John Gordillo: Love Capitalism

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It’s not enough that capitalism is inescapable, John Gordillo argues. Now it wants to be your bezzie mate too. But Gordillo does not want to be capitalism’s mate. He doesn’t want to rate everything from pornography to the Grand Canyon on a five-point scale, only to have his likes and dislikes fed back to him by an algorithm. So why can’t he stop himself?

Gordillo is a ferociously smart man, and his catalogue of chummy adverts is by turns hilarious and infuriating. Yet the vision he describes is almost too ambitious for an hour: a dystopian existence where life is boiled down to a series of consumable experiences, in response to which we shatter our personalities into exploitable consumer drives. But, you know, funny.

It’s a credit to Gordillo that the laughs are consistent as he sketches this out, but recent events in his personal life have prompted a powerful, if still ragged new ending – like adverts on Facebook, the show has morphed to reflect new data. Once these changes have solidified, this might eventually be one of the most interesting shows on the Fringe.

Until then, it’s a powerful and funny reminder that not everything can be ranked and categorised. Three stars, would recommend to a friend.