edwad:

advertisements can tell you a lot about the logic of capital tbh. my favorite example is the old stride gum commercials where they’d say the flavor was so long that they’d have to go out of their way as a business to get people to spit it out so that they could buy another pack. it was meant to be funny bc they were releasing like rams into the public to tackle gum-chewing pedestrians or whatever and force them to drop their gum so that the men in suits could run up and pick it up off the ground before speeding off in their company van

but it also exposes the constant speed up of the circulation of capital to the point where things can’t be produced of an actual decent quality without putting themselves out of business because if the flavor actually did such a long time, stride would never be able to sell you another pack and they would potentially be forced to do something differently or go under. it’s meant to make you laugh but it also manages to tranparently capture the nature of planned absolesence and turnover time