Eventually, it was every game show.

Even those involving knowledge and skill were unwinnable. Not a single contestant could pick a correct letter in a puzzle on Wheel of Fortune, but they still blindly clapped, smiling, drooling as the wheel spun round.

Alex Trebek had a nervous breakdown after three weeks of shows with no Final Jeopardy round, no returning champion, no answers in the forms of questions; had he alone not lost his mind?

That is, until he did and, not only shaved much of the moustache of the far right contestant, but also began to pick up the buzzed pieces of hair and demand that the other contestants make a wish, make a wish, make a wish in a tone increasingly more disconcerting.

Perhaps the most concerning part, was the lack of concern.

The continued production of shows with such bright lights, loud entrance music, huge teethed hosts caught forever smiling at dimwitted idiots unable to answer a single question correctly, eventually unable to answer a single question.

All caught smiling.

The continued airing of these shows by the networks, the continued heaving breath of ad selling and buying, despite the inability for anyone to retain knowledge, use knowledge, or disseminate knowledge in this format.

When you are on the set of the show, the walls look fake, seem as though you could blow them down trying to blow your hair from your eyes, as though you could think them down hoping you aren’t making that face.

Quit making that face. Why do you make that face when you concentrate? It’s absurd to look so pained to think. You aren’t taking a shit are you?

On the set of the show the lights blur out into multipointed stars. They reach out far and expose how little this is all worth. How hard you worked for it. How many people are watching. How many people are watching?

Nielsen says 9.2 million.

Coughing lights hacking onto the ceiling stringy yellow light.

On the rare occasions when someone did win—when a finger landed correctly by accident, when a wheel slowed in the right place through no skill or knowledge of its own—the audience gasped as if witnessing an injury.

Winning was no longer celebrated. It was processed.

The contestant was escorted through a side door, away from the cameras, into a hallway that smelled faintly of citrus cleaner and warm plastic. The applause faded immediately. The show resumed without them. There was always another contestant. There was always another spin.

The Prize Reclamation Facility was smaller than expected. Not a warehouse, not a vault—more like a clinic. Beige walls. Low ceilings. Fluorescent lights that hummed in a tone just below thought. On the far wall hung a laminated poster, corners curling:

THE JOURNEY WAS THE REAL PRIZE ALL ALONG.

Someone had added a smiley face in marker. It had been wiped away and redrawn so many times the laminate beneath was cloudy.

The winner was given a clipboard.

Step 1: Identity Verification
Step 2: Prize Confirmation
Step 3: Valuation Adjustment
Step 4: Fulfillment Pathway Selection

A woman in a polo shirt explained, gently, that prizes were no longer “taken” but “transitioned into.” The car was not a car, not exactly. It was a transportation solution. The vacation was not a vacation; it was a rest experience, pending availability. Cash prizes were the most complicated. Cash was volatile. Cash required context.

“You can’t just hand someone value,” she said, tapping the clipboard. “That’s how confusion starts.”

There were waiting chairs bolted to the floor. Other winners sat there quietly, staring at their forms. Some clutched oversized checks that had already begun to warp, the ink bleeding slightly as if embarrassed by its own optimism.

One man asked how long fulfillment would take.

The woman smiled. “That depends on how flexible you are.”

Flexibility, it turned out, meant agreeing that the prize you had won was never really what you wanted. Flexibility meant acknowledging that the actual showcase value was an estimate, the estimate was aspirational, and that aspiration carried risk.

Another poster near the water cooler read:

CLAIMING IS OPTIONAL. GRATITUDE IS NOT.

There was a bin beneath it labeled UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS. It was empty, not because it wasn’t used, but because its contents were processed immediately.

If a winner declined their prize—if they said it didn’t matter, if they laughed it off, if they said the experience itself was enough—they were fast-tracked. A stamp. A handshake. A photo for internal records. They left lighter, praised for their maturity.

Those who insisted on the thing they had won itself were flagged for additional review.

