By Situation Theatre 24/11/2019

We’re a satirical site with a serious mission.

For the unitiated, Patreon is a crowdfunding membership model to help sustain the lives and businesses of writers, musicians, podcasters, visual artists and other capital-city lunatics.

It’s a useful way for individuals and collectives to sustain creative and activist pursuits without resorting to gambling adverts, busking in a climate emergency driven hail storm, or working for Westpac.

Here are six reasons why becoming a Situation Theatre patron will not just make you feel all warm inside, but help build the power of media for the many, not the billionaires.

1. You Want To Fund An Antidote To Establishment Poison

If you’ve watched the news, read a newspaper, or hopped onto the SMH online lately, you might have noticed that on the whole, the media is God awful. Setting aside outlets like The Guardian, Crikey, New Matilda, Schwartz Media, and those good journalists left at the Nine newspapers and ABC suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, our media consists of Murdoch pustules bursting graphically onto the Internet, or centrist hacks equating Nazis and environmentalists. Situation Theatre can help explain why eco-fascist death cults are in fact worse than eco-socialists with dreams of a liveable future.

2. You Recognise Capitalism Still Exists and Paying For Stuff Is Still A Thing

While the utopia lying anywhere on the spectrum between democratic socialism and communism is just around the corner, for the minute, exchanging money for goods and services is still common. Unbeknownst to the Trump family, labour does have value and deserves to be rewarded. While this won’t always the case, the dominant way to recognise value under our sick and twisted society is to put a price on it. This explains why the fact that women do thousands of hours of unpaid work each year is the ultimate expression of patriarchal capitalist bullshit.

3. You Value Our Analysis And Satire

You’d like to support journalism which the billionaire press would never do, like this piece called Here’s 194 Ways The Coalition Have Fuelled These Bushfires. They Have Blood On Their Hands, this one titled It’s Almost As If Causing Offence Is A Deliberate Distraction From The Government’s Climate Crimes or this article headlined We Don’t Have A Government. We Have A Plaything Of The Coal Industry And Murdoch Press.

You’d also like to support satire which exclusively and explicitly targets the 1%. You’d like to read more articles like 10 Million Australians Devote Thoughts And Prayers To Ensure Missing PM Stays Missing, PM’s Empathy Consultant Wonders If Her Time Would Be Better Spent With Human Clients, and Europe Swamped By Illegals As White People Go Back To Where They Came From.

4. You Enjoy The Links We Share

You’ve followed us for weeks, months, or years, and get a kick out of the kind of the satire, memes, videos, and analysis we pass on.

5. You’d Like To Continue Reading Situation Theatre As We Cover The UK Election, US Election, Increasing Climate Protests, And The Horrifying Time Lapse Train Wreck That Is Australian Politics

It’s no exaggeration to say the next 12 months will determine much of the future of life on Earth. In less than a year, Prime Minister Corbyn and President Sanders could begin forming a solidaristic international socialist movement which is rolling out a Green New Deal, backed by millions of people around the world out on a general strike for the climate. Such a coalition would boost support for The Greens here in Australia and put enormous pressure on the Labor Party to re-ignite the light on the hill.

Alternatively, BoJo and ScoMo could be congratulating DoTru on a dignified and honest second Presidential victory and we may as well set fire to all of Earth’s forests ourselves.

Hopefully, you’d like to follow Situation Theatre’s coverage of all of these developments and are willing to help cover costs associated with the website, newsletter, PO Box, and paying a writer part-time. As much as we’ve enjoyed exploiting our own labour over the past five years, earning a living wage and avoiding debt would also be cool.

6. You’d Like To Help Grow Situation Theatre

Everything we’ve done so far has been produced on a budget of $0. Imagine what we could do on a budget of $10 or even more! There’s great potential here to publish more original satire, analysis, reviews, memes, and videos than ever before, to start publishing the work of other leftists (ideally all sorts of eco-socialists, eco-anarchists, eco-feminists, and many other folks who are anti the end of the world), to hire talented artists, activists, and social media boffins, and perhaps to create the world’s first podcast featuring white people.

All this and much more is possible with our powers combined.

Membership Levels

You may have noticed that we have not set actual rewards for the different levels of membership, and this is for a couple of reasons. Mostly, we want to spend as much time as possible producing quality content, rather than shipping “Down with Capitalism” and “Shame” stickers to your mailbox. Also, hierarchy and material rewards are much less cool than equality and intrinsic motivation (except when it comes to funding Situation Theatre of course. In that case material rewards are obviously best).

We have faith that the reasons above will be sufficient for many of you to back us.

But check back in a week to see the fantastic selection of stickers on offer.

Whether You Decide To Become A Patron Or Not, Thank You

Perhaps these reasons haven’t convinced you. Perhaps you can’t afford it, or perhaps you already give money to a range of other Australian democratic socialist satirical websites.

Either way, thank you for supporting our stuff on social media with likes, comments, and shares.

Thank you for reading our content through Facebook, Twitter, or our newsletter.

And thank you for being part of the Situation Theatre family (sure it’s a pretty distant family and we never see each other, but isn’t that like many families under capitalism?).

We’d like to keep all our content ad-free, and accessible forever more for those who can’t afford to pay for it.

For those who can, we’d love you to join us.

Sharing this article with your friends and family and signing up to our newsletter are other great ways to join the struggle against centrist and right-wing propaganda.