LE EPIC CLOWNCURLS MANIFESTO OF AWESOMENESS
WHY DID SHE WRITE THIS CRAP?
Stick It to the Man! is a story about community empowerment, rejecting commodification, and the strength of the working class.
Currencies and values evolve, but capitalism's core purpose remains unchanged: amassing wealth is the most effective way to gain power. Since the birth of commercial technology, competition has risen and fallen in the race to climb to the top of its corporate ecosystem, but artists and workers become disposable in the pursuit of frugality. The modern rise of generative artificial intelligence epitomizes the corporate greed capitalism fosters: it is not financially beneficial for top companies to leave room for inefficiency or invest in art when cheap, fast alternatives exist. This systemically reduces human expression to a commodity.
However, far before the integration of artificial intelligence, art has been the most resilient form of community resistance against corporate harm to the working class. It uniquely recounts historical moments and the political circumstances that affect workers' lives beyond immediate control. By capturing raw history through artistic passion rather than commercial pressure, artists challenge this powerlessness as an intellectual union of storytellers. In times of systemic oppression and economic crises, this is what often sparks revolutionary art movements.
Crucial steps in impactful labor activism are community-building and historical documentation. In 2009, Yahoo! shut down Geocities.com because it was no longer profitable, resulting in a massive loss of personal history and early digital art. In its place, Neocities.org, an open-source, community-funded web hosting service, was created independently to preserve the fading roots of the early, non-commercial Internet by reviving the endangered art of hand-coding personal HTML websites. Inspired by this resistance and many others, Stick It to the Man!, hosted on Neocities.org, is a cautionary tale about the exploitative nature and dehumanizing consequences of late-stage capitalism.
Set in 1999 Manhattan, the comic follows Fyodor Rakovsky, a former Soviet computer scientist. After surviving the Chernobyl disaster and crawling out of Gorbachev’s perestroika, he calculatedly worked his way up to corporate management at a computer shop and is determined to own the company when his boss retires. When Stanley Provan, a young, naïve graphic design intern, accidentally alludes to his involvement in an emerging workplace union, Fyodor coerces him into confirming his greatest fear: a workers' strike scheduled for the turn of the century. At the precipice of the Y2K bug, which would undoubtedly tank the company without employees to prevent its devastation, Fyodor makes it his goal to keep gaining Stanley’s trust and exploit it to protect his hard-earned career.
In both its plot and real-life presentation, Stick It to the Man! represents artistic community organization, rebellion against corporate greed, and political trauma inflicted on the working class.
Suck on that, Musk.
