Azelma wrote:
I think Blizzard execs should try to literally sell their own feces.
I'm sure some fanboy or girl would buy it.
Metaphorically speaking, they did succeed in doing just that for Kaldoreii. Somehow I think that she would be just as willing to go literal.
It can and almost certainly will get a lot worse, believe me.
Technology will give rise to a vicious and very tenacious sort of corporate feudalism, propped up by mind control, drugs, barriers to access, surveillance and identity management. The Chinese will be a major aggravating factor should they try to leverage their holdings to reshape America in their image to exploit it as they do their own people (provided, of course, China doesn't implode first, which is quite possible).
When I say "mind control", what I'm referring to is the power of modern technology to overwhelm human senses and psychology and reshape human psychodynamics in ways that were previously unthinkable via groupthink and vivid imagery. People being fanatically loyal to a corporate family, or to narrow institutional ideas that make no sense, would have been unthinkable and impossible until the development of advanced marketing tools.
If you doubt this go look at people like Kaldoreii who willingly pay to be told what to think, and adopt the most ludicrous of ideas on the basis of pure spectacle and groupthink. It's cultlike behavior previously associated exclusively with religion or political movements that now lies within the grasp of corps.
It is this conflation of economic and intellectual power that makes feudalism such a degenerate and tenacious system and so hard to undo once it metasizes.
"Survive another 30 years". If the DPRK embargo has taught us anything, it's that however small the pie gets, there's always enough for those at the top to go on as they have. And, as in the DPRK, the party line is that the ideology will save the nation even as it leads it down the tubes.
