Corporate America is on Life Support
In a lecture from 2011, called The Coming War On General Computing, Cory Doctorow makes some pretty brilliant predictions on how legislators (in tandem with corporations) will try their damnedest to curb internet piracy, and in doing so, continuously shoot themselves in the foot, as said pirates will always be a step ahead. This legislation, that will only grow more direct and authoritarian as tech companies grow, will make it impossible for the average person to have control over their own products. Due to the fact that every aspect of our life is an appendage of some computing mechanism, the corporation who produces these computers can break the device on a whim, if they detect that there is any 3rd party interference.
From your car, to your TV, to even some people’s refrigerators, our lives are woven together in a fabric of computation. We live in a bizarre hyperreality, where the official end to a device, of which it may be labeled as such, is really just a computer in disguise. Even more so, it is a computer that runs algorithms, is connected to wifi, and has direct contact to its proprietary network where it feeds information to a central computer about who you are. The inventions that made our lives so free and endlessly beautiful in the 19th and 20th centuries, have become what essentially encage us in the 21st. A father and son can no longer work on some old El Camino, alas it is computerized and proprietized to the point no average person could work on it, even if the corporation allowed it.
Through the ever-expanding need for the corporation to achieve a monopolistic end, like a skinwalker, it will willingly go through a process of malformation to become its enemy, in order to gobble up competition. What we are seeing with the overfeminization of the workplace, the bureaucratization of every person’s job, and the focus on centralization, is really just what corporations do in a kneejerk reaction to conforming to the times. However, this isn’t really just an issue with corporations, it is the outcome of any group trying to expand. The ultimate end to a government is to have more power, the ultimate end to a charity is to garner more donations, the ultimate end to a corporation is to find the most efficient way to garner more profit, to honor its obligation to its shareholders. The compulsion to become so overlysanitized, so unhealthfully and spiritually rotten to its core, and embody the dystopia that the 1985 film Brazil laid out of the overbureaucratization of modern life, is simple efficiency to achieving its ends.
And so goes the America we once knew. Rather than being the trend-buckers, we became artistically inept, and have actively discouraged thinking outside of the box, in every facet of our culture, as to prioritize the maintenance of the machine. We reached a point in this nation where the big few corporations who run everything can no longer find a more competent way to run things, and so in this era of diminishing returns, out of survival, the hivemind of corporate America simply seeks to maintain itself as the room for expansion has been met.
In trying to maintain the machine, we have made it a religious priority to keep the tradition of oppression and equality-worship alive. We aren’t living unless we are developing systems to create equitable futures for minorities without opportune dispositions™. The post-WWII regime was built on fighting inequality, and it will die doing so, because it knows nothing else. So to continue its journey, and I’d argue it’s been doing this for a couple decades now - many aspects of our culture are less inclined towards starting new innovations, but simply borrowing from already tested versions, and making them more efficient. When comparing the personality of a pre-2000s vehicle, to something from now, the objective of both vehicles is very obvious. Older ones prioritize creating a new bandwagon (like Chrysler did with the Town & Country, or Mazda did with the Miata). Newer ones prioritize trying to look as fancy and round as possible, as to turn the knob of gaudy and safety as far as possible without compromising any quality.
There’s a focus on trying to get the most out of the least little bit, and computer algorithms have helped with that venture, but it all goes back to the corporation’s need to stick with the times. Unfortunately, it does this worse and worse, as the culture of the West has become so broken apart from what it once was, all the modern corporation can do is actively silence the voices and views it just can’t market to out of principle, and focus on the ones it can (the ones who spend the most of their discretionary income), and that happens to be liberal innercity types and women.
