Capitalism is reshaping our fantasies

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]So, latestage capitalism has people romanticizing captivity. I've come across a couple of these Tik Tok videos that say things like, "Date idea. You kidnap me and keep me forever." This video has almost 50,000 likes. Now, I'm not here to diagnose strangers on Tik Tok. I myself play a lot of visual novel games with yandere themes. So, unfortunately, I'm not judging from some moral high ground. I'm right there with you. But, I think the responsible thing to do is to question why fantasies like this are so popular right now. You see, under latestage capitalism, even our fantasies have a budget. Obviously, the appeal is not a realistic depiction of being kidnapped. The fantasy is what if someone wanted you so badly. You didn't have to compete for affection, housing, food, attention, stability, or a future.

[00:00:45]There's no uncertainty or unknown.

[00:00:47]Someone is choosing that for you. What if your bills, your rents disappeared because someone kept you? Loneliness disappears because someone's obsessed with you. Obviously in real life that's horrifying. It's captivity. But sometimes fantasy takes shape of whatever reality has stolen from us. And right now people are starved for security, starved for time and connection and spaces where relationships can develop without everything costing money. So we're not imagining freedom. Some people are imagining being possessed by someone or at least someone appealing enough to make the cage feel velvet lined. All this has me rereading Alexandra Colintai. Coland Tai, one of the early Bolevik feminists, wrote constantly about how capitalist society deforms love, marriage, and family life. In communism in the family, she said that capitalist marriage has been truly a chain for working people. Her vision of a new society was love as a union of affection and comradeship between equals. And in her thesis on communist morality, she wrote that jealous and possessive attitudes towards the person you love had to be replaced with camaraderie and respect for their freedom. Obsessive love looks a lot more appealing when ordinary life feels this unstable and disposable. So just like Colintai and the early Bolsheviks creating a new socialist society, deciding what that would look like, we need to ask questions. What kind of society is making love feel like ownership? There's this very famous early Soviet poster that features a quote from Lenin. Every kitchen maid must learn to govern the state. It's not about romance, but it is about the distribution of power and labor and a reflection of what society was before this. Linen argued in 1917 that ordinary people, women especially, those dismissed as just laborers, cooks, unskilled workers. Everyone should be brought into the capability of governing and deciding what society looks like.

[00:02:34]We're all deserving of something better, that we're all capable of learning and keeping power in the hands of the elite and the kind of people that that creates is the real danger. He wrote that we must break the idea that only the rich are capable of running the state.

[00:02:48]Talking about and creating a more communal life also becomes about freeing women from private dependency. Freeing all vulnerable people from private dependency. When we think about our future, it can't be about finding another man, a better man to own you. We want to build a society where no one has to be owned to survive. But yes, like enjoy your spooky little fictional captor if that's your thing. But ask the hard questions. Why does that sound relaxing? Why does being chosen obsessively sound better than being free casually? Why does the fantasy of losing autonomy sometimes feel less frightening than the reality of paying rent, dating apps, isolation, and the collapse of public life? Again, I don't mean the king shame. I mean to capitalism shame.

[00:03:35]The fantasy is not the problem. But what causes us to lean into these fantasies specifically might be