As a child around six years old, my family began filming as subjects in a reality TV program, at the time titled Little People, Big Dreams, and now Little People, Big World. It is evident that we were chosen due to the genetic rarity of my diastrophic Dad and my achondroplasia Mother having twin boys, where one inherited achondroplasia dwarfism and the other did not. Later, two more kids of average height—my older sister and myself.
On top of this, my father had constructed on our many-acred farm an ostensible theme park, with an Old West styled town, a treehouse girdled to an old and massive oak tree, a pirate ship, marooned on the shore of a small pond, itself complete with an island and an edge-to-edge zip-line. And more. There is no possible way in which, retrospectively, I cannot appreciate the privileges afforded to me by my unique upbringing (although with every passing day it becomes less unique. The sheer number it must be, of children now famous being traceable in time through to the ages of infant, toddler, child, and teenager; through both the self-perpetuating online venues i.e. YouTube, Vine, TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter , but also through the larger industries of movies and television. It’s certainly a phenomenon!).
The program, continuing for many years and still filming new episodes at the time of writing this, afforded significant opportunities and a generally improved quality of living, for myself and my family. From a capitalistic perspective it has been a huge success, as evidenced by it still being on the air after more than 300 episodes, or more than 12 years (“'Little People, Big World' Just Broke a Guinness World Record”, Good Housekeeping, 2018). And from other perspectives it has been generally successful, too, though probably necessarily to a lesser degree, since the effort throughout was in to capital and not to other aims. In particular of those has been the aim of spreading general awareness of dwarfism; that, because of this show, chronicling the daily lives of little people—child, adult, and baby—there has been significant education in the general public on their regard, even sprouting several other shows focused on little people (The Little Couple; The Little Chocolatiers; etc.) in the years since. Nevertheless, there have certainly been other aims in their origin, more closely linked to the exploitation through capital of subjects and would-be viewers, enlisted and retained through deception into serving capital themselves.
Having bowed out at my earliest perceived opportunity, I have for a long time been figuring the correct terms and words in which to come to grips with my experience, landing finally on its inverse education. Toward my affinity to democratic socialism. I have had quite a different perspective on the experience as compared to the majority of my family, and to the chagrin of the many fans and supporters of the show. Nevertheless….
Firstly; I believe that the entire edifice of which I had been a part should henceforth cease to exist on the basis that the selling of peoples’ inner lives for the vicarious living of anyone is a dystopian manifestation of capital in entertainment. The instantaneity of possessing information which came with the internet and social medias has fundamentally changed our perceptional goalposts for which informational bits we are lacking and thus owed until we possess them of others.
From vaguely knowing some names and characters, reading sparse interviews, we began watching interviews and picking out the idiosyncrasies that piqued conversation and intrigue in these base people, their names and characters. More interviews, talk shows, more interviewers, more reporting. More conversation. More consumption, more profit. The capitalistic process unfolding…
Then ‘lifestyle’ pieces: “Besides what you already create for people’s entertainment, what are you like? Hobbies? Interests? Favorite food? What does your every day look like? (How can one normal hope to attain you?)” At this the original name or character may rejoice, for it brings more attention, more views, more interest, validation, and, again, more profit—that it also brings immense profit to the hosts of these questioners, the original person may fail to even consider, for the system works for them to a sufficient enough degree. “I will be fine. I’ll eat." That it also forces adherence to and creation of a mass-appeal version of oneself is also gravely unconsidered. There are only but a few relative defectors to this system.
From lifestyle pieces, consumers wanted more, and so now there had to be made use (and profit) of the social lives and interests of not just these desired and admired names and characters—the act, but the consumers, too. Enter social media. Up went the scaffolding, around our entire social interactive sphere. Now there are folks who, once, may temporarily have assumed different names and characters, but have now had to combine all of them into one capital ‘c’ Character (or caricature); a Branded Self. Diversion from this capital (no lost irony) ‘C’ Character means the risking of profit, while proper maintenance means inherently to deceive; for it is a deception, perhaps to both parties, to perpetually ‘put on’ a mask of a character to be sold as genuine, within the proposed genre of reality. It lofts an ideal into existence that has only ever existed to serve as the carrot hung in front of the hare—never attainable, especially by the original name or character who, once assuming many different aspects in their life, is now locked securely to the embodiment of one mass appealing Brand. The whole genre seems to be baked-in with this tendency of becoming a commercial for capitalism: how one is rewarded by following capital, how one might be punished for failing to do so. I thought this to be quite weird, as I participated. Such is my desire to resolve some things about it which now I find having decent language to do so.
