Astral Codex Ten

Walmart

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Walmart

Article

Walmart is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 30, 2021 and December 31, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “a Walmart catalogue”; ""woke capitalism”, where Wal-Mart or Amazon or whoever would put their corporate logos in rainbow colors”; “companies have done a better job making Zoomers feel like expensive products are part of the good life (e.g. shopping at Walmart vs. Whole Foods)“. It most often appears alongside 4chan, Chapo Trap House, CIA.

Metadata

  • Category: Brands
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: December 31, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: Double Fold
April 30, 2021 · Original source
Even though it’s possible to make educated guesses about how much a certain publication might be valuable to future historians – e. g. Barack Obama’s memoirs are more important that a Walmart catalogue – it’s very hard to predict what will be used by a future researcher and what won’t. The best guess is simply that anything might be valuable at some point. During the last two centuries, historians have broadened their interest from an almost exclusive focus on political and military history to things like social and economic history or the history of women and people of color. To a historian in 1850, information about the historical prices of bread, the use of cutlery, or the travel speeds of different kinds of merchant vessels might seem like footnotes to real history at best. A century later, Fernand Braudel used nothing but information of this sort to weave together a groundbreaking new history of medieval and early modern Europe. It is reasonable to assume that 21st- and 22nd-century historians will keep expanding their field in similar ways.
Inline links: weave together
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
In 2014, armed with this model, I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. For the previous few years, the social justice movement had been the dominant intellectual paradigm in online spaces (and increasingly offline too). The movement had started with the same people who start all trends - starving bohemian artists, poor people on the fringes of society, hip college kids. Beginning around 2008 it spread like wildfire among all the most popular and clued-in people I knew - all my favorite slightly contrarian bloggers, all the most interesting people at my college. But by 2014, it was starting to get embarrassing. We'd already seen the beginnings of "woke capitalism", where Wal-Mart or Amazon or whoever would put their corporate logos in rainbow colors for gay pride day and then everyone would praise them and talk about how they were striking a bold blow against the entrenched forces of the kyriarchy. Hillary Clinton, 25-year-contender for America's least cool person, was giving speeches about male privilege and rape culture. The Instagram pages of the hippest, most counterculture people in the country sounded exactly the same as the lectures corporate consultants gave at mandatory educational workshops. According to Bell's theory there was no way this was a stable situation.
And so I predicted that hip young people would go far-right. Nobody would confuse them with the maximally-uncool people, the obese white Boomer who shops at Wal-Mart and plasters their car with anti-Obama bumper stickers. And it would distinguish them from the corporate consulants and Hillary Clintons of the world. A few hip young people seem to have tried this - I think this was a little bit of what gave the alt-right its original appeal, especially after Clinton's speech.
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
Cue commenters yelling at him for feeling like he “needs” to shop at a nice grocery store, and him very reasonably responding that the question asked about “feeling financially successful”, not about what he “needs”. So one interpretation of this question is that companies have done a better job making Zoomers feel like expensive products are part of the good life (e.g. shopping at Walmart vs. Whole Foods). I endorse this: I’m in the same social class as my parents, but I remember them shopping at the same grocery store as the poor people in their hometown, whereas I mostly shop at upscale hippiesh places.