Corporations Are Spiders And We’re All Flies
Walk around a casino sometime and you will notice it is laid out in such a way that it makes it difficult to find the exit. This is no accident but an intentional design to keep you there as long as possible, with the idea of getting you to spend as much money as possible. They don’t care if they suck you dry and ruin your life. It happens all the time. People’s lives are ruined by gambling, their families’ lives are ruined by gambling. The gaming industry expresses concern about helping people with gambling problems, but that’s only to cover their own asses and put the blame on the person who lost their life’s savings on a sucker bet. You are to them what a fly is to a spider, and they spin their webs in hopes of ensnaring you.
Department stores are not quite as brutal, but they are designed in the same way. It’s hard to walk directly through one. And while people’s lives are ruined less often through compulsive shopping, they’re still trying to get you to buy things you don’t need and most likely are not good for you. They too spin their webs.
Facebook preys upon the same human frailties as casinos, as well. It goes out of its way to keep you artificially stimulated by providing pings and visual notification cues for things you often have no interest in. Facebook tries to keep you from leaving Facebook. To do this, they throttle posts that have links that take you out of Facebook. If you manage a Facebook page you can see that any post that includes a link out of Facebook only gets about a quarter of the views as posts that do not.
Television programming has been doing this for a long time. They leave you hanging with a tease when it’s time for a commercial break so you’ll hang around through the commercial break. Take a careful look at what the commercials are trying to sell you sometime and tell me this is an ethical practice. It’s just business, yes, but it’s just business for the spider, too.
Spiders do what spiders do, and corporations do what corporations do. There’s no surprise in that. But if you’re a fly, you’re not real keen on what it is a spider does. And if you’re a human being, you shouldn’t be real keen on what a corporation does.
I’m not suggesting that every capitalist is a bug-eyed monster intent on devouring you. I know some very fine business owners who wouldn’t think of using manipulative tactics when it comes to people with serious gambling issues or other problems. That’s because they are still human. It would be a sick human being who would take advantage of someone with a gambling problem, but a corporation thinks nothing of it. It is the corporation that is the monster because it strips from itself all human concerns and replaces them with corporate interests. Which are no different than a predator’s.
Look at how the drug manufactures raked in obscene amounts of wealth while the opioid epidemic ruined entire communities. Look at how Afghanistan was a cash cow to the tune of trillions for decades for the arms manufacturers who did worse than nothing to make the country any better. Look at how the fossil fuel industry is willing to alter the climate and cover the world with plastic for the sake of increased profits. Stop acting like they care about you or about anybody or even the planet. They’re just giant spiders with marketing departments.
The best advice I can think to give you is to avoid as much as possible their webs. Oh, I know it’s impossible to avoid them entirely. But do whatever you can whenever you can to avoid entanglement. Never go further into one than you have to, and tread as lightly as possible. Always be aware of exactly what it is, a trap laid out by a hungry predator. Look for alternatives to unthinkingly walking into spider webs and soon you will notice the spiders trying to eat you have become rather anemic-looking. This is doable, and you are dumber than a fly if you do not make the attempt.
As much as possible, you have to keep them hungry. Because a hungry spider spins desperate webs. A hungry spider cannot afford to sit patiently until the fly lands upon his web. Be a smart fly and make him work for every morsel it gets. Don’t be a willing victim. Realize that ultimately your interests and the spider’s are in opposition with each other.