.</span></p><hr><details><summary>Referenced by:</summary><ahref="/garden/no-politics-rules/index.md">"No Politics" Rules</a></details><p>Politics shape every facet of our lives, but its influence is often so entrenched it becomes invisible unless you're actively trying to be conscious of it. But being conscious of it is important, because otherwise you'll just end up implicitly supporting the current power structures created and maintained by the political status quo. Or society has guided us towards considering much of it as apolitical when is not for the purpose of perpetuating the existing power structures (capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy).</p><h2id="consumption-is-political"tabindex="-1">Consumption is political <aclass="header-anchor"href="#consumption-is-political"aria-label="Permalink to "Consumption is political""></a></h2><p>We live in a society dictated by capitalism, and it has infiltrated not only our markets but every aspect of our lives. We all know when you buy an apple from the store not all of it goes to the workers; it's putting some amount of money in capitalists' pockets and further accumulating wealth at the top of the hierarchy. We know the prices are only as low as they are due to the exploitation of workers all around the world working in horrible conditions for horrible pay. We know the company we buy from is organized like a totalitarian regime where all the decisions come from up high and serve to benefit those at the top. So why isn't buying an apple political?</p><p>Engaging in our market economy is both a necessity for our survival, and normalized through decades and decades of propaganda and reinforcement of the status quo. We become alienated to the effects of our actions as a defense measure because our daily complicity in various atrocities are simply too grand to carry on our shoulders. It becomes apolitical out of necessity. This has a side effect of making all challenges to the status quo (progressivism) appear far more controversial and political than just keeping things as they are.</p><p>With so many things becoming commodified, this effect becomes stronger with time. Our culture, love, attention have all been commodified. Everything being for sale means politics affects everything.</p><p><ahref="https://youtu.be/X_234m1zGf4"target="_blank"rel="noreferrer">The Search For The Apolitical Video Game</a> goes over how essentially everything is political, through the framework of searching for an "apolitical" video game. The arguments they make for video games trivially apply to all forms of media. If all media is political, so is the act of consuming it. Even news will always have a bias, as <ahref="/garden/objectivity/">Objectivity</a> doesn't exist.</p><h3id="r-nonpoliticaltwitter"tabindex="-1">r/NonPoliticalTwitter <aclass="header-anchor"href="#r-nonpoliticaltwitter"aria-label="Permalink to "r/NonPoliticalTwitter""></a></h3><p>This is a subreddit that claims to only allow non-political content. Naturally, this is a good case study to argue why the concept of non-political content doesn't exist. They have an interesting interpretation of politics, wherein content can <ahref="https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1asphum/addressing_the_community_regarding_the_no/"target="_blank"rel="noreferrer">even involve political figures</a>, if the focus of the post isn't considered political. This leads to one of the top posts at the time of writing being about <ahref="https://www.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/1fu46li/lost_in_translation/"target="_blank"rel="noreferrer">Jimmy Carter giving a speech in Japan</a>. So its a post about a US president engaging in politics abroad, but the post focuses on how an interpreter handled a joke, so it's not political. There's naturally no discussion on why Carter was in Japan or putting this event in a broader context of the relationship between the US and Japan after WW2 and Carter's role in repairing it.</
