Corporate apocalypse: Feeding the hand that bites us

1920: The customer is always right.

2020: The stockholder is always right.

This ain’t your grandfather’s capitalism. The myth of American capitalism endures: If you have good ideas and work your ass off, you’ll get ahead. But the reality is very different: Instead of rewarding hard work and pursuing customer satisfaction, modern capitalism is designed to reward shareholders, and everyone else be damned.

Two things made this possible:

1. Corporations replaced small business as the dominant force in the nation’s economy.

2. Convenience replaced service as the most important element (along with price) in the consumer’s daily lives.

Convenience is king

As customers demand more convenience, business is motivated to provide it. But doing so requires technological advances that, in turn, require investment – often more investment than a small business can afford to make. It’s only natural (and sometimes, perhaps, essential) that such a business seek outside money to finance the necessary improvements.

The problem is that, once a business secures financial backers, it becomes responsible to them rather than its customers, much less its employees. Shareholders want a business to maximize profits and minimize expenses, regardless of the cost to worker morale, consumer service or even the company’s reputation. Just hire a glitzy PR firm and make some strategic donations to charity, and you can still look like a good guy even when you treat your employees and your customers like shit.

Andrew Carnegie used part of his fortune to create libraries, but does that make him a “good guy” when he earned that money by paying his employees a pittance and pushing them beyond their limits?

A return to the late-19th century world of Carnegie becomes easier when convenience and immediacy are valued more highly than quality and service.

When service doesn’t matter as much as convenience, the people who provide that service become expendable. When you pump gas yourself, you don’t need an attendant to do it for you. When you buy goods at self-service check stands, you don’t need cashiers anymore. When people demand news the moment it “breaks,” you don’t need copy editors to check for spelling or accuracy, you just need a program to make sure you’re online first.

The Matrix has you

But in demanding convenience, consumers have put themselves in a bind – and, in many cases, have cut off their collective nose to spite their face. How convenient is it, for instance, to navigate a phone tree, then wait on hold for an hour until the next customer service rep is free to take your call (or start all over again when you press the wrong button or you’re “accidentally” cut off)? How convenient is it to use one of those self-service check stands when the scanner keeps malfunctioning? Or to check the accuracy of a story via Snopes because journalism is done on the fly, rather than with care and precision?

Then there’s the identity theft that comes with using debit cards and computer programs vulnerable to hackers. Now that’s really convenient! (Note sarcasm.)

Here’s the rub: Convenience doesn’t always make life easier, at least not in the long run. It often just frees up more time for us to become busier, take on more commitments and, in the end, become more stressed out. We’ve devalued human interaction as consumers, and that interaction becomes the first thing we sacrifice in our personal lives when we start to feel overloaded. The result is a vicious circle of busyness and isolation.

We become, in a very real sense, dependent on – even addicted to – convenience and instant gratification. And, as with any addiction, the “highs” get less intense, the “lows” get lower, and the dependency grows stronger as time goes on.

Corporations know this and, as we become more dependent, they have less incentive to provide that high. Because. They. Have. Us. Hooked. Once they do, shareholder and consumer interests that once seemed aligned in the quest for convenience are no longer in sync. For corporations, convenience was always just a means to an end: maximizing profits for shareholders. Once it no longer serves that purpose, corporations will discard it like yesterday’s news.

Toxic capitalism

When’s the last time you stopped at a full-service gas station or were put directly through to a live operator willing and able to answer your questions? It’s probably been a while. That kind of service has largely gone by the wayside, and (in most places) you no longer have any option but to pump your own gas or navigate that phone tree. It all happened right under our noses, so gradually we barely noticed. But now, here we are, and we’re no turning back.

Once they’ve eliminated all our other options, corporations have no more incentive to provide service, convenience, low prices or anything else. The consumer becomes irrelevant, and only the shareholder matters. Instead of personal service, we get automated phone trees and overseas operators. Instead of quality, we get planned obsolescence. We were supposed to have learned this lesson more than a century ago, when monopolies were working employees to death (literally in some cases) and foisting off bogus “miracle cures” on consumers. But apparently, we’re going to have to learn it all over again.

