01/14/2024
EDIT: There’s something so important that a lot of people are missing here, it’s not that somebody like Taylor Swift sits in some smoky back room of her studio cackling while she plots how to exploit people, it’s that the economy is specifically designed that way so she doesn’t even have to.
The bigger she gets, the more exploitable levers of power become available. Using some of those levers is a choice, like overzealous copyright violence, others operate invisibly and require active counter maneuvers to overcome.
I’m pretty sure Taylor probably will morph into like a Dolly or a Madonna who go out of their way to do really generous things like the Books program or the schools in Malawi. But the money that they are giving away is still “gathered” by exploitation. Multiple things can be true at once.
I’m a huge Madonna fan, in my eyes she can do no wrong. She could get a green alien face transplanted onto her face and I would be like oh my God she’s beautiful and still run to the record store and get her new album at midnight. But she does exploit people.
You can be a fan of someone and want to support their work and also recognize that our economy is not functioning in a way that benefits everyone and that we need to address that. Their art will still be brilliant, and they will still benefit from it, the rest of us will just benefit more from our role in their success, and vice versa.
So please if you love Taylor’s art, continue to enjoy it, go to a concert, do whatever you need to do to experience joy while you are living. And also, I can only speak for me, but I plan on using a portion of my time here to try and leave things better than I found them, because that also brings me joy.
One final thought, I put pictures of ridiculous old, rich, white dudes on my page literally all the time, rage bait is a well-known tactic that I use to keep the algorithm juicy so the rest of my content can get seen.
Taylor isn’t special. She’s just useful to drive home the point of the text to this meme, which is essentially “literally every billionaire”. That doesn’t land as hard unless you use a billionaire that many people want to exempt. If all means all, then all means Taylor. I don’t know what else to tell you.
