Corporate interests are trying to reduce overhead to wages, unions, taxes, safety and health regulations, and a range of other costs. They actively do so in the US through lobbying politicians and the use of legal means. Each corporation thinks it wins in this manner, but in reality it is destroying what it stands for.
We all have to stop where this is going. Everyday life may be somewhat placid right now but it won’t be for much longer. We are sailing into a stormy sea. The future will be more volatile. So what are corporations – who want to save money now – to do?
This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—we’re talking trade balances here—once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwaves in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity—
— (snowcrash)
Sources:
The World is Flat
Hot Flat and Crowded
Snow Crash
The Lights In The Tunnel
They won’t listen, hun. The short sighted corporate world has no concept of time beyond the next quarterly budget. They’re already dead and rotting from the inside out, and they can’t adapt to a new reality. So they try to prevent that reality from killing them by making it illegal to evolve. Pity that evolution doesn’t care about the law.
There are 10,000 various technologies coming of age, every one of them a game changer in various ways. We could probably adapt to any given one of them, or even a few dozen, but we will be hit with wave after wave after wave after wave of change.
This is only the beginning. I hate to say it, but it will get worse. There will be chaos, and unrest, and attempts by the powerful to prevent any change that will threaten their power, but there is nothing that can be done to prevent change. Everything we have taken for granted will vanish, to be replaced by utter madness.
Heinlein called these the “Crazy years” but he woefully misunderstood it’s causes. The old world and the old ways we have known is being washed away in a sea of unlimited possibility and those who cannot see the paradise that lies beyond the tsunami are doing everything that they can to try and ignore the wave or prevent it from happening.
But there’s only two options. The wave cannot be stopped, so we can either ride it to a better future through a raging cataclysm of the old, or we can fight it and be swept away.
The future is not “Snow Crash” or “Burning Chrome”. It is not a future of ever greater inequality or world wide poverty in which a select few posses unlimited wealth while the masses starve. That is the world of today, the world that will cease to exist. It has at best less than 20 years of ever greater decay to look forward too, providing that no-one lifts a finger to fight against those seeking to prevent the future. Considering that it seems that people ARE fighting back against those who fear the future and seek ever greater control in their desperate attempts to prevent change, perhaps my darkest worries will never be realized, and we will see less people sacrificed to the greater profits of the few than I fear.