Capitalism works well when it encourages competition; when it discourages it, it’s toxic.

Want evidence? What ever happened to Marshall Field’s or Rich’s or Filene’s or Jordan Marsh? They’re all Macy’s now. Every single one of them. In the 1960s, there were dozens of regional discount retailers; today, there’s Walmart. And Target.

As Facebook has all but cornered the market on social media access, has it become more flexible or more controlling? Have those controls become more in tune with the user or the shareholder? Since Facebook went public, its quest to maximize profits by allowing corporations access to personal profiles – and by looking the other way on Russian interference – has been widely publicized. But we still use it because most of our friends are there, not on Ello or MeWe. We’re addicted. We’re stuck.

Tainted government

The government, meanwhile, enables and accelerates this process. It’s no secret why this happens: The same corporations that have the money to invest in business have the money to lobby Capitol Hill – to their benefit, and to the detriment of their competitors.

Many of those competitors are small businesses, who then have little choice but to go public themselves so they can get money to pay for their own lobbyists.  

The 2018 tax cut is a great example of how this works. Whom did it benefit most? Small businesses that need help to compete or corporations that will use the advantages to consolidate their stranglehold and eliminate even more choices?

We know the answer to that question.

Before the trust-busters broke up Standard Oil’s monopoly at the dawn of the 20th century, cartoonists portrayed it as an octopus, with its tentacles wrapped around everything from the U.S. Capitol to statehouses to investors. Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Google and others are on the brink of becoming today’s version of Standard Oil.

Customer service died decades ago. Convenience is on its last legs. Can a return to snake oil and sweatshops be far behind?

The Internet is our Matrix, and it's killing us

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”

— Morpheus to Neo in "The Matrix"

The Matrix has you.

Whether you know it or not – and if we stick with the film’s analogy, there’s a good chance you don’t, you’re in the process of becoming dependent upon a form of virtual reality that could just drive you nuts.

So, here’s your red pill.

If you’re reading this, you’re online, which means you’re hooked up to our 21st century approximation of the Matrix, a mechanism that has supplanted our traditional sources of … you name it: shopping, news, entertainment, information. You get the idea.

You’re more likely to find a newspaper – minus the paper – on your computer screen than on your front doorstep these days. You find movie times online now, too, along with the movies themselves. Netflix, anyone? YouTube? Who needs a TV weatherperson when you’ve got weather.com? And who needs a book when you can download the text to your Kindle?

Despite pockets of resistance, the Internet has become so pervasive that it’s starting to look like Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century. That company became so powerful, and society so dependent upon it, that the Supreme Court ruled it was a monopoly and broke it up into 34 separate companies.

We can’t do that with the Internet, which unlike Standard Oil, isn’t a single company. And it doesn’t work exactly the way a monopoly does. Unlike a traditional monopoly, hasn’t limited our options, it’s broadened them exponentially, providing access to more streams of information and entertainment than ever before.

Growing dependence

I love that about the Internet, and a lot of other people do, too, which is why it’s become so successful.

Yet in doing so, it’s also become nearly indispensable, and there’s the rub. Even as it has broadened the number of options at our fingertips, it’s narrowed our means of accessing them. The more brick-and-mortar stores close, the more we’re reliant on Amazon and its brethren. The more newspapers shift their focus online, the more we have to shift our focus there, too. The more “streaming” video becomes a thing, the more we rely on it for our entertainment. And so it goes, right on down the line.

National security experts long ago started worrying about our growing dependence on the Internet. Back in the days when MySpace was still a thing, they began warning that even warfare would shift from traditional battlefields to online cyber-skirmishes involving black hats, white hats and a whole new form of espionage.

Turns out they were right. Russian interference in our political process is merely the most blatant example of a problem that’s been simmering for a long time involving hackers on the one hand and security experts on the other, each trying to stay one step ahead of the other.

This involves continual – and rapid – change, something human beings aren’t always comfortable with.

Information overload

Yes, change is good, but constant rapid change puts people in a continual state of anxiety, slaves to a fight-or-flight response that feels like it’s always on the verge of kicking in.

