The following text is a rebuttal to “Marie Condo (sic) is a a Psyop and we need stuff” from the February 2025 issue of Hammer Times, an offline journal.

After stumbling upon “Marie condo(sic) is a psyop and we need stuff,” we felt inspired to offer a rebuttal in what we hope can be taken in good faith. The author wrote several points we agree with and several we absolutely disagree with, and we will note those here:

We agree that it is ineffectual and possibly even “harmful” to shame people into purging their belongs. The correct amount of belongings looks different for every individual. Purging is a spiritual and emotional process that should not be done under duress or judgement from without the body. The intimacy of purging a beloved pair of boots worn during a crime is no different than the religiosity of the black flame expunging the building/vehicle/flag during said crime. Destructing is beautiful and should only be done to encourage and reinforce one’s autonomy, not at the behest of another’s opinions or judgements.

We also agree that possessions can carry complicated feelings, much more than Marie Kondo’s English-limited “Joy”. Objects and possessions are complicated and have different energies and spirits imbued within them. The sweater from your abuser may be your favorite piece of clothing. A hidden stash may be a reminder of your multi-year sobriety. Some objects may be hyper-objects, including an expanded geographical-temporal expanse within them. The trick with these more complicated possessions is to be able to determine which are adding a net positive to your life and your autonomy, and which are detracting from them. Complicated objects may be a reminder that you have emotions or events that still require processing.

Our first disagreement comes in the second sentence of your text:
We are all just trying to hold onto and maintain human culture, which is made of stuff, and that, with the distance of time becomes artifact.

We couldn’t disagree more.

Not everyone is interested in maintaining “human culture”. Some of us are far more interested in dismantling the anthropocentric civilization we find ourselves trapped in. We desire the destruction of this plastic archive of the civilized human experience that has wreaked havoc on this planet for the last ten thousand years. We aim to burn these archives so that we may become free again.

Don’t worry though, your plastic “stuff” will outlive us, you, and everyone you love.

Human culture is not defined by creating and having possessions, and many non-human animals also have what we might call tools, possessions, or in your words, stuff.

We are not misanthropes, and we reject the limits you put on human culture that it is merely “made of stuff”.

Our cultures are more than creating, maintaining, and trading our possessions. Aren’t yours?

Alienation/labor/climate aside, we encourage you to attempt to parse out the “imbued” emotions you put into your favorite t-shirt from the imbued emotions put in by the 12 year-old Bangladeshi worker who created it.

Lastly to the misstep of utilizing possessions as a history of who we are or were, we assure you that the erasure of objects is not the same as the erasure of a people. Ethnic cleansing, gentrification, and gendered violence do not rely solely on the removal of physical objects or locations to achieve “erasure”. Our cultures are not defined by the objects that we have. A religious text book is not a religion, a bodega is not a community, an outfit is not a gender. The beauty of the sociohuman experience is with the intangible and abstract. We do not require possessions to know who we or our friends are. Do you?

Forever against the archive of artifacts.
History is written in actions, not possessions.