On September 8, 2022, the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II was reported dead.
The royal family officials announced that the queen “died peacefully” on Thursday afternoon at Balmoral Castle, her estate in the Scottish Highlands. Her son Charles, 73, is now king and will be known as King Charles III. Officials said he remains at Balmoral and will return to London on Friday. And outside of Buckingham Palace in London, hundreds of mourners gathered to lay flowers and pay their respects as a double rainbow arced overhead.
“Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II embodied the British nation’s continuity and unity for over 70 years,” said French President Emmanuel Macron. Multiple touching cartoon tributes depicting the Queen reuniting with her beloved Prince Philip were created. But the United Kingdom is not the whole world. What does this mean for the rest of us, commoners and post-industrial peasants?
“Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was more than a monarch. She defined an era,” said President Biden and the first lady in a White House statement. “We send our deepest condolences to the Royal Family, who are not only mourning their Queen, but their dear mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Her legacy will loom large in the pages of British history and the story of our world.”
There was a time before the queen was even born when only the excess of production was exchanged. Then a time came when all products, all industrial presence, had passed into commerce when the whole of production depended upon exchange. And finally, a time when everything that men considered inviolable became an object of exchange of traffic and could be alienated.
“She was the first British monarch to whom people all around the world could feel a personal and immediate connection—whether they heard her on the radio as a young princess speaking to the children of the United Kingdom, or gathered around their televisions for her coronation, or watched her final Christmas speech or her Platinum Jubilee on their phones. And she, in turn, dedicated her whole life to their service”
Joe Biden, The White House
Back in 2019, The now passed monarch posted two images to the royal family’s account of a letter written by Charles Babbage. The “first computer pioneer” wrote the letter to Prince Albert in 1942. The Queen made the post from an iPad to the official Royal Family Instagram account, which has 4.6 million followers. She also sent her first email in 1976 and even recorded her annual Christmas message in 2012. The Queen was online before she died.
In other times, when only the excess of production was exchanged, everything seemed to be more “real”. If you wanted to see the queen, or the pope, for that matter, you would have to be there in person. Or just never see her and mythologize an image of what she could’ve looked like, or what her voice sounded like. No marketization turned abstract by a monetary value and exchange: No screens, Twitter, or pixels.
According to French sociologist, philosopher, and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard, “People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contact therapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food”.
Everything accelerates, and the queen dying is a sign of a time that is to come, and another that is truly ending.
Heritage is something that is passed on from generation to generation. On the other hand, culture is the way of life of groups with the same values and beliefs. The constant demise of all values places us in a state that is flooded by memes, bad music, lazy television, and mindless consumption. The queen dying is a vision of a future lacking heritage and a numb culture that continues to exploit the poor for more consumption.
the queens bereal today pic.twitter.com/a0jO1HNLsh
— megan (@owIjude) September 8, 2022
Clout, drip, sauce, fame: none of it is real. What can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? The system seeks to exploit and it will continue to do so. And we all fall for this trap time and time again. When they announced that the queen was dead, some cried, others made memes, and others talked about the broken state of religion and culture. We will see the royal and sacred fly away; then, we’ll look around and realize that we are surrounded by Addison Rae, Takis, and a million frogs and toads that sing the national anthem of the machine.
Is the “system” the only deceitful and evil presence in this world?
Give a man or a woman economic prosperity, such that he or she should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat Oreos and Cheetos and busy themselves with reproducing and fucking. And even then, out of sheer ingratitude and sheer spite, man and woman would play you some nasty trick. They would even risk their Oreos and Cheetos and would consciously desire the most fatal trap, the most uneconomical trick, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense their fantastic element. It is just their fantastic dreams, their vulgar madness, that they will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to themselves that men and woman are still men and woman and not the keys of a piano.
