Heirs to the Wreckage

The main tool we use to regulate the misdeeds of corporations is the boycott. It sometimes works to great effect, there is no example more illustrative of this than the recent reinstatement of Jimmy Kimmel (after Disney lost $3.8 billion from canceled subscriptions). It works, but grows less effective everyday: there are less products that people can afford to boycott and unions are no longer as provocative or as popular. Yet, we ignore the most impactful thing we could boycott, because it’s the most precious commodity of all, jobs. Corporations sustain themselves by purchasing our labor power. It never occurs to us that denying them this, boycotting the jobs and wages they sell in exchange for our labor, would be infinitely more effective than boycotting their products.

We are experiencing a precipitous slide into corporate neo-feudalism, where mass consumption is not only motivated by pleasure but by need. The greatest trick a corporation can perform is to make a product so necessary, so integral, that society restructures itself around it. We talk of boycotting products from Amazon, or from Pepsi, but it’s never that simple. In the modern economy, the increased time demands of the workplace make the convenience of Amazon indispensable. Jobs gradually reorient productivity demands around the speed of ChatGPT, making ChatGPT necessary for timely work completion. The cycle continues in this way for every new product and every new innovation, until we forget the distinction between necessity and convenience. As the they like to put it, not using ChatGPT puts one at a “competitive disadvantage”. Jobs are very much the same, we sell corporations our labor (though of course we rarely have a hand in the negotiations). In exchange, big corporations sell goods that go far beyond employment: they sell identity, security, prestige, the promise of wealth, healthcare benefits, even a distorted conception of freedom. What we tend to forget is that because the corporation is so successfully etched into our culture, a job ceases to be purely a means of accumulating wealth- it becomes a social identity. The culture, public image, and instrumental logic of working a lucrative job become equally as marketable as the wage itself. LinkedIn privileges the Performative over the Real, that much should be clear to everyone. One sees it in the same bland politically correct announcements (“I’m so thrilled to announce that I will be working at so and so…”), the insufferably bureaucratic process of networking, and job descriptions that throw in a surplus of “keywords” at the expense of real information. But, the performative quickly becomes the real, and that drastically strengthens the affective/emotional links between an individual and the corporate world.

So jobs, like any commodity that is rendered “necessary” by late-stage capitalism, are incredibly hard to boycott. People all over the world do not have the financial or social luxury to boycott any product, jobs least of all. But jobs are diverse, we don’t need to work for Meta: startups exist, smaller organizations exist, the market only grows more stagnant if we all work for Big Tech. Blackstone and Lockheed Martin are basically countries at this point, both in terms of valuation and political power. I see so many Gen Zs, supposedly the generation most educated in the excesses of the market and the need for social reform, all getting snapped up by this culture. Granted, we work because we have to, but it goes beyond that. The performative is becoming real for us and the number of Gen Zs I see just embracing hierarchical corporate culture at the expense of awareness (people who were literal kids just a few years ago) is appalling. Eating Sweetgreen instead of McDonald’s and purchasing less Amazon packages are not enough. If you want to stop Bezos from buying out another city then don’t fucking work for him. I’m not arguing for complete divestment, but your labor is not worth these organizations that are slowly but surely locking us into purgatory. The image, the corporate identity, so marketable and so promotable on social media, is not worth your faith. I hear stories of GenZs taking out loans to appear as if they possess this image of wealth. Is this not another proof that all the privileges promised by corporate life will only become more unattainable as the cycle continues (most Gen Zs can’t afford housing)? Find startups, find diversity, find organizations with missions. We can’t solve all the world’s problems, we can’t constantly remind ourselves that every sentence of ChatGPT costs a spoonful of water, doing that breaks the spirit. But we can diversify our options, we can try and practice just an iota more of self-reflection. Labor is the most important tool we have, the most potent boycott weapon. Without people to man their warehouses, perform all their bureaucratic tasks, manufacture their PR, their products and influences would become irrelevant. The impact it would have on them would be exponentially greater than the one it would have on our technocratized lives.