study political economy.

The glittering mecca that is modern popular culture is a beautiful electronic skin stretched over a vast corporate machine devoted solely to profiting from you. Maybe apocalyptic metaphors aren't the most scientific structure of inquiry, but nonetheless, they do have some dramatic effect, and in this case, is an utterly effective description of the market model. Sure, the advances in technology and in affective quality of life have been vast under the capitalist system, but all have been effected by that vast, shrieking corporate machine, whose true goal is profit. (note three uses of effect/affect/effect, all different meanings. weird.... derrida just rolled over in his grave) Sure, the profits allow those corporations to reinvest into new technologies, and further enhance our 'quality of life,' but at what real cost? Often, the relationship between this disturbing machine and the populace that feeds it is a relatively symbiotic one. Yet consumer interest, the market model's ultimate arbiter and guarantor of equal opportunity, is a fundamentally skewed concept. As Chomsky points out, its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income. We cannot help but observe in our day-to-day interactions with the capitalist system that consumer interest does NOT always dictate business practice. Driving home from the (24 hour) grocery store tonight in the middle of the night, I remarked about how, if it DID always dictate business practice, everything would be open 24 hours a day. Someone might want to buy something at conceivably any time, so in a mythic utopia where consumer interest really did all that neo-cons say it does, stores would be open at .... ANY TIME. But that's not how it works. Sure, it might be patently ridiculous for all stores to be open at all times, but the point stands that there are other forces, more concealed and powerful that fuzzy-wuzzy consumer interest, at work in the market model. Just like in the bastard, flunky political complex it has spawned.

Let's go back briefly to the power of the corporate machine to improve our quality of life. More frightening than the costs of having a profit-oriented corporate machine as the base of our economy, an economy which subsists by bleeding one sector of the population as dry as possible in order to fatten itself, is the troublesome and never fixed concept of 'quality of life.' More specifically, the implications when the very definitions of 'quality of life' are in the hands of that same corporate coalition? Because that is what happens when media, the distributor of ideas is subsumed into the big humming corporate machine (to belabour a metaphor). Okay, well, I've got no problem reassuring myself that the happily brainwashed disciple of the capitalist cult that is the corporate media will totally restrain itself from perhaps, modifying our concept of quality of life so that it's skewed a little bit more... towards their interests? They sure wouldn't have any desire to turn the planet into a nation of fat, consumer whore junkies sitting obediently in front of their televisions awaiting the next message from on high about what to buy. Phew... I'm gonna sleep easy now.

Fuck.

STUDY POLITICAL ECONOMY

"here's american gladiators ... sit there and watch these two pituary retards bang the fuck out of each other ... go back to bed america, your 'government' is in control"

bill hicks, another dead hero