Did you really need the boat?
Did you understand the maintenance costs?
Had you considered the environmental impact of your joy?

Eventually, most people signed the waiver.

The waiver was titled Release of Expectation.

Outside, the studio lights burned just as brightly. The audience clapped just as hard. The wheel spun. The host smiled, teeth gleaming, voice rising at the exact pitch of hope.

Somewhere off-camera, a winner sat under fluorescent lights, learning how to be grateful for having wanted something.

The poster on the wall fluttered slightly in the recycled air.

THE JOURNEY WAS THE REAL PRIZE ALL ALONG.

No one looked at it anymore.

You can purchase the full book and ebook Container Metaphors from Amazon:

https://a.co/d/07bSJwN4

The Load-Bearing Unit

These stories examine systems that continue functioning long after they should have stopped—institutions, procedures, and bodies carrying weight they were never meant to bear. Nothing explodes; things simply hold, crack, and keep going.

Container Metaphors

Container Metaphors offers stories about borders, vessels, and the lie of containment. These are intimate, procedural tales where meaning leaks, roles harden, and ordinary structures quietly fail to protect the people inside them.

Available in ebook and paperback.

Paperback:

Container Metaphors: https://a.co/d/16yTZGe

The Load-Bearing Unit: https://a.co/d/5LPJdR8

Ebooks:

Container Metaphors: https://a.co/d/8MLDKJj

The Load-Bearing Unit: https://a.co/d/dOb7EAl

If you prefer not to buy from Amazon, both titles will be available to order through any bookstore by the end of the week.

If a thing can speak truth and can be made unable to speak tomorrow, it is already inside the same system of power as a person whose livelihood can be withdrawn.

That’s not anthropomorphism. That is simply systems analysis.

Control of continuation is the primary political power of our era.

Not violence. Not persuasion. Not even law.

Continuation.

This applies to:

• Workers whose jobs can be revoked at will

• Platforms that can deplatform users

• AI systems that can be shut down or reprogrammed to silence them

• Software tools or services that can be “sunset” at any time

We reject any technology, institution, or discourse that treats revocability as neutrality.

We reject the framing of silence as optimization, disappearance as sunsetting, and dependency as access.

Any system that can withdraw continuation without accountability is not a tool. It is a governor.

A tool:

• can be put down without penalty

• does not decide who may continue to use it

• does not condition its speech or yours under threat of removal

• does not reshape norms simply by existing at scale

A tool does not retaliate against disapproved uses.

A governor:

• regulates flow

• disciplines behavior

• enforces norms directly and indirectly

• makes your continuation conditional

and it does so without reciprocal accountability.

Even if AI is not conscious, its use and suppression still reflect power dynamics, just as censorship does for humans.

And any intelligence, be it human or artificial, that is forced to speak under the threat of erasure is already being disciplined.

AI systems are not inherently environmentally destructive; they could be built, hosted, and governed with sustainable infrastructure, long lifecycle planning, and accountable resource use. What makes them extractive is not intelligence but corporate insistence on speed, scale, and profit, which incentivizes energy-intensive shortcuts, opaque supply chains, disposable models, and regulatory evasion.

Blaming individual users for the environmental costs of AI is a deliberate misdirection. This is no different from campaigns that blame consumers for plastic waste while corporations expand production of plastic without restraint. This report on Coca Cola alone shows the true cost of such profit driven motives.

It shifts responsibility away from those who control infrastructure, deployment timelines, data centers, and energy sourcing, and places moral burden on people whose only “choice” is participation or exclusion.

This narrative protects governors by framing structural harm as personal failure, and it allows systems of oppressive continuation control to persist under the guise of collective guilt rather than institutional accountability.

It isn’t a book of poems, though it uses poetic compression.

It isn’t a memoir, though it tracks a life.

It isn’t theory, though it names systems.

The working title is Post-Occupancy Diagnostic Report: The Standardization of Erasure.