It must be a confusion, to believe you want to be this Character. One is made to believe by profitable, petit bourgeois, success, that it is oneself selling something that oneself produces of ones own volition; but in actuality (I won’t use ‘reality’), the Character has been created jointly and evenly by: the mere vestige and caricature of the original, the expectations of the viewer (brought on through the aforementioned system of informational expectations), and by the speculation of the promoter/provider (manifested as production, host, and “parent” companies). This is to say that through mild success, and by the creation of a raving, though minor and localized (to the Character), fanbase, one who finds oneself in the position of being this Character is suddenly switched to believe that the Character is in fact them. This phenomenon reinforces, firmly, belief in, and therefore the continuation of, this business model: of the raver and consumed; under, itself, the all-consuming business model of communicative-capitalism (for more on that see Jodi Dean; multiple[1]).
A peculiarity to me in this market of faux-reality is the frequent infatuation by everyday consumers with those creations and Characters that are successful in material and wealth terms, or made to look such. It may be chalked up to the successful propaganda of capitalism to fetishize success, so that more people may seek it and thus continue the capitalist system, though it would be hard to pin down a central committee that concretely posits such a program. It would seem that the infatuation of the proletariat with the petit bourgeois is self-perpetuated, and for this, the reasons either conscious or no may be guessed at by those more qualified than I. For the point, it suffices to say that because of the speculation of the bourgeoisie on this infatuation, the overseers end up inserting, and this is important, as part of the creation and contradistinction of origin to Character, these “successful” elements into the life-original; elements that never would have been provided or attained, in such a manner or time, otherwise. This situation tells us a few things. First, it emphasizes the blurred lines between a life lived from within, and a life created from without, that come with the sustained exposition of the preexisting inner life. In the process of turning into a product for the outside, the inner life becomes itself outside by that action, and thus the inner life is starved, deprived, and may be eventually paralyzed, until further notice (at such time in foro conscientiae—before the tribunal of conscience). Secondly, success is provided to the life-original only in profane and material ways, i.e. vacation specials; while interest from the consumer is accrued through equally profane drama, centered on explicitly wealthy decisions, i.e. which way should the house be remodeled? What type of pool should they purchase? To reuse the metaphor, only the superficial scaffolding of success is built up.
As for the opposing sacred success of inner fulfillment and peace in this life, it remains starved. This brings me to a third quick point, surmised from the above so-hypothetical-general situation. “Reality” genre’d content seems either to be exploiting the ‘different’, as a circus might (i.e. shows fundamentally concentrated on the obese, there are several); glamorizing the lifestyle of wealth and of idleness, further propagating the alienating function of total individualism, (i.e. Keeping Up With The Kardashians, etc.); or lastly, it may prop up a subject on that so-feeble scaffolding for the wrongheaded and idle minded reason of fad profit, unconcerned with the subjects as they are (i.e. Wife Swap, etc., or some other timely subject under auspices of education, as surely is the defense of The Learning Channel, where so many of these shows find their home).
In a system of marketing such falseness, the neutral subject (neutral as such prior to the objectification of their core life) we see in the last category eventually will themselves be consumed by (or dependent on) the immediate benefits, in a monetary and material sense, and will consequently welcome living off of the propped life of the Character. The problem arises then of dependence on the external capital being pumped into their life, and a loss or blurring of any original self-development or trajectory, uninfluenced or encumbered by the falsity and straw-man nature of petit célébrité. If subjects do in fact accept such a caricature of themselves, as it seems they must in order to participate whatever, they are also accepting the terms for their income—indeed, forfeiting certain freedoms of development as a human being! Living is no longer in service to others from oneself, but service to others by proxy of oneself. I have found, there is Marxist-socialist intellectual background for this displacement of labor and product, though they (the marxist-leninist-socialist intelligentsia of old) likely could never have foreseen the terms, scale, and breadth with which this dialectic is being made manifest.
