The “corporatization of everything” model isn’t unique to the US and the UK any more. It’s been enormously successful, akin to an early religion spreading across an illiterate people, and leaving exploitation and ruin wherever it goes. Of course, it does produce a handful of wealthy “elites” along the way, usually a group defined primarily through happenstance– those who were already slotted to benefit disproportionately, either through accidental lineage or favor.
An example of non-American corporatization of everything: in China there are now province-level plans to make culturally important sites, such as ancient buddhist temples and shrines, commercial enterprises (though it seems many already have that status) through offering IPOs on them for “development”.
What this means is that each site will have an obligation, under law, to do what it can to “make money” off of the sites for shareholders. This means changing and outfitting these places with whatever will attract the most amount of people who will pay the most amount of money to visit. In China, this could mean anything– turning the actual temple into a mini golf course, installing hot tubs in all the ancient gardens, and especially KTV theaters, perhaps directly in the temple itself. Anyone who has been to China and had the misfortune of visiting tourist attractions is often left in disgusted dismay.
“You mean this entire part of the Great Wall, from here all the way to the horizon, is not real? It was built to look this way about 30 years ago, intentionally aged to look “authentic”?
“You mean all those cool looking rocks that make that garden look so beautiful are actually cement? Like Disney World?”
This kind of commercial development will ruin ancient places forever, rendering them impossible and useless to us. It’s equivalent to erasing them, and our shared histories. Relics of human achievement… the actual physical record of human development, and the only means by which we can study and understand our selves and our history as a species… now replaced with what the idiotic children of a spoiled-rotten world would “prefer” for their tour of “antiquity.”
Following in lockstep, humanity marches down the road to devolution. Those in charge are like addicted whores. The addiction is to the drug of distraction and the state of being switched off. “Play” is now akin to a diminished consciousness, and “fun” reduced to any time your brain goes on autopilot. Can anyone hold a thought for more than a couple minutes at a time any more? Does anyone think deeply about *anything* any more, and more importantly, are they even able to?
Humans are devolving into species like the fictional Ferengi from Star Trek: http://en.wikipedia.
One thing the US could do to lead the way again is reject that model, finally, and watch China and SE asia sell itself out to complete and nearly robotic hollowness. Unfortunately, the political and religious right in this country will do whatever they can keep us on the path of civilizational ruin. They create mindlessness in culture, mass, consumer culture, and create whole societies of people willing to switch off and do what they’re told– how to look, what to say, where to go, what to do and how to think. The ultimate goal behind this is to monetize and hoard everything on earth– which has largely already occurred through the commoditization of labor. So the effort is now to preserve everything the way it is… to “conserve” the status quo…
Which is perfectly cataclysmic for the majority, and comically simple for the accidental “elites” and their mentally retarded kin who are quickening the pace of the destruction of humanity.
