Commissioned Bespoke Rituals
Feb. 14th, 2019 12:09 amPulling this out of my linkdump because I wrote enough on it to merit its own post.
A Design Lab Is Making Rituals for Secular People via![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
umadoshi
I'm uncomfortable with this. Not the concept of rituals for atheists or whatever, I'm uncomfortable with it being part of the mindset of startup culture. Putting people's spiritual lives in the hands of Silicon Valley--that feels really predatory on a really vulnerable axis. I mean, if people actively want these classes on how to make their own rituals like it says, there's clearly a demand and not everyone is comfortable making their own stuff up on the fly like is common with modern polytheism (and paganism and witchcraft and etc), but... it really puts my hackles up to commoditize spirituality. (Especially in the environment of venture capitalism, where every company eats itself and its customers alive to milk the last drop of profit out of a business model before self-destructing in a rain of fire, because growth is more important than stability.)
Probably I'm thinking about that all the more right now, with the interviews that have come out with the people behind Patreon being unhappy with their steady sustainable profits and their "generous 90% payout model" and wanting to milk their customer base for more money (probably because they were funded by venture capital, which demands more than just return on investment), and the horrible Activision Blizzard layoffs after a year of record profits to funnel more money to the shareholders. CAPITALISM IS THEFT EAT THE RICH okay I'll stop now.
It does say they don't "currently charge", but I agree with the quoted detractors that the commodification and isolation aspects are troubling regardless. And I don't really trust anyone in Silicon Valley to stick to that, anyway.
Also, honestly, a lot of why I'm not currently an actively practicing polytheist is because of the incredible isolation of practicing a bespoke religion without coreligionists and how dispiriting and lonely it is, so bespoke rituals sound like... more of that. So much of our modern culture is isolating, and inventing new isolating spirituality doesn't seem like a healthy or helpful response to that, to me. (And then we're getting into my endless paralyzing indecision about whether I want to consider approaching organized religion to counteract that isolation, and if so, which (judaism? unitarians?), and that's really out of the scope of this.)
A Design Lab Is Making Rituals for Secular People via
umadoshiI'm uncomfortable with this. Not the concept of rituals for atheists or whatever, I'm uncomfortable with it being part of the mindset of startup culture. Putting people's spiritual lives in the hands of Silicon Valley--that feels really predatory on a really vulnerable axis. I mean, if people actively want these classes on how to make their own rituals like it says, there's clearly a demand and not everyone is comfortable making their own stuff up on the fly like is common with modern polytheism (and paganism and witchcraft and etc), but... it really puts my hackles up to commoditize spirituality. (Especially in the environment of venture capitalism, where every company eats itself and its customers alive to milk the last drop of profit out of a business model before self-destructing in a rain of fire, because growth is more important than stability.)
Probably I'm thinking about that all the more right now, with the interviews that have come out with the people behind Patreon being unhappy with their steady sustainable profits and their "generous 90% payout model" and wanting to milk their customer base for more money (probably because they were funded by venture capital, which demands more than just return on investment), and the horrible Activision Blizzard layoffs after a year of record profits to funnel more money to the shareholders. CAPITALISM IS THEFT EAT THE RICH okay I'll stop now.
It does say they don't "currently charge", but I agree with the quoted detractors that the commodification and isolation aspects are troubling regardless. And I don't really trust anyone in Silicon Valley to stick to that, anyway.
Also, honestly, a lot of why I'm not currently an actively practicing polytheist is because of the incredible isolation of practicing a bespoke religion without coreligionists and how dispiriting and lonely it is, so bespoke rituals sound like... more of that. So much of our modern culture is isolating, and inventing new isolating spirituality doesn't seem like a healthy or helpful response to that, to me. (And then we're getting into my endless paralyzing indecision about whether I want to consider approaching organized religion to counteract that isolation, and if so, which (judaism? unitarians?), and that's really out of the scope of this.)
