Company of Zeros

Above her, beneath her, and around her, the Machine hummed eternally; 
  she did not notice the noise, for she had been born with it in her ears.
- The Machine Stops

Corporate Culture is Anti-Culture

To enjoy, with servile delight, gnawing at the center of humanity in the pursuit of profit is to fall in love with the emptiness and loathing you have inside of you. To free yourself of blame and guilt; To gladly surround yourself with unquestioning idolatrous minds; To want for the construction of self-resonant echo chambers; To reject the dangers of reality and truth; All with the ultimate aim of disarming the strength and meaning of action.

Companies appeal with convenience alongside increasing constraints for both consumers and employees. They are in the business of marketing and executing a planned and sponsored way of life for everyone. Consumers are not sold physical products or tools but a safe system of thought to live within. Employees are convinced that loyalty can be earned by pay in a fair trade, and that loyalty will be repaid in kind later in one's life.

Companies, or Massive Business Organizations, do not want to change. Further, they cannot change themselves easily although they pretend to through rebranding, restructuring, and acquisition of other talented companies. Re-organizations within companies are a masked means of employee auditing, only serving to bolster managerial authority by constantly rearranging the warm bodies below in a pyramidic delusion of control. Massive Business Organizations acquire hip technology instead of developing it, and thus acquire the corresponding youth audience without earning it. This is evidenced by the largest companies competing to acquire or acqui-hire the top talents who have risen through the ranks of startup or research (or pop) culture. Time and time again, old companies acquire new companies who have the attention of society, hold younger audiences, and attempt to control the future by bending the will of the younger to the purposes of the older inplace systems of control and status quo.

The anti-competitive nature of this system of absorption is not only stifling invention, but it is cutting off the systems that could support it. With each of these acquisitions come corporate approved assurances that "nothing will change" and that the startup will just have access to the plentiful resources of the acquiring company and thus thrive. While acquisitions have varied reasons for occurring - the real reasons for driving acquisitions can surely be pinned to acquiring new, relevant, youthful audiences who have not yet been milked for whatever information they are good for. Regardless, the promise of trust-busting has rung hallow in the halls of false culture - carved deep by corpo-digital technocratic control of democratic systems.

The level of contagious and absurd appetite for half truths and the displacement of culpability for effect in companies is unfathomable. Doublespeak is not a normal, it is an enforcement. Each employee of a Massive Business Organization are happily subjected to Agentic Shift, or the dispersal of moral culpability for actions and protection of one's individual contributions through obscurity. Employees of Massive Business Organizations are playing along in the most interactive collective action problem imaginable - all paralyzed by wealth or comfort. Companies seek to paralyze their employees through a planned system of wealth and comfort. Comfort factories forming both an internal sea of processes rendering perspective meaningless, and externalities being dismissed as vague and far off results of one's work. Engineers are generally given the ability to decide how fast they turn their screw, and not whether the tank they are ultimately building is aimed at their neighbor's brain. In other words: you can do it your own way - if its done just how I say.

Pathologies of Deceit, The Elephant in the Room

Massive Business Organizations largely control the internet and the computers connected by it. They are too focused on producing a more addictive "horse", and have thrown rapid radical progress to the wayside. Moreover, progress characterized by a blind faith in attention-abuse profit-seeking incrementalism is encouraged and measured internally at every company. Conglomerates of people embrace a distributed lack of culpability for outcome, plausible deniability assuages each individual's fears as the end-user's mind is subject to execution by firing squad. Conscious Practitioners of the Computer Arts can tell if they are firing live rounds or blanks, and must preserve their ethical compass in spite of inconsequential economic forces.

The most monolithic, featureless, immovable of cliffs must still yield to the fluid tides of change. We are being trained to act as if the Information Age is an end to progress; that all will be delivered readily upon request. The slate must be cleaned, new entities must rise and fall, the show must go on. Each successive attempt at an iron grip on reality must be resisted on all fronts at all times. Once avarice interposes its own ambitions in between the fingers of the artist, the art itself becomes irrevocably touched with a longing for control, a loathing of humanity.

Understanding the Urgency

Once the technical means of control have reached a certain size, 
a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good. 
The word has ceased to have meaning.
  - Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

Massive Business Organizations are bringing us the last-best-thing slightly worse, at a speed slower than ever, with the sole intention of predicting and controlling behaviour at-scale. They recognize our sovereignty and individuality only insofaras we can be differentiated from other loyal paying customers. TV and Radio represented unidirectional flows of information, were used at first intentionally, then for entertainment, and then for advertisement-profit. Those who "platformatize" the personal computer in our pockets aim to regress to an identical purpose. Platform's exist to "grant" us an identity within their limited contexts - despite what we may be led to believe, each of us remains even if the computer is off. We each have a right to a sovereign identity, not be a member each of multitudinous Mickey Mouse Clubs.

The Internet-Computer is a new beast, one not of burden but of mental expansion. Our aim is no longer the calculation or proliferation of information, but the engagement of new shared contexts that result from the marked morphogenesis that occurs within the interstices of our minds. We are now in an age where the new generations of adults are those who were born into the computer context. If the computers that we interface with are themselves only able to operate within an extremely limited context, we are limiting the problem-solving contexts available to us. While Corporate Corpses are playing wealth-extraction games with our minds, we cannot be lulled into a context wrought in complacency and lack of agency. We cannot afford to be complacent about the technology that runs our lives. Companies are basically playing wealth-extraction games with our minds, our lives, and our children. We cannot afford to stagnate or render ourselves exhausted waving false flags of success, especially given the looming challenges upon us.

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny '‰failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.'
    ...For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking. People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think”
  — Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death)