It’s depressing how difficult it is to imagine an alternative universe where Kurt could have made it to 40 and still been Kurt.

Maybe somewhere out there was a 90s with better solutions to mental health problems then “just do heroin until you can’t stand it any more then kill yourself” and we’d have a few thousand more artists running around.

But would it have been enough? I feel like he’d hate the world we built.

Corporations psychopathically wrung every penny they could from his life, art and obvious misery. They didn’t show the slightest remorse for their part in his tragic, lonely death, instead just revealing in the feed frenzy it caused and the millions it put into their bank accounts.

But even after watching them feed artists into the woodchipper over and over again, we still didn’t burn it down. We didn’t even get angry. We just let the neoliberalism wash over us, settling into it like a lukewarm bath.

He couldnt stand racism, homophobia, fundamentalism and toxic masculinity. He was angry, hurt and disillusioned so he wrote poetry and music and put it into the world.

Now the angry, hurt, dissilussioned kids just make far-right memes because a social media exec decided letting them get groomed was worth it for 14c worth of ad impressions.

I just don’t see how he could have made it here, watching everything he hated packaged up in plastic and sold to the world, unable to even hide away with his little family because for a few years he was the hot new product.

I think its a massive improvement. Reddit did next to nothing about astro-turfing and vote manipulation. Lemmy gives people the tools needed to detect inorganic content.