Corporate America is a Flying Abortion
How does a human being become a Randian objectivist so divorced from any sense of morality, he’s no longer able to even understand what morality is? Mega-corporations like Amazon, Walmart, and Nike put so much time and energy into being assholes; what do they even gain from that effort? It would be fun if somebody crunched the numbers. I bet these egotistical maniacs actually waste so much energy waging clownishly evil wars on their own employees they lose money.
To name one example out of many, look at Amazon warehouses. Someone in the food chain apparently decided the main takeaway from his business degree is “micromanagement good, and the harder you micromanage, the gooder it gets.” Counting your employees’ footsteps during their shifts, and timing bathroom breaks down to the second? Endlessly terrorizing people with the looming threat of getting sacked for tiny offenses? Management from top to bottom so viciously heavyhanded it causes employees to collapse from exhaustion, and sometimes even suffer heart attacks?
Come on! Those Amazon workers stocking IKEA furniture and Chinese sex toy knock-offs must be utterly demoralized. I refuse to believe Amazon is getting anything beyond minimum effort from their workforce. Anyone who’s been on the job for a little while would gain a firm understanding of the algorithms behind the 1984ish surveillance camera.
I’m sure Amazon surveillance systems cover every square inch of the facility and programed with algorithms to maintain a success rate pretty close to a 100%, able to consistently spot
even small offenses, like failing to meet the demanded quota or going on break for too long. Algorithms are infallible but only at the extremely specific events they’re coded for, but have zero reasoning skills. Even a toddler can interpret what’s happening around him better than an automaton and can understand subtle details in the emotions and attitude of the people around him. Algorithms can’t do any of that. They have no emotional intelligence that enables any fairly observant person to notice a fellow human behaving suspiciously.
Yes, there are human shift supervisors and managers on the floor, but I have some experience working as a customer service employee at the figurative bottom of the overflowing porta-john. I have firsthand experience with inspiring leadership cultures that American corporations are famous for. I’ve met and worked with the corporate first line and middle management that are the very backbone of our glorious 1% executives dedicated to excellence. They’re mindless nonplayable characters (NPCs).
Most of these people can string together complete sentences, and some are even knowledgeable about the product line they’re selling. However, in my experience, these people with very few exceptions are the same flavor of mindless NPCs. Their shallow personas and collective hive mind of limited personality traits remind me of a rushed videogame that really should have gotten a few more months of beta testing. Imagine an incompetent mess of a video game production. Right in the middle of it is an overworked and underpaid “at will” employed under the gun to head to meet deranged deadlines he knows are impossible.
Therefore, this $12/hr. underdog does a very smart thing. He knows that, at least in early playthroughs, most customers will be absorbed in the main quest and that’s what will get the most scrutiny. Screwups and lazy shortcuts outside the main quest might go unnoticed long enough to be quietly fixed by patches after the game’s release. So instead of making ten variants of a merchant NPC, he cuts corners by making just one and cloning it twelve billion times.
Upon making these logical connections, I experienced an epiphany that cut deep. I realized that maybe I don’t exist, and nobody else exists either. Maybe our entire perception of life is a lie; it’s actually a crappy video game, and God is the rushed employee. That would explain a lot. The reason our world is so screwed up and awful is because our video game is a violent horror-themed adventure (which implies there’s a good chance we’re going to get hit with something terrible like zombies… or reptilians).
Our exhausted husk of a God designed managers but just repeated the same NPC over and over again. Also like an NPC, these folks are competent at a narrow range of tasks but need specific instructions on everything they do. They lack any semblance of initiative or creativity, making them incapable of venturing outside their pre-programmed parameters, or conceptualizing such a thing. But blocks of code aren’t sentient (yet) so I’m being kind of silly here.
American corporations apparently love generic manager NPC. They employ him as exclusively as possible. Anyone who’s not manager NPC might have the deathly flaw of critical thinking skills, a dangerous pathogen that must be kept out of leadership roles at all costs. I assume the reasoning here is that managers are the slave drivers who inflict
punishment for breaking rules that are stupid and shouldn’t exist at all. A person can’t be relied on to inflict punishment on subordinates for violating rules unless he mindlessly obeys rules himself. NPCs are the perfect candidate for management.
Now in the Age of Woke, corporations have embraced “diversity,” which apparently means “pick out two or perhaps three races at most, and commit grossly illegal discrimination against the rest of the entire human race”). I’m about to take a controversial stance on this hotly debated topic.
Corporate overlords don’t weep for employees any more than soldiers weep for ammunition they expend on an Army training range. Cartridges are loaded and fired, bullets mush into targets, and shell casings pile up under the GI’s bootsshell casings. At end of the day, the casings are collected and discarded. If a corporate “leader” can’t be bothered to at least pretend to care about employees on the job, they won’t care about their jobs either and are completely justified for feeling that way. It would be pointless to put anything beyond absolutely rock bottom bare minimum.
I’ll take this reasoning even further. It would actually be dangerous to put in more than the lowest possible level of effort because even a slight excess of unnecessary physical and mental exertion increases the chance of burning out. Only a moron would even consider putting in more effort. Why would he? There’s no chance of promotion, pay raise, or even acknowledgment of good work. Amazon and companies like it are corporate regimes so nightmarishly horrible they make tinpot dictatorships look like inspiring examples of egalitarian democracy.
Ian Kummer
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