Living and Dying in the Consumatron Zoo

Like with any commercial zoo, the visitors’ brochure always shows happy animals delightfully roaming about in their confined, carefully curated cages, occasionally interacting gleefully with both the staff and the public. They are carefully photoshopped to look like animals who have chosen their “stardom”: they love the attention and the spotlight, because all they ever wanted was to become social media celebrities. Besides, assuming the celebrity role was for them the least that they could do for their masters, as a thank you for all the free food they receive: they have been “cared for”, given everything that they needed in order to survive in their tiny prison. Not because someone actually cares for them, but because they need to look healthy and happy for their next photoshoot. Above all, because they simply can’t die. This would be bad publicity. They need to be maintained as they are, like necrocapitalist objects in a museum display case, bar the occasional dusting. Some of them have been born inside this prison, living their entire lives knowing that their purpose is to be props in a movie set. They are living to survive, not to exist, and do not know the difference between the two, simply because they have never experienced any version of reality other than the zoo.

The visitors of the zoo think that they are “the free ones”. But they are living in a zoo themselves, constantly made to feel that they should be thankful to the psychonomy for all that it provides them with. They should be thankful, rather than resentful.

Both the visitors and the zoo animals have been defrauded. But they are unlikely to revolt. Only in extremely rare moments in history does the showy shopfront of the system briefly collapse, momentarily revealing all the ugliness, exploitation and despair, in all of its naked grotesqueness. Speechless, the people and animals are for the first time able to witness what lies behind the curtain. But before they can take a good look at this Ground Zero long enough to begin to process what they are seeing, a brand new curtain is drawn over the ghastly reality they’ve only had a brief glimpse of. The psychonomy’s engineers are out in full force, repairing the glitch.

Phew. It must have been a hallucination, as everyone returns to their roles. The crazy colourful lights come back up, the carousel begins to spin, the music starts again right from where it had left off.  There is no reason to wonder, not for a second, whether all of this theme park is real or not. How can it be fake when it is a glimmering heaven? So colourful, so tasty, so tangible? As long as people take their daily prescription of affirmations and entertainment drugs which the Thing generously provides, all of us, humans and animals, are living in a happy zoo, and a perfectly “normal” world.  As long as we trust the Thing to run our lives and provide us with reassurance and protection, we are the happy algae locked inside this coral prison.

It takes immense vision, not to mention courage, for the few brave ones amongst us to wake up from our manufactured happiness in the necrocapitalist matrix, knowing already that the minute we do this we will become immediately depressed. How many of us wake up on a Monday, look outside our window and think: “What have we done to this world?  What have we done to ourselves?” Even fewer will ever muster the motivation to think: “today I’m gonna drink my coffee, and then start a revolution against this system”. They are more likely to smoke a cigarette then jump out the window.

George is an author, researcher, chemist, molecular biologist and food scientist. You can follow him on Twitter @99blackbaloons or enjoy his books