House of Eratosthenes

What is Mara’s job like? Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed “orders” at her, parroting her own “performance” back to her, telling her how she compares with quotas calculated…down to the second…It’s as if the NSA was following you around…and it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest of your life.
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Note what all the technology and bureaucracy that wonderful, noble company has invested hundreds of millions in doesn’t ask her to do. Learn. Think. Reflect. Teach. Inspire. Lead. Connect. Imagine. Create. Grow. Dream. Actually…serve customers.
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The economy doesn’t make stuff anymore. That much you know. So what does it make?

It makes assholes.

The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.

And that’s not just a tragedy. It is something approaching the moral equivalent of a crime. For it demolishes human potential in precisely the same way as locking someone innocent up, and throwing away the key.

Consider Mara again. Who in Christ’s name would design such an inhuman system? Whose sick joke of an idea is a “store” like that? What do you even call it? Because it’s surely not a “store”.

Yes, I have noticed this lately on a subconscious level; when I move my purchases away from one source, toward another one, it seems to be less and less often over some issue involving quality, and more and more often over an issue far simpler. Like a lot of old farts, seems somewhere along the line I have embarked on a new mission to figure out who doesn’t want to do business with me, weeding out who is only pretending to want to do business. And there are more than a few vendors who only go through the motions of it.

Who would design such an inhuman system? I think I may be in a position to say: It is a conflict, as so many things are these days, between process and outcome. The writer errs in the presumption that the outcome must be the fulfillment of a design. I submit that you don’t get here by way of design, you get here by way of a great big jumble of smaller, incremental movements, enacted by a great and vast community of manipulators, which isn’t a community at all because they’re never meeting each other — all driving toward this final nightmare, with not a single one of them laboring away with that image in mind.

So then what were they trying to do? Ah, that answer is even simpler: They were hoping to find one anemic carrot in a thistle-patch full of sticks. “Great idea Barbara, wireless headsets, that’s the ticket.” “Never would have thought of that Steve, sales quotas in real time.” Trying to build up a little tiny bit of credit in their accounts, before the next beat-down.

Column concludes with a bit of welcome wisdom:

We’re obedient constructivists. Pragmatists. Rationalists. So you probably want to know: what can we do about it?

It’s pretty simple.

Don’t be an asshole. Remember the Asshole Factories? Here’s a secret: they’re churning out assholes by the millions. And so should you bravely decide to be an asshole, what you’ll really be is just another interchangeable, forgettable, rapidly depreciating commodity.

So who should you be?

Be yourself. The person you were meant to be. Whether you believe in heaven or the inferno, freedom or fate, the simple fact is: each and every one of us was put here to be something greater than Just Another Asshole stealing pennies from his neighbors to pay off Even Bigger Assholes.

Hat tip to Gerard at American Digest.

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- House of Eratosthenes | 09/28/2015 @ 06:39

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What Does Our Economy Make?Tuesday, September 1st, 2015

What Does Our Economy Make?
Tuesday, September 1st, 2015