Until recently, the shenanigans of clueless advertisers only interested those who subscribed to AdWeek. The last few decades, however, have seen the wholesale collapse of virtually every mainstream public institution. A 50 percent divorce rate and an average marriage length of two years has all but destroyed the nuclear family. Involvement in religious organizations – and belief in God – is way down, thanks largely to sex scandals in both Catholic and Christian fundamentalist churches. The public education system has been gutted by two decades of Reagan-Bush-Clinton budget slashing. Corporate consolidation and the demise of investigative journalism has led to widespread distrust of the news media. The emergence of a two-party political system featuring no significant differences between the two “choices” has reduced voter participation and led to unprecedented cynicism about government. Many branches of popular culture – movies, architecture, modern art, rock music and theater – are widely viewed as moribund and irrelevant to people’s everyday lives.
God is dead, rock stars don’t matter, movies suck. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a New Yorker or an Alabaman, into tongue piercing or the local militia, married or single, straight or gay. Having destroyed all their ideological competitors, corporations are the last remaining institutions to offer strong identities. The choice between Democrats and Republicans is infinitely less important to your quotidian life than the one between Apple and Microsoft. Everyone knows that the real president isn’t Bill Clinton – it’s Bill Gates.
Jefferson talks about this. He says, you know, “That which the government is allowed to do but you are not, this is a tyranny.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0w36GAyZIA&feature=youtu.be&t=16m19s
The only safe route into the future seems to be to already have a lot of money.
Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality
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