There was a wondeful comment I found yesterday - as usual, I didn't bookmark it, so no link - where an academic was talking about Sony's recent faux graffiti PSP promotion campaign in Philapdelphia. Sony paid local victims as much as $100 for two weeks of wall time. The city gave Sony and their hip creative agency the bum's rush, and after fines Sony won't be doing it again.
But the great quote said something like 'I think it was just tawdry - but that's modern business for you.'
I thought that really hit the nail on the head. Globalisation is evil, stupid, dysfunctional and really just a con-game to benefit the very rich at the expense of everyone else. But more than that it's tawdry. It has no nobility, no grandeur, no aspiration to promote or achieve anything more than a quick buck and a chance to screw over the little guy.
This acute and terminal poverty of aspiration and vision that makes it different to previous hypocrises like the original Victorians. They were as crazy and ideologically infected in their own way, but they built some astonishing things and valued a project with real vision.
The globalists will leave nothing of value behind them. Once all the Coca Cola has been marketed, the plasma TVs have ended up in landfill, the SUVs will lined up in rusting lines and melted down, there will be nothing else to mark the passing of the locusts.
And yes, I suspect that commerce -- as opposed to craft or trade -- may be inherently tawdry; because its entire focus is on profit, that is, chiselling the extra penny out of the sucker (er, customer) by whatever means necessary. Which is a tawdry undertaking. So perhaps we are now a culture that worships tawdriness, and that could explain a lot.
The history of commerce-as-we-know-it is the history of force and fraud, predation with (nominal) rules, the failure of cooperation and reciprocal altruism. Whether that's because commerce has been defined by the winners in Jared D's Great Game of Guns, Germs, and Steel or because of something inherently dehumanising in the reduction of value and worth to arbitrary cowrie-shell counters that can be infinitely accumulated -- or whether it's Original Sin -- I am not sure. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
