Woo-woo spirituality thrived as a capitalist-compatible response to technocracy’s failures

Evidence

These New Age practices took on the moniker woo-woo, which originated in rationalists’ pejorative name for pseudoscience. Such rationalist critiques began to feel as outdated and shrill as the liberal triumphalism of the Obama era. With technocracy delivering nothing but a hypercapitalist economy and the chaos of Trump’s presidency, woo-woo emerged as a potential counterbalance. Manifesting, astrology, and other mystical practices offered not just solace but also a sense of agency. Most critically, woo-woo aligned perfectly with capitalism, as magical thinking often became a tool for building profitable personal brands and working toward future fortunes. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 602

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘omnivore monoculture’ thesis thread — woo-woo as identity-signaling consumption that flattens into another brandable commodity, paralleling how all difference gets absorbed. — connects to: The technostructure faced a spiritual backlash before its economic collapse — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 205
• QUESTION: Is woo-woo genuinely a counterbalance to hypercapitalism, or just hypercapitalism’s newest face? Marx seems to want both — worth chasing his actual position.