You know at some point corporations -- and by extension your Boss, your Manager, your Supervisor, your Whatever -- are just going to own you body and soul. There will be no separation between what you do between the hours of 9AM and 5PM to make a living, and what you do after 5PM to have a life.
The Daddy Corporation will dictate everything eventually. They will dictate what you do and where you go because a good corporate drone does not go to bars on Weeknights and would never get completely blitzed in public. For shame, for shame. To keep health insurance costs at the bare minimum the Daddy Corporation will dictate what you eat -- put the Mickey D's down for god sake, you know you are going to have a heart attack at 50 if you eat that and run up your healthcare costs. Eventually the Big Daddy Corporation of the future will even dictate what you think and when you think it; I imagine a complicated series of electrodes and wire cable running from your snoozing head late night back to some black, windowless oblisque built in the center of Nowhereville Desert Town U.S.A -- have a dirty dream about that girl in in I.T. or dream about shoving a shotgun in your Boss' mouth, ZAP! Instant electric thought correction. Now go back to sleep, dear. You got to wake up at five in the morning afterall to start that morning commute.
Its already started. Little bits of freedom we've already consensually signed away, yielding to the immovable forces that command us to seek out Make-Work for our Make-Lives in huge, souless office towers. Like most bullshit that I have come to vie as just... well, just the way Life Is, I have no idea where it started. Probably with the random drug tests, meant to ferret out those dangerous dopers lurking in the corridors of Corporate America.
Now it is so bad that a person cannot even write or speak for fear of getting fired. Take the case of Jennifer Zenner who was (keyword there) a contractor for Nintendo who recently got fired for blogging. According to
Kotaku by way of
The Stranger Jennifer Zenner got canned at Nintendo for penning
this blog under the pseudonym Jennifer Carr. Now she never wrote about Nintendo directly, or her bosses specifically. Although I guess one of her bosses figured it out from gems like this:
"One post on Zenner's blog—titled "The Daily Weed"—begins with her disputing her friends' perception that she is a pothead. She digresses into a wry tirade against one of her bosses: "One plus about working with [a] hormonal, facial-hair-growing, frumpy [woman] is that I have found a new excuse to drink heavily," Zenner writes. "My gut tells me that this woman hasn't been fucked in years."
(Paging Perrin Kaplan, paging Perrin Kaplan...)
Yeah, it is raw. Brilliantly raw, and many of us would say the same or worse about people we have to work around. Jennifer just happened to stick it up on a blog instead of blurt it out sotto voce around the water cooler. More importantly, she was blogging on her time and her dime, seeing fit to utilize what her own time they way she wanted. And, because Nintendo did not like what she was doing in her free time, Jennifer gets fired.
There is no longer a line between work and private life. We like to pretend there is but that is playing dress up with moral concepts. The truth is that whenever you or me choose to work for the machine of Corporate America we sign our rights away for a paycheck and an uncertain future.
The most ironic part of the story is that Jennifer Zenner's husband is stationed in Iraq right now supposedly fighting for concepts like "Freedom of Speech" and "Democracy" for Iraqis when his wife is being denied those very same rights back here in these United States.
Keep it Sexy, America
Labels: Blogging, Freedom of Speech, Jennifer Zenner, Nintendo
I post one story about Sodomy at a Kentucky McDonalds and suddenly I've got six contextual ads for Sex Offender Attorney's and Rape Counseling. Yeesh. Thank god I didn't post something about peanut butter and monkeys in the same time frame. 
