Art is Resistance.
Full remix album of Nine Inch Nails’s Year Zero, all tracks and visuals remixed by Stuart Roland.
I write this in the year 0000. American democracy has been bought and commercialized for your convenience; you can claim your daily allotted freedom through any commercial product or service of your choosing while our corporations pick and choose their laws and regulations. American values have been hijacked by right-wing, christian authoritarians who are controlled through fear and reflexively support the repression of anyone who that fear is projected upon, even at the cost of their own (and our collective) self-interests. Everyone is fed their own version of the truth through social media and reality is made irrelevant and unrecognizable by a carefully crafted false dichotomy. My words are being fed through an algorithm as I type them to make sure no subversive message needs to be censored for your protection, no copyright needs to be enforced, to determine the potential profitability of this message and thus to determine how much to promote or bury this content.
Compassion is seen as weakness, pointing out problems is hypocrisy, calling for change is extremism. Public good is communism (read: evil), racial justice and LGBTQ rights are violent dissent against American values (read: racism and heteronormativity), animal rights and addressing climate change are ecofascism (read: inconvenient). If this message causes you undue distress through forcing a moment’s self reflection you can get an opiate prescription from your corporate-sponsored physician and collect a state-sponsored bounty for turning in a dissident on the wrong side of the culture war. Our infrastructure, our ideals and values, our sense of normality, our opportunities, and our democracy are crumbling. They have been stolen from us, and yet we are all of us to blame, all of us who stand by. Yet even our sense of agency has been lost, and we look on as helpless bystanders watching our world burn as we continue to spill the fuel from our gas tanks. So much potential, so much loss, so much waste. Shame on us – for all we have done, and all we ever were, just zeroes and ones.