The “reality” genre thus reveals itself as one-of-many iterations of capital exploiting our trajectory of development as human beings. For, most of the time, the subjects of such content are going about their everyday lives prior to The Offer. Thereafter, the excitement of capital-accrued sweeps them down the line and eventually they find themselves measuring that capital-accrued against their sustained capitulation. There are always agendas and rough storylines to fulfill therein, and they are certainly not spontaneously generated from the mind of the subject. Sure enough, in initial years they may be, but only as a hook to the consumer. Once on the line, the consumer continuously grants that genuineness to the artificial trajectory that takes its place. Thus they are right to say things near the end such as, “These folks have changed,” or something to that effect. Indeed the subject cannot help but be changed by this fundamental switching up of their life-ly routine.
At the same time, however, they had their reasons for agreeing to this , right? Surely the material benefits have improved their life and surely they would do it once again, if offered. . . “I would, at least!”
Having lived my first 6 years unmolested, as it is, by the situation I am describing of entertaining others, I do in fact remember the vestige of ‘normal’; where my mother had three part-time jobs, my dad worked from home while renovating the country house they purchased, from decrepit into a bona fide family home; where our concerns were turned inward into the development of our individual interests as a family; sports and hobbies and so forth. Then, suddenly and for twelve years, cameras swarmed the property, with dozens of adjunct workers beside, and with them came the aforementioned opportunities of travel and income. Suddenly my mother dropped one of her more demanding jobs, then thinned further down to the job that was more her passion. She was afforded that choice. My father was able to taper his already remote work hours off, as he built our property into an attraction of its own, with the novel structures mentioned above, and centering it around seasonal crops and agri-tourism. From a certain perspective, it was the fulfillment of some branded dream, but as I came to learn objectively, our opportunities were afforded to us by sheer genetic luck, and not by the hard-work demanded by so many millions of workers who receive far less. And it is not in spite that I come to these realizations, but in recognition of a system that predicates luck as the feature factor of living a life of privilege; and I recognize it in solidarity with those comrades elsewhere that are not valued (by the proverbial House) so lucky.
It was, within it and self-ish-ly, a positive experience; Hawaii, New York, RV trips, Riverboat cruises, catamarans in the Caribbean; unsolicited gifts; attention; a nicer house. Indeed we had far more than necessary, and all of that extra was externally provided to us by virtue of the show existing and not of our “American values”, our hard work; and of no bootstrap-pulling. (It must be placed here that my parents worked a great deal in their lives before and after the show, for money and also in overcoming stigmas, personal and public, attached to their dwarfism. However our continued level and scope of success has undoubtedly been supplemented by the alien influence of our petit célébrité status. My dad had designs to be as creative as he was able, and verily had the same aspirations, but his ability to execute was, by lottery, given to him and us by the whim of a production company; a person who said, “This sells.” Thereafter, he and our family indeed made use of our new resource; though, I fear, the distinction between original and creation has dissolved. The function of being that sort of petit célébrité, within the reality genre, is to, quite literally, fool the viewers into believing that we lived this life prior to them, and that they were getting a picture of what they might achieve. Such is not true. ’Twas a creation, very early after beginning. We find ourselves now hard-pressed to detach ourselves from this dependency, living a scaffolded life whose expected budget to upkeep the Brand far outpaces our natural capability.)
Why had I been afforded this life? What was special about me? I became certain that not a single thing made me more deserving of this privilege than any other person or family, and while ours had healthcare and security of income provided for us at low physical (though increased mental) expense, others were being deprived of any material comfort whatsoever, and still would be undergoing their own peculiar personal and mental discomforts. As much as I have tried to disavow and have found confusion at my privilege, it is impossible for me to claim myself a victim in any realm, as opposed to the deprived and oppressed masses, struggling in totality.
