On Friday book-loving New Yorkers got a shock as the city’s largest bookstore — The Strand — announced that it risked going out of business. A post on Twitter from the company said:‘We need your help. This is the post we hoped to never write, but today marks a huge turning point in The Strand’s history. Our revenue has dropped nearly 70% compared to last year, and the loans and cash reserves that have kept us afloat these past months are depleted.’
The Strand is far from the only bookstore to fall on hard times this year. Barnes & Noble, the last big book retail chain, faces mounting pandemic-related difficulties compounded by their own bad decisions.
I loathe Amazon as much as the next person who relies on it. But on recent visits to The Strand I have left empty-handed and had to revert to the dreaded competitor-destroying behemoth. Because there are very specific problems with The Strand and if it doesn’t make it to its century then it will be its own fault.The book trade in America is badly screwed up, as it is everywhere. In part this is because many publishing houses seem to think that their role is not to give the public the books they want, but rather the books the publishing houses think the would be best instructed by. It is the nature of the publishing industry, and the way it hires, that the viewpoint diversity in the sector is narrow, blinkered and parochial.That same viewpoint is now replicated on the frontline. Increasingly bookstores are places where customer are force-fed books that the store’s employees think will be good for them. In recent months in particular bookstores in the US have decided that if they push certain products on the public hard enough then all those who work there will be doing their bit to defeat white supremacy/embedded racism/patriarchy/cisheteronormativity/Donald Trump and more. The joy of bookshops used to be that they offered an opportunity for the reader to open their mind up to many worlds. Today many bookstores seem to think that their role is to force-feed their customers with only one view of the world: one that the retailers honestly seem to believe is the only worldview a literate or thinking person could possibly have.
Conservatives have slowly come to the realization that most big corporations–especially in the entertainment industry–aren’t in business to make money anymore. Instead, they’re missions out of which proselytes from the managerial class spread the Death Cult anti-gospel.
Folks older than Gen X can be forgiven for their bafflement as to why megacorps blackwash comic book characters, build restaurants that resemble gray cubes, and lavish marketing dollars on 2% of the population.
The answer is: for the same reason American Christians used to go to church.
The more astute folks who’ve internalized these facts are fond of quoting the meme, “Get woke, go broke.” So far, though, the expected bankruptcies and studio shutterings have yet to materialize. That’s a strong indication that woke capital doesn’t adhere to older business models.
A model that better fits the facts is a cross between the Japanese zaibatsu and the front companies run by a cult. Woke capital enjoys both vertical integration–as in oldpub’s paper distribution monopoly–and industrywide networks of fellow travelers eager to give them sweetheart deals.
That’s why the ossified New York publishing house signing talentless token writers to million-dollar book deals while bleeding sales to newpub hasn’t gone under. That publisher’s international parent company has an in with the bank and doesn’t pay taxes, so they can afford to lose 60 million a year.
The fact is that the global economy as we know it should not exist under any known economic theory. If anything goes, it’s possible that Marvel can go on desecrating Stan Lee’s legacy forever.
Economics may not have an answer, but this is where metaphysics steps in. Everything that had a beginning has an end. Everybody thought that woke capital would end up like a bankrupt business. Instead, its final fate is shaping up to be something more like the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Millennials and zoomers won’t remember this, but the USSR was widely perceived as an unstoppable force well into the 80s. The same geopolitics wags now hysterically bleating about Russians stealing elections once assured us that Soviet world dominance was inevitable.
Then one day, the curtain came crashing down to reveal a Potemkin village.
That’s probably what’s in store for woke capital. Small outfits like the Strand are just sacrifices to grease the machine’s gears. That machine will grow in power and influence until it seems unstoppable. The next day we’ll wake up in its rubble.
Don’t take that as an excuse for complacency. Not funding people who hate you isn’t about destroying them. It’s about saving yourself.