Ever wonder why so many people resist moving away from fossil fuels and toward alternative forms of energy? It’s not because they like pollution or want climate change. It’s not even just about jobs or industries, although that’s a part of it. Fundamentally, it’s about security. We develop habits and, no matter how much we strive to embrace innovation, there’s a part of us that resists it for no other reason than “we’ve always done it this way.”

More to the point, we know how to do it this way.

There’s a tendency to dismiss resistance to change as backward or ignorant, but there’s far more to it than that. It’s a natural human defense against the kind of upheaval we’ve experienced as we’ve become more and more dependent upon the Internet – where rapid change is the rule rather than the exception.

We’ve moved out of the information age and into the age of information overload. I’m not just talking about the proliferation of choices the Internet has offered us. Those are, after all, still choices. There might be millions or even billions of websites out there, but we tend to find those we like and stick to them (insulating ourselves in the process from opinions that don’t gibe with our own, but that’s another story).

Not-so-brave new world

Still, we don’t always have a choice to shield ourselves from information overload, or the anxiety it causes.

One simple example: The demand that we continually change (and remember) multiple passwords as a means of shielding ourselves from identity theft, computer viruses, etc. It’s not like the old days, when you taught your child to remember his home phone number, which never changed unless you moved to a different city.

That’s stressful, and it’s just the beginning.

Add to that the stress of staying on top of internet marketing techniques, whether you work for a major company or are in business for yourself. Google, Facebook and so forth are continually tweaking their algorithms, so marketers have no choice but to respond. A generation or two ago, you took out an ad in the newspaper, on radio or TV, then measured the results in terms of how many shoppers turned our and how big a sales boost you got. Simple cause and effect.

Now, you aren’t limited to those three marketing options, which are largely secondary anyway. Online, you have to market your product via Facebook. And Twitter. And Instagram. And Snapchat. And Pinterest. And LinkedIn. And Amazon. And Goodreads. And on and on and on. Each of these platforms has different rules, different systems to learn and different ways of maximizing page views.

(As an author active in promoting my work on all those platforms except for Snapchat, I know what I'm talking about.)

Once you’ve mastered those rules, you’ve got to test them by figuring out where those clicks are coming from, along with the demographics of real and potential customers.

You’ve got to use the proper metadata and keywords. Then, once you’ve got all that in place, you’ll need to measure the performance of text vs. images vs. videos at attracting a user’s attention within a milieu of never-ending options. Are users staying engaged? Are they returning? You’ve got to measure those things, too.

We’re not built that way

Suddenly, you’re light years away from a relying on folks to page through the Sunday paper at their leisure, providing solid customer service when they visit your establishment and hoping they’ll spread the word.

Pretty soon, nearly all your time is being taken up adapting to ever-changing systems, processing information and analyzing the results. Then starting all over, virtually from scratch, when some algorithm-writer changes the rules.

In an atmosphere where marketing is king, queen, prince and pauper, there’s little time left for actually creating the product you’re supposed to be selling in the first place. The process is king, and the product takes second place. Heck, just getting through the process is a challenge – one that often demands a greater degree of multitasking.

Despite what this word might suggest, our brains aren’t built to multitask. If they were, texting and driving would be no big deal.

"If you have a complicated task, it requires all your attention, and if you're trying to spread your attention over multiple tasks, it's not going to work," David Meyer, cognitive scientist at the University of Michigan, said in an article by Joe Robinson titled The Myth of Multitasking.

The fact is, we can’t think straight when we try to process too many things at once. Our memories suffer. Our ability to think creatively – which involves things like daydreaming, brainstorming and joyfully exploring the world around us – is stifled. We're actually 40 percent less productive.

We become stressed-out automatons, more prone to breaking down thanks to hypertension, fatigue and burnout. But we've fashioned a world for ourselves where we seem to have little choice. It's a world of diminishing product value, increasing health problems and rising frustration – a world where style hasn’t merely surpassed substance, it’s supplanted it.

Welcome to the assembly line. Welcome to the future.

The Matrix has us all.

“You ought to be setting aside large chunks of time where you just think. Einstein was not multitasking when he was dreaming up the special and general theories of relativity.”

— David Meyer, University of Michigan cognitive scientist