With my afforded leisure, then, I decided to expand my sphere of comfort, knowledge, and exposure, as I felt was imperative given my position economically. By mere accident of example, my two brothers-in-law from my wife were hugely impactful in my waking up this way. Simple things like dumpster diving for food, traveling by train across the Americas, playing music on the street for the little money that they had or needed; love and empathy; camaraderie among strangers; I learned all this in raw form from them, those comrades of mine. What’s more, among the brothers, Nico and Tomás, the latter had passed before I had the opportunity to meet him physically. And yet, the stories of his life woke me up just the same. He was nonviolent, creative, loving, astute, gentle, and outspoken. He was the epitome, to me, of assuming ones rights as a human being, and a precursor to what I now see as an international comrade. Most of his teaching to me came through his music (his band was called Profane Sass, after being arrested by a police officer who was giving them trouble about playing music on the street. Such was the charge: “profane sass.” After protests to Free Toe, his nickname, he was released). Songs like “No Borders” (Fuck your apologies, / fuck your policies, / fuck the queen and / fuck all the monarchies, / No Bor-ders!), the lighthearted “Chocolate Bar” (Hey Man, I said, “Fuck the government!” / You know that they fucked us first! / They’re always fucking us first!x2 / … The government owes us a million chocolate bars! I want to see that shit stacked up to the fucking stars! All Chocolate should be free! All chocolate should be free!), “Rabinal” (La magia del cosmos esta adentro, / Cada persona y cosa en este existencia / Tenemos que conectar y tener respecto / Los hermanos, hermanas y mamas y pápas / Abuelos, abuelas y todos)[2], and “Los Abandonados” (Este es para los abandonados, donde estan los desaparacidos? / Donde estan, donde estan? / Donde estan en este mundo tan loco? / … Tengo sueno, yo tengo suenos / En este mundo SIN FRONTERAS! / Las mujeres caminando en la noche / Sin miedo, sin miedo)[3]; they could all be folk/punk anthems in line with the best! and indeed they are well known in their own rights and circles. Semi-anachronistic, I place them amongst the vanguard in my awakening. Something about his emotion, intention, and energy while he sang, consistently struck me as real. Opposing the life he had chosen to live as against the one I had lived, the distinction could not have been starker. Self-consumption as compared to solidarity.
He did choose to live the life he did, if only by disgust of our misfunctioning society. He would smile as my wife, eleven years younger, would ask about that poster on his wall, “Mother, should I trust the government?”
“No,” he would likely say. His attitude was and is not uncommon among my generation, certainly. The administrations of Clinton, Bush 1 and 2, and even Obama, all serving the bipartisan interests of capital and her primary handlers, stressed the distrust and discontent that people had with governmental operations; and with capitalism itself. People today generally want the same ideals they demanded in the 1960s and 70s, only in greater numbers and through smarter organizing; no imperialist wars, social programs lifted up, justice for the oppressed, equality among all. Tomás was an explicit voice in this, and from him I have only continued to mature and progress by watching our world unfold; always learning; out to see…
Recently, it has been from the famous historical points of reference, and mainstream intellectuals of the left that I have been seeking exposure; Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler, Frantz Fanon, Alain Badiou, Jodi Dean, Naomi Klein, Ten Days That Shook The World, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks; all these reshaping (and perhaps birthing) my notions of revolutionary politics. For as long as I have been cognizant of them, U.S. politics have been securely stale; stagnant; status quo; the land of moderates. The discourse has been majorly limited in framing, favored to the perceptions of the ruling classes and systems. More and more, dissent and discontent grows among those whose whole lives have seen nearly no time at all in which the United States was not bombing someone; where GoFundMe was not a major healthcare provider; where the climate was not rearing its head in warning in all its devastating ways; in which the working class was so excluded from the concentration of wealth; where jobs paid so little congruent to out of control education debt. These bad times are certainly revolutionary—novel even; and it is past time that politics took a more discursive route in our culture. No longer do I believe that our group trajectory should be drawn up by a cabal of hidden representatives to capital—which will always be bipartisan—it should be drawn by the group itself.
