We're All a Bunch of Ants. Worker Bees. Sheep.

The whole idea of free market capitalism is that it serves consumers best, right? When governments or state enterprises get involved, they screw it up, right? I have this uneasy feeling that the answer is, “Not quite so;” that, as citizens, consumers and employees, we have come to expect and accept a system that isn’t what it’s trumped up to be.

China is communist but is has achieved over 10% growth for about fifteen years, which no other country has achieved ever! State planning can work! I've always believed that, if Walmart had been running the Soviet Union, that "Red Menace" would still be a going concern. (Not that it isn't still, with thousands of nukes pointed our way.)

Anyway, in our dream-world, corporations are models of efficiency. One way to be efficient is to outsource even core activities to poorly regulated, pro-business countries, to avoid paying decent wages and benefits to real employees. Dilbert, the greatest business guru of all time, instructs us that contractors are sub-human without families to care for. Even if they are, business is business.

But outsourcing work to customers has ushered in a whole new wave of almost limitless opportunity. It really took off a few decades ago, when gas was cheap and Exxon, Texaco and other poor oil companies were dumb enough to compete against each other, often on all four corners of expensive downtown intersections. They didn’t have a handle on how to fix markets and prices quite yet, so cost-cutting was the only way to keep executive pay at a decent level.

Ergo, let’s get customers to do our work for us! And so self-serve was invented and we’ve been pumping our own gas ever since.

The banks caught on fast with ATMs - a marketing tour de force, a rare triple whammy. They fired all the tellers, transferred the work to customers and then charged us for the privilege! It doesn’t get any better than that.

Now everyone is doing it. Grocery stores get us to check and bag our own. Airlines have these newfangled check-in machines. As if getting searched, sniffed and our toiletries and other dangerous contraband confiscated wasn't bad enough!

This “do it yourself” trickery has no limits, and is usually sold as a way for us to save money. IKEA is not bad at this but I think any product that takes a five year old more than ten minutes to put together or install should be banned.

I personally lost my way around the time of having to reset the clocks on VCRs after power outages. Have you bought a computer, a wireless device or a TV lately? Done all three and if I didn’t have kids, I’d be lost. Whatever happened to plug it in and turn it on?

A man’s home is his castle? Not anymore. Companies are planting bugs on our computers and tracking our activities. Banks, airlines, telcos and Internet service providers are snitching on us to the feds. I think Google is a CIA conspiracy! Well, not really, but I bet it and other communications and computer companies have some real "spooky" deals with Big Bro.' Stuff we can’t even imagine.

I love music but I can’t keep up with the technology. I’ve been through 78, 45 and 33 records, reel to reel, eight track and cassette tapes, MTV, CDs, DVDs, MP3s, etc. It’s the same music and I've been "upscaled" enough, thanks. Maybe the medium really is the message.

Don’t get me going about tobacco, alcohol or pharmaceutical companies. Their killer drugs are legal but not marijuana? Geesh. Has anyone done a cost-benefit analysis? It's total madness!

But there is one service that really takes the cake. I am of course referring to every organization’s favourite means of avoiding helping their customers: telephone reply systems. If you want this, press that. Ad infinitum, until one would have to be a math major and have the patience of Job to get to speak to a real person. If, as your drones tell me, my business is so important to you, answer the freakin' phone.

Let’s recap. As citizens and voters, we are nothings and governments are scurrying around deregulating the financial, energy and other markets, while racing to the global bottom concerning environmental, worker, consumer and other protections we once had. We get to vote every few years for Tweedle Dee or Tweedle Dum, who serve their corporate masters in between. If we get really exorcised about this quaintly anti-democratic reality, we can write our elected representatives or a newspaper, or join a movement that has little to no say.

As employees, we are treated like any other resource to be exploited. Check your privacy at the door and be happy with your pay. Productivity gains used to be shared with workers but our real incomes haven't gone up since 1980! Except for you know who. And the more a CEO screws up, the bigger the golden parachute to keep it a secret. Perfect.

As consumers, however, we still reign! Not.

We're all a bunch of ants, worker bees, sheep.

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Richard Sharp