RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: The Struggle for Owned Space  Thu Apr 29, 2021 6:18 pm | |
| Retake Main Street or prepare to be homeless.
In his review of Bronze Age Mindset, Michael Anton zeroed in on “owned space” as perhaps the key theme of that bizarre book. “Space,” for author Bronze Age Pervert, writes Anton, “is owned when it is mastered or controlled. This can either be accomplished by you—or your herd or pride or clan or tribe or nation—or by others.”
One need not agree with nor even read Bronze Age Mindset in order to understand the usefulness of the owned space concept in understanding the plight of today’s conservatives. If you don’t have owned space, if you live or build on space owned by others, then you are putting yourself in a highly disadvantageous and vulnerable position, subject to cultural eviction and spiritual homelessness.
The easiest way to illustrate this is to look at businesses and creators on social media sites like YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter. They have no influence over the platforms and don’t even own their relationship with their fans or customers. They add immense value to the platforms but have essentially zero rights and can be kicked off or downgraded in the algorithms at any time. As finance writer Byrne Hobart noted, “if you build a business on someone else’s platform, in the end you’re either doing R&D for features they’ll add or you’re setting yourself up to cede them your margins.” Or to be targeted for virtual elimination if you fall afoul of them politically.
It’s notable how little owned space conservatives have in any domain. This can include physical space as well as social and cultural space. One of the biggest problems faced by conservatives is that they exist almost entirely inside space owned by others—legally owned in many cases, but as importantly socially and culturally owned.
Virtually every major corporation, major education institution, and major cultural and media institution in America embraces and promotes the values and preferred policies of the left. So does essentially every major American city and economic center. The left owns them. There are remarkably few genuinely conservative institutions in America outside of politics and religion (where they are actually many deeply conservative state governments and churches). This means in their basic day to day existence of life in America, whether that be going to work, shopping, reading the news, or watching sports or mass entertainment, conservatives exist largely inside space owned by others—space from which they can be expelled at any time, often with significant negative personal consequences.
The typical conservative response to perceived problems of growing leftist ownership of space is to leave—to move to a red state, a suburb, etc. This establishes a mindset of retreat and running away. Conservatives have ceded not just territory and institutions to the left, but those of highest value, some of which can never be replicated.
Having failed to defend their old territory, there’s little reason to believe any of these conservatives will successfully defend their new one either. Indeed, we see the suburbs, for example, like the cities before them, now trending left in many cases.
.https://americanmind.org/memo/the-struggle-for-owned-space/ |
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