With a democratic socialist being stonewalled from the Democratic nomination in 2016, leading to the catastrophe of Donald Trump, the discontent and demands are at even higher stakes. Though I have lived a life that benefits from the current old-style régime, long predating petit fasciste Trump, I renounce it in favor of a life and society centered on solidarity; one that does not forget nor ignore the inconvenient, and does not create undue misery in the lives of the helpless or voiceless. Bernie Sanders certainly galvanized these feelings and desires in his 2016 run, and gave the political language and sensibilities of democratic socialism to a great many people. Now in 2020 he is running again with even more multiracial and multigenerational support behind him, and people are near to demanding that we try this new way of politics—certainly not unAmerican in its adventure or precedent.
The absolute servitude to capital and its aggregation has led us precisely to this moment of ecological disaster, income disparity as never before seen, concentration of capital that could hardly have been imagined by the most critical of capital, Marx, and of the so many social issues; of homelessness, joblessness, healthcare, mental illness, debilitating stress. This fixture of society, idolization of capital over people, has reached one of its many crisis points, and perhaps even a major one. People are now seeking the genuine and all-serving, as opposed to the singularly self-interested. For, indeed, in a world where we are no longer dealing with merely local problems but planetary ones, we must fundamentally be together, in solidarity, to combat them. We must, in a sense, curtail the utter excess[4] of our individuality alone, and consider our neighbors-in-kind. (In placing the absolute focus on our ability to choose every thing individually and freely, for instance which car we buy, we are delaying the focus on the solidarity-based solution of inter-city biking and walking paths, supplemented by public transportation; with limited personal vehicles for the disabled and long-distance. In choosing the market-based capitalist solution for transportation, in Tesla or electric cars, we are delaying the necessary solutions to address our overpacked cities and the pollution of construction and use of new personal vehicles. There are many changes to be considered, obviously, and this is nothing near to exhaustive.) The point is to realize a revolution of political and social thought and perception by simply adding another alternative, one that is naturally developing before our eyes; albeit forced upon us by our historical realities.
Now is the time for the privileged bourgeoisie populations to sacrifice that title, disperse their focus from the peripheral assumptions of comfort, and toward the work that is wanting, to build and sustain a better world that is serving all those “lucky” enough to be born on the sole habitable planet in this exceptional solar system. It is in terms of that exception that we must view ourselves, for it is, at our current stage, only internationally-minded, worldwide, and in complete solidarity with our fellow human beings that we can achieve a society for the betterment of All; toward magnanimity and pragmatism… and probably our best political path toward this is democratic socialism.
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
— V. I. Lenin
We are surely in those latterly famed and proverbial weeks; as a country we are poised to substantiate further the democratic socialist movement for decades to come, certainly in the United States but also in the world through the connections to our many international struggles regarding the climate, imperialism, and the refugees therein. And yet, even presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders cannot save us from the charge that “we are the ones that we’ve been waiting for.” So we must resolve to be the difference instead of promising we will be. Educate oneself and others; step outside your inherited boundaries; organize with others, all in solidarity…
[1]: First encountered in Comrade: an Essay in Political Belonging (2019, Verso), though she mentions it initially and in more detail elsewhere, as she formulated the theory herself.
[2]: The magic of the cosmos is inside, / Every person and thing in this existence / We have to connect and have respect / Brothers, sisters and moms and dads / Grandparents, grandmothers and all
[3]: This is for the abandoned, where are the disappeared? / Where are they, where are they? / Where are you in this crazy world? / … I have a dream, I have dreams / In this world WITHOUT BORDERS! / Women walking at night /No fear, no fear
[4]: Bernie Sanders wrote that “the American economy is based on the production of goods which are useless,” and that American society “breeds misery.” Source: Paul Sperry via Twitter. Though Paul meant it disparagingly, it is an astute assessment, by all accounts. In jest do I use this example, and not something from the mass of literature on that particular charge of culture.
{For resources on local left and democratic socialist chapters visit (and join!) The Democratic Socialists of America by going to their website, DSA.org.
Also, Haymarket Books is an independent left/political publisher of a wide range of authors and topics; along with the publisher Verso. I highly recommend looking at their catalogues.
For generally lighter but no less substantive reading, check out Jacobin magazine, among other periodicals from the political left… Monthly Review; Dissent; Socialist Review…}