ROGER'S DIARY OF THE END TIMES: Branding your royals, having your food delivered and waiting for the final moments.

There was a time when hereditary monarchies enforced the head of the family's whims by means a tad stronger than appearances with their attorneys in trademark court. Consider Henry VIII's six marriages. Of course no reason whatever remains for there to be any such thing as a hereditary monarchy (precedents exist for this sort of cleansing, too).

This brings us to the End Times Branding Department.

Harry and Meghan show anger at palace over loss of royal branding, by Jamie Doward (The Guardian)

Sussexes say monarchy has no jurisdiction over use of word ‘royal’ overseas

The couple’s Instagram account uses the name SussexRoyal, as does a website they set up following their shock decision to stop carrying out official royal duties in favour of financial freedom. Both will have to be rebranded.

Maybe they need to consider guerrilla marketing.

In other news from the apocalypse's cusp, I posted a brief piece at Food & Dining Magazine about problems with food delivery services, which might be summarized thusly: The more you seek to make things easy for yourself, the harder things get for everyone else.

Edibles & Potables: About food deliveries, domains, tipping and reconciliation

“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.”
― Confucius

Where I live the options for food delivery used to be simple. Many pizza parlors did it, and maybe a few Chinese restaurants. These were the alternatives to going to the eatery itself to pick up your order, or if it got to be too late in the evening and driving wasn’t an option, tearing into your stash of emergency past-date sardines and stale Saltines.

(They pair well with beer, but I digress.)

These days amid the post-apocalyptic, neoliberally electronic, service-oriented economy, food delivery services have become ubiquitous, and so have issues arising from them. The evolution of these discussions can be confusing, to say the least ...

Learning from Megxit: Our device-driven "bread and circuses (while we remain) supine in the face of the social and democratic collapses."

Amid this analysis of the British royal family's latest effort to confirm its own senselessness, there's a very valuable point that I wish I'd found the words to describe.

First, the pitch.

The Real Megxit Deal, by John Davis (CounterPunch)

In a move that reflects the time-worn pathologies of powerful aristocratic families, the House of Windsor has agreed to allow the Queen’s grandson, Harry, currently sixth in line to the throne, and his California-born wife, Meghan, to leave the family business (The Firm) and attempt to establish independent lives in Canada, a former colony which remains a member of the British Commonwealth. This represents their exile from the territorial, ceremonial, financial, and emotional heart of the royal family.

The gimcrack contrivance of the constitutionally constrained modern royal family was immediately apparent upon its founding in the late seventeenth century.

Now, the section with universality quite apart from the United Kingdom.

Enthralled by freshets of free entertainment enabled by personal electronic devices, and the increasing availability of cheap consumer goods brought directly to one’s attention by those self-same devices, we exist in a perfect storm of twenty-first century bread and circuses – supine in the face of the social and democratic collapses that fester under such conditions of popular disinterest, inattention and apathy.

Royalty, heads of state, captains of industry, sports and entertainment stars offer up their lives in service to the insatiable maw of those who trade information for the privilege of exposing consumers to targeted advertising. They are but the tip of the pyramid, the base of which consists of all those who contribute cat videos, personal vignettes and the like to social media. Goods routed to consumers, along global supply routes and hub and spoke distribution networks, do so only upon the initial capture of their consumers’ attention on, most often, the tiny screens of their devices. (The actual production of those goods remains largely hidden from their consumers eyes, spread across the planet, most often in areas of poverty-wages, pollution and environmental vulnerability).

Brand Sussex, Karl Marx and why pitchforks matter.

Harry and Meghan are seceding from the monarchy -- well, except for Harry's inheritance. It's a useful reminder that inherited wealth and not "inventing a better mousetrap" is where the One Percent got all that money in the first place.

Seen in this harsh light, amok capitalism and hidebound feudalism have quite a lot more in common than might be evident. This said, I wish Brand Sussex much luck; someday they may even appear on the cover of Extol Magazine.

But there's really no reason whatever why any of us should give a damn. 

Harry, Meghan and Marx at The Economist

Brand Sussex represents the biggest threat to the monarchy so far

 ... The Sussexes are doing something new. They are embracing capitalism in its rawest, most modern form: global rather than national, virtual rather than solid, driven, by its ineluctable logic, constantly to produce new fads and fashions.

This type of capitalism is the inverse of feudalism. In a feudal society you are bound to your followers by mutual bonds of obligation. In 21st-century capitalism you accumulate followers in order to monetise them. In a feudal society you are bound to plots of land: Harry is the Duke of Sussex while his elder brother is the Duke of Cambridge. In a 21st-century-capitalist society you are propelled around the globe in pursuit of the latest marketing opportunity. It is only fitting that the principal agent of the current debacle, Meghan Markle, is the product of an entertainment business that has done more than any other industry to fulfil Marx’s prediction that “all that is sacred” would be “profaned” and “all that is solid” would “melt into air”.

snip

The daylight that Walter Bagehot said should not be let in upon the magic of monarchy is as nothing to the glare of 21st-century capitalism.