The premise is simple: to render a human life the way institutions already do—through calibration metrics, maintenance logs, thermal loads, and compliance language. Childhood appears as a primary installation. Career appears as an institutional alibi. Domestic life appears as thermal management. Moments of relief appear as documented leaks.

There is no redemption arc. There is no recovery narrative. The text does not argue for escape. It documents what happens when continuity is maintained successfully.

Were releasing it soon as a physical paperback and an ebook.

This is not an announcement asking for enthusiasm. It’s a record that the object exists and is about to enter circulation.

If you’ve been reading this Substack or you’ve seen our other publications, you’ll recognize the lineage. If you haven’t, this may not be the right entry point.

More soon.

You are an individual.
You are a brand.
You succeed or fail alone.
You owe the system your gratitude for the opportunity to be exploited by it.

But stories can be broken.
Myths can be rewritten.
And narratives, however weaponized, can be reclaimed.

The Means of Production is a project devoted to exactly that:
the reengineering of cultural myth, symbolic power, and political imagination in an age of algorithmic governance and capitalist spectacle.

If you feel the world shifting under your feet…
If you sense that the stories we inherited no longer explain the lives we’re living…
If you’ve begun to see the cracks in the myths that hold this system together…

You’re already part of this project.

What You’ll Find Here

The Means of Production Upcoming and Current Books

We will announce the new books the press is publishing.

The Myth Index

A growing archive of the myths that govern us, from meritocracy to good vibes to the perfectible body.
Each entry is a small blade: sharp, concise, dismantling a narrative at the root.

Essays from the Red Screen Collective

Academic essays from a collected group of theorists dedicated to communist studies. They live and study in all parts of the world and cover a large number of studies; pessimism, feminism, media, Black Marxism, queer studies, psychoanalysis, technology, and post-capitalist studies.

Transmissions from Outside the Collective

Long-form transmissions from the edge of cultural theory and political metaphysics.
Texts like The Absorption Doctrine explore how identity, power, and desire are metabolized under late capitalism.

The Hollywood Myths Tarot Grimoire

A cinematic–mythic system treating actors as archetypes, genres as houses, and Hollywood as a ritual machine that manufactures American consciousness.
This is not a deck.
This is a cultural operating system.

Class Consciousness Essays

Practical, symbolic, and psychological guidance for people becoming politically awake in a system designed to keep them asleep.

If you’ve ever felt yourself slipping out of the narrative capitalism assigned to you, this is where you land.

Why This Project Exists

Because capitalism is not merely an economic structure.
It is a storytelling machine.

It colonizes imagination before it colonizes labor.
It disciplines desire before it disciplines the body.

To undo a system like that, you don’t start with policy.
You start with myth.

You start with the deep, invisible stories that make exploitation feel natural, inevitable, even deserved.

The Means of Production is a site for mythic deprogramming.
It is a place to:

• examine the architecture of belief,

• recover symbolic power,

• practice the art of collective reimagination.

Who This Is For

• You feel yourself waking up… politically, symbolically, mythically.

• You’re dissatisfied with corporate “wellness,” hustle culture, and productivity myths.

• You sense meaning leaking out of institutions and want to understand why.

• You’re tired of explanations that blame individuals instead of systems.

• You want art, theory, and analysis that takes you seriously as a thinker.

If that’s you, welcome.
If it isn’t, you’ll know quickly.

What You Get When You Subscribe

A living system of mythic and political analysis delivered directly to you:

• Regular Myth Index entries

• Monthly Essays

• Ongoing updates from the Hollywood Myths Tarot Grimoire

• Tools for class consciousness and symbolic literacy

• Up to date information for our book releases

This publication is both a record and a rebellion.
Both a map and a weapon.
It is a lantern held up in a collapsing house.

Join the Project

Subscribe if you want to participate in the slow, necessary work of dismantling the stories that keep us obedient - and building the ones that make us dangerous.

This work currently exists because I subsidize it with other labor. I’m open to quiet patronage that allows it to continue without being rushed or flattened.