by Aldous Huxley to become “Brave New World”
Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
Last year I decided to buy a website again and chose WordPress because I had liked the site I had with them 10+ years ago. Imagine my dismay when I realized that nearly every feature was behind a paywall after I’d already paid. Almost nothing on the internet is free anymore. I get it, people are broke now, industries are massively shifting..it’s just sad. And yeah I’m just letting my website die, I won’t be renewing another year since I couldn’t change the coding to make it usable without paying an extra $200 a year.
Sadly this is the reality in an increasingly widening circle of products and services. I mean, this includes the most ridiculously individualy “owned” things, like a phone or a car – you don’t really own them; you pay for the temporary right to use them.
Or films that you “bought” – if you didn’t get a physical product, haha! Bad luck!