"per capita"
by lazyhorse 2003ad
part two
"center of power"
02.01:
good news, bad news.
news concerning early christmas sales talks about consumers and producers as if they were two different races of people, with a conflict of interest. "good news" for consumers, "bad news" for profits. this reenforces the "us and them" concept of economy, constantly, subtley persuading you to think of your business as not your own. you are reduced to a school-child or animal mentality, getting away with what you can, dumb, fed, handled.
02.02:
in the square, draconian industrial culture, roles are too exactly defined, and people find it hard to be themselves. the game-show host can't help the pretty assistant struggling with a heavy tray of prizes, because it's not in his job description. as the over-design and over-control creeps further into the life and mind of the individual, these limitations on the available range of behaviour will turn us into robots, along with wave after wave of invasive "lifestyle" technologies. that's going to be a strangerly disfunctional, disassociative society, where you just walk on by.
02.03:
unnoticed, unquestioned, unchallenged eugenic selection in the workplace.
your job may not be difficult. a monkey may be able to do it, but you will be subjected like an astronaut to a selection process involving human cannonball weightless training spinning and vomitting, electricuted maze experiments, bible memorizing recitals, and mk-ultra trauma conditioning weekends, not to mention the tv gladiator training. the office mentality is all about over design, like the rest of the industrial culture.
the finalists in this jeux sans frontiere madcap square frolic are then assumed to be some kind of master race worthy of the grand industrial ritual of standing at the photocopier filing your nails until the machine goes "ping!". the fact is anybody can do it, and the whole thing is a cover for maintaing post-feudal feudal social power structures. most of the jobs people do today don't need doing. they probably haven't needed doing since the seventies. automation and business simplicity have been forsaken in favour of labour intensive and beurocratic wasteful processes in business that make peoples lives more complicated, difficult and expensive, as producers and consumers. the individual's social status is tied to their industrial role. no industrial roles, no stati. that's why we still have the industrial roles.
when the quantity and type of work in the economy is artificially fixed, then heirarchical social order is maintained by allocating different roles to different social groups. this is where the eugenic selection process comes in. those conforming to the eugenic criteria of race, character, attitude, lifestyle, politics (or the lack of it), beauty, youth, tidyness (a fetish), and whatever else, will be approved, and will be permited to perform the entirely unnescessary token work ritual which grants them a status above those rejected (who are equally cabable of the little real work required), and thus will lead secure, healthy, less stressful, less angry lives, right alongside the others, who may serve them in more menial roles.
so, even though our economic activity is a relatively simple matter of fabricating goods like toy plastic bath ducks, apparently we can't take our time over it, or get round to it when we please. all this trivial junk consumerism must take place on some kind of strict timetable with everybody in their place like coloured cardboard holding students making up the big picture at a communist olympic ceromony.
it's like a surreal war effort, but then war is the mother of employers' markets.
02.04:
there are ways of going about business that deny individuality, and ways that are compatible with individuality, however simple the business. draconians will tend to arrange elaborate collectivised vast over-centralised processes that dwarf and intimidate people. because those involved are only aware of their small part, nobody really knows what resources come and go, or why, or to whom. it's easier to conceal the flow of power and wealth, and conceal the causation. when strangers half way across the world make stuff in low paid sweat shops for global big business, they have no idea why they are doing what they are doing, completely out of the loop. neither can they afford to buy and use what they're making. for all they know they could be supplying space aliens shoes for earth conquest under a brief but lucrative contract with some corporate power tower somewhere. it's just not a dignified or civilised experience of being a human being.
intro
part one
"popular capitalism"
part two
"center of power"
part three
"direct representation"
part four
"mind control"
part five
"dragon people"
download complete file
www.lazyhorse.co.uk/pc.zip