The Appetite of Big Business

In the future, the world will no longer see government as the main authoritarian forces within our planet.  Rather, the executives from Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and other communication and technology companies will be the ones sitting around a version of the United Nations Table discussing plans for the people that inhabit the Earth.  At least, that’s what almost every piece of futuristic literature we’ve read this semester supports that.  Wu told us about the danger of monopolies and moguls, Gibson painted a world controlled by the Zibatsus, and now M.T. Anderson’s novel Feed has a world controlled by the technology corporations.

However, instead of Wu’s version where the modern day people are uneducated about the evils of modern corporations or Neuromancer where they have created desolate areas in the world, the people within Feed knowingly accept the dangers and evils proposed by these big businesses.  “We all know they control everything.  I mean, it’s not great, because who knows what evil shit they’re up to” (Anderson 48).  These people have knowingly let the corporations become this big.  However, their sole reasoning behind this isn’t simply because they keep perpetually all the world employed.

No, the people in Feed tolerate this because they are dependent on the technology that these corporation output.  We see the result if they are disconnected from it, and their only way to keep this technology is to accept the role that these monopolies have and the power that they exert over them.  What’s more, their consumption of technology actually enabled these business to become as powerful as they are, and yet everyone seems to be perfectly fine with that as long as they get their electronic addition fix.

What’s scary is perhaps how we as a culture may be headed down a similar road.  While we are nowhere as bad as this dystopia, we do rely heavily on technology.  Because of this, these companies have an enormous amount of control over us.  If a company like Apple tells us that a product is cool and we need it, no matter its technical flaws or failure to make any real innovation (*cough* iPad *cough*), millions of people rush out to get it.  Imagine how Google could control us if it started to arbitrarily block content.  Yet what would we do?  Most likely just accept it and move on if it were gradual enough.  It’s scary to think that the roots of these future may already lay within society today.