In its trek to try and create the least offensive product and advertising possible, the modern corporation has to make its base advertising not have any kind of offense made against minorities, fat people, or women (AKA, people who spend a lot). In an attempt to avoid making offense, because the average American is so focused on harm avoidance, the mission towards the most efficient corporation based on this, has made sure it can collect every crumb of profit possible while maintaining adherence to a population of harm avoidant, feminized, entitled people that seek their bidding to be tended to perfectly. It’s what happens when a culture gives itself up to focus on its gluttonous consumerism, and that’s simply what every organization in the West had to do. It really goes hand-in-hand with lowering native birthrates, and the importation of immigrants - everything is focused on selling to people who spend money, and those people are just not who they used to be. (see Grubhub commercials vs. any commercial pre-1970s). And these newly-imported minorities simply seek to enjoy the fruits of the cardboard cutout culture of America that now exists, rather than maintaining the best of the old one.
There’s only so far it goes, however, and I think deglobalization is a good sign. I think people will start to favor skill and quality, than having as many things as they can get their grubby mitts on. These corporations are simply screaming for more profit, but they’re caught in a loop of having to become more efficient to appeal to absolutely everybody. Unfortunately, appealing to a populace of poor saps who make less and less money isn’t that profitable in the long-term, but honestly it’s all they got. Don’t be surprised when cars start to look like round orbs so as to not offend any focus group. Unknowing to the focus groups, or the corporations it seems, is that the corporation creates the new trend, not the people, and in the days of the Town & Country, America was a bit more savvy with taking risks. Now, it’s quite clearly the opposite, and every corporation does its best to appeal to every group, while simultaneously appealing to none. It tries to live up to trends that it used to create. It focuses on overcomputating everything, creating the best algorithm, and making sure its products artificially create more business through making sure people have to bring their products in for maintenance, rather than giving the customer freedom to fix and edit products that they own.
It seems that the free market led itself into its own disaster. It utilized its power over governments to make sure it can maintain its copyright over everything it makes, while in the process, damning anyone who tries to buck any trends through regulation. A free market’s trend towards authoritarianism is self-evident, as numerous times throughout history, it was either a giant market collapses or active actions of the government, that kept giant corporations in line. Which, what really separates a modern corporation from an ancient horde or roving gang of bandits? It has an obligation to itself to expand, and in doing so, destroys everything in its path. We are simply at the critical mass of capitalism.
And I don’t want to hear from double-digit IQ libertarians who try to separate the free market from capitalism - no, the natural direction for a corporation is to maintain its ability to expand, and it will do everything in its power to keep expanding. You see, idealists never really like to take into account the real world because it muddies the waters of their idealistic visions of a perfect world with perfect economic and political systems. Unfortunately, reality isn’t idealistic. There will always be governments eager to take advantage or blackball a corporation’s sustainability in favor of doing a little something for said governments (and vice versa!). These powers are always actively working against each other, which makes corporations a bit more survivalistic than profit-motivated. If they need to sacrifice their image if it means to keep some angry libs from boycotting them, they will do exactly that. They do not care about profit first, but rather staying alive. This is all-the-more exacerbated by the diminishing returns of our modern economy.
This is why, for many libertarians, they find themselves in a rough spot when they think companies have the right to discriminate, but said companies are happy to take that discrimination factor as far as they can against conservatives and libertarians. At some point, you have to step back and see these corporations from a medieval mindset (maybe even a bronze age one) where they’re simply just lords trying to keep what they already have, or hordes trying to maintain their ability to expand their loose confederal empire. They will mince words, take regime political positions, sell their customers’ information to governments, create algorithms to collect data on you, hire Pinkertons to come rough you up, and do everything in their power to achieve their goal of profiteering. So rather than standing for them or against them, simply react. Understand that their goal is nothing elaborate, and that when a beast is in simple fight or flight, it doesn’t matter what its innermost goals are, when its target is you.
The computation of modern life is almost a reaction, itself. Corporations took the most profit-maximizing aspects of modern technology, and took it as far as possible. That’s why we haven’t experienced the great singularity yet, because there is none, but rather such great advancements we dreamed of in the 20th century have become one single dream of the most profit-maximized algorithms possible. But unlike what many conspiracy theorists will have you think, these algorithms will only act as means to sell to you, and nothing more. They act as a culling tool to keep as many of the sheep in their pen as possible.
“…For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf-paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun,
To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their devious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred groove,
Along which all their lives they move…”
An excerpt from my favorite poem, The Calf Path, by Sam Walter Foss