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When you look at the sales pitch for Capitalism and how it’s supposed to function, it feels to me as though it were crafted in order to conjure up fictitious images that reflect the undisclosed desires of an individual. They want it to sound empowering and even morally righteous. They will tell you with hard work, you’re going to be rich! I’m sure, for the most part, that everyone is familiar by now with how the sales pitch goes. It’s usually something about the free market. A little about how anyone can be rich if they come out with a really great product. Something along those lines. Typically it doesn’t pan out like this. Hell even the pointless right-leaning version of Wikipedia acknowledges that, and they have a near 50-page long article about how homosexuality is the root of all sorts of social diseases. Consider this:
“One self-regulating feature of capitalism is competition, which helps maintain fair market value for goods and services. However, unrestrained or pure capitalism may sometimes create a positive feedback loop in which a small number of individual accumulations of capital grow ever larger, eventually becoming so few as to limit effective competition, thus ceasing to strictly be free-market capitalism. In this regard, pure capitalism is unstable.”
It’s not really unstable. It’s how the system was designed to work. You start a business, it gets big, you become a corporation in order to function at higher and higher levels economically, with one real goal in mind. The only goal of a corporation is to increase profits for it’s shareholders. That’s absolutely it. That’s essentially the nature of the beast, and it shouldn’t be really surprising when corporations begin interfering in politics. When you have the money, you can influence the power, and with the money and the power you can begin to stack the deck against anyone else coming to take your piece of the market. You can begin to eliminate competition, and you can ensure that only the people who play by your rules ever get to experience what it’s like to be one of them. Wealthy. Keep in mind that when I refer to wealth, I’m not talking about a couple of million. I’m referring to the type of money that grants you political power. That’s not something that’s obtainable, except on a small scale, to anyone but a corporate entity.
When a corporation’s activities negatively or positively impact a society they actually have crafted a term for this so that when they speak of it, anyone but those familiar with the term, will be unaware as to what they are referring to. This is an important function of what I have started to dub ‘corp speak.’ The purpose of corp speak, is to obfuscate the meaning of what they are saying so that the layperson will not be able to actually comprehend whatever point they are making. The particular term, in this case, is an ‘externality.’ Wikipedia defines an externality like this.
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Not dead. Eyes open, and there’s smoke and chunks of metal and plastic, white material from the airbags, the foam inside them already drying up, causing the powder left in it’s wake to give thier surface a faint glow in the blinking red crash lights. There is an automated message playing on a cracked screen informing me that the crash is indeed over, and to exit the vehicle and seek medical attention. Oh and don’t forget to have a pleasant day and thank you for using Circa inc for all your commuting needs.
Memories, triggered by the smell of electrical fire, the pain radiating from my head and limbs, by the feeling of being buried in rubble. Somehow the past was playing catch up with me. The accident that took me out of commission couldn’t be the source, there was no memory from that, as it was explained to me it happened so fast and was so violent that I was immediately incapacitated and unconscious. Maybe a mine, bomb, grenade, betrayal, crash. No, this memory was much older, from something deep in the past, and the pain normally associated with recalling anything from anything from that far back was momentarily less horrific then the current head trauma I seem to have suffered. I was buried alive at one point. There was a city, I vaguely remember. Hands, frail and with chipped nail polish on them start digging and I’m crying. Then the memory fades, the pain overwhelms the forces of my concussion’s. Usually if something triggers an old memory; say, a smell, a moment, a voice of a turn of phrase someone uses around me, I get the sensation that my head is just full of those little white and black waring dots from white noise, all of them trying to kill their way through each other and out my ears. Like a loud electrical buzzing that rumble across gray matter like thunder. So I push those feelings down, I forget the moment, avoid it if I can and go about my normal routine. Smile, wave, talk to the reporter, lie a little, lie a lot, who cares, what’s it matter, do it and don’t ask questions and get your pay and go home.
With a tremendous struggle I turn enough to look out the slot window, between a piece of concrete and some cables and glass the sky is burning in the background. Like an apocalypse, a personal one, because nothing is a cliché when it’s happening to you. The sky was burning, the smog and clouds glowing in hues of orange and red that seem to rumble and pulse with their own hidden life. My home was up there, old books, old tech that I had collected. The sitting room where leaders met with me to take pictures and shake my hand and smile then berate me and criticize me when the cameras were off. A grim smile begins to worm it’s way across my face, with the knowledge that at least that part of my life is over. This is what you could call, my pink slip. Termination papers. Write-up. In every sense of the word, I was irrevocably fired.
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The capsule screen is black. I haven’t pressed the button yet. When the screen is black you get a decent reflection, it’s the kind of black mirror you envision in children’s stories. The colors are faded enough to mask how thing really are, but enough to give you the details. My face stares back at me, with it’s cut-too-short brown hair, it’s slightly wrinkled brow, and bright blue eyes. Bright enough to almost negate the toned-down colors reflected in our makeshift black mirror.
I lean forward, press a button.
The sky opens up around me, the only structure that still stretches up higher than my current position is the Demer Complex. It’s one of those arcologies, the kind that were ripped off from old oriental architecture. It’s a self-sustaining structure. A self-contained city. The standard rails won’t operate on it, you’ve got to get on the one railway that goes around the circumference of the tower, which, from this height looks like a mountain of steel Tall and angular. They call the railway system for the complex the stairway to heaven. Once you’re rich enough to ride it, you won’t be coming back down to gallivant amongst us mere mortals.
The capsule takes a dip. They call these capsules Circas. The kind I use, because it’s got a duel piloting system. That means that I can control where I go to a degree, I can choose routes, and change them on the fly by touching the screen and pointing to a different building, rail, whatever. The conduit towers are supposed to be used for two purposes, to catch people coming back from orbit and to place people in orbit. You can only use it as a quick jump halfway across the city if you happen to press the release at the moment it is about to pull you upwards and inside the tower. Inside your vessel is subject to what a spike would be inside a rail cannon.
During the decent I get a slight case of vertigo, this is all right and perfectly normal. When you lose the sensation of gravity and then are quickly reminded of it’s presence you tend to have moments like this. This is my vacation. This is my therapy. Thinking that I might die, it’s not as frightening as you may think. Especially when there’s always the prospect of my job looming in my mind’s horizon, making my thoughts of the future only of two things, which I’ve already had in ample supply in my life. Dread. Regret. The important thing to remember is, I’m not a monster. My job is the president of The Commission. You look at my face on the news every night, you hear my voice in every national address and speech. I show no emotion other than optimism, and what I say never has any true meaning. You see, there is an arrangement to ensure this is the case.
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I’m a very angry person. Over the last five years I’ve lost touch with my passion for anything because, for the most part, I felt that there was no point in trying. I realized this somewhat recently and thought long and hard about the condition of my life, where I want to be, where I was, and how close I was to my goal of writing full-time. Not very close. I have wasted the last ten years of my life working for jobs that I have hated, that have left me tired and humiliated and a little broken. Not because of any overt oppression, but the implications of the work and how it effected everyone I worked with and me. When I thought about it long and hard, it made me realize just how angry I was about the situation I’ve put myself into this whole time. It’s my fault for putting up with these jobs, sure, but I learned something in the process. I saw how the corporate world is, I know how these people think. So with that in mind, I have set to using that as inspiration to make one last attempt at reaching my ultimate goal.
So bear with me over the next few months, I will only be writing about stuff that I can use as material for my work, and I will only be posting sample chapters. If I do not have this book finished by the end of the year, or at least the first draft, I will officially give up my goal of being a writer. So, one more time, from the top. Here… we… go.
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