Grift-Stage Capitalism

PART 3: America isn't a country. It's an elaborate MLM scheme.

There are two versions of Elon Musk that appear in the public imagination. One is a real-life Tony Stark, a tech-mogul polymath on a gaudy and overdetermined quest to save humanity. The other is the stilted nullity in an awkward-fitting Wario costume, staggering through a bumbling SNL monologue. They both inhabit the same body, but don’t really seem to be the same person. Both are the richest person on Earth, but when the later version winced from one garbled punchline to the next, his performance correlated with an overnight plunge in Dogecoin value. That person, allegedly, is not the Official Elon, who is a combination of a carefully crafted influencer-meets-genius persona and a toweringly grandiose “next Thomas Edison” brand. Most of the time, though, various sozzled pundits and preening blowhards and attached grifter remoras would like everyone else to join their bizarre servile delusion that syncopates with the kind of cringy bootlicking that frequents r/wallstreetbets.

The “savior” veneer didn’t drape over Musk until he leaned into a variety of internet sub-culture gimmicks. He’d careen from one clammy fib and ploy to the next: guest-starring on a Rick and Morty episode, smoking weed on the Joe Rogan Experience, naming his child after the serial number on his cell phone, launching a car into space. At this stage in his sublimely unexamined life, Musk’s investments aren’t discussed as typical VC business-smithing, but as “world-changing” endeavors guaranteed to solve humanity’s existential problems. He didn’t establish Tesla or invent its green battery technology; he acquired it from his board seat and retroactively installed himself as a founder. SpaceX is propped up by $4.9 billion in federal subsidies. The Boring Company’s hyperloop projects were billed as mass-transit solutions and have swung to lurid failures, or they have manifested into long tunnels that aren’t even wide enough to fit an emergency service lane. The heavy-handed approach to muddying the schism between Elon The God-Savior and Elon The Typical Billionaire scans as profoundly hackish and criminally mawkish.

America’s fixation on hyperindividualism has led to a catastrophic and vehemently denied collapse. The blank, militant incomprehension of its own glaring issues persists as a widespread belief that cooperation can’t and/or shouldn’t replace this dim and Dickensian milieu. The bottomless and abandonment of this past year—a weirdly proud unwillingness to understand or acknowledge the virus—exemplifies an inability to conceptualize a massive collective challenge in terms above or beyond the individual. By this dint, any conceivable futurity ends with a fleeting and fictitious technological salvation.

Elon Musk is the avatar of this fantasy future, one where tech is a stand-in for empty aggression and gilded bluster, one where we’re delivered to salvation before reckoning with the contradictions and depravities of capitalism. For those who have abandoned, or never had, any hope for society organizing around more egalitarian principles, Elon Musk must be fetishized. If he can’t develop the technology to save Earth or shepherd humanity to Mars as our plan(et) B, then there really is no future to believe in. And living that way is, like, definitely not a vibe.

Some days, America doesn’t feel like a country as much as it does an elaborate multilevel marketing scheme. Corporate America, in the soaring grandiosity of its ambitions and the broader grandiosity of its grandiosity, repeatedly mistakes itself as a parallel nation-state, a moralistic entity dedicated to making its civic-minded branding as profitable, consumer-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing as possible. As is often the case with this dynamic, the tangle of its hypocrisies and contradictions unravels cleanly when you realize the driving engine of this country is the greasy pursuit of finding a bigger sucker than you. A broader culture stands on these debauched principles, offsetting the costs of a functional society onto somebody less clever, less of a grinder. We are unable or unwilling to be anything other than a nation of scammers.

America loves to tell stories about itself to itself. If these are not all quite pathological lies, they are something safer than fact, and they have curdled into a more explicit and desperate denial. One of the central tenets of late-20th century consumer capitalism—as articulated by the immoral gloss of Ayn Rand or Frederich Hayek or Margaret Thatcher—is that the sanctity of the individual takes primacy above all else. This notion is also capitalism’s biggest con. Today’s economy is a collective enterprise, but a perverted collectivism that exalts and advances the good of a business over individual human beings.

Amazon workers don’t set the rules of their own workplace: the dignity, sanctity, and even sanity of the employee is sacrificed to puff the company’s profits—or at least to finance Jeff Bezos’s space trip. Well-to-do Wall Street traders regularly log 18-hour days to maintain their posts at Morgan Stanley. According to the Atlantic, non-profits “depend on large numbers of their lowest-paid staff working unpaid overtime hours.” In customer service relations, the salesperson or clerk is almost confined to a predetermined dialogue tree, carrying out the instructions of a playbook that treats patrons as an anonymous herd of potential leads. Journalists must craft their reporting to fit within the mold of digital content to be mass-consumed, the tidal pull of the market dictates that articles must be crafted in a way that will generate enough clicks to adequately secure ad revenue for their news outlet. Musicians, authors, and filmmakers often compromise their artistic vision to the cash flow of the record label, publishing house, or studio executives who sit on the committees that make the final creative decision for the people who command the capital funding it.

America has an entrenched class of reactionary squids and odious goblins bellowing idiot grievances about collectivist communism, something like masses in gray toiling at the whim of an abstract dictator. As the country has grown dumber in crueler ways and crueler in dumber ways, it has become more apparent that this is the reality of today’s capitalism. Collectivism is retail workers rocking matching polo shirts. Collectivism is the Google Campus. Collectivism is the proposed company towns in Nevada. Collectivism is social media oligopolies subverting free speech for the profits of unseen, unaccountable, unelected board members. Collectivism is total submission to managerial hierarchies. Collectivism is the sum total of every employee’s actions working to benefit the good of their employer.

A collectivist government has fragmented into a regime of legally-sanctioned companies and institutions, little fiefdoms enforced by state violence, each overseen by management teams or shareholders. This complex of entities is mislabeled as “the free market,” even as industries consolidate and form collectivist monopolies that achieve greater control over people’s lives to serve increasingly concentrating private capital.

Last March, nine days after belatedly declaring a national state of emergency, Donald Trump faced the press and said, “A number of people have said it, but—and I feel it, actually: I’m a wartime president. This is a war. This is a war. A different kind of war than we’ve ever had.” When Republican politicians start talking about war, even as drowsily and mundanely as Trump did in that press conference, Democratic politicians tend to respond by making a great show of getting behind them with polite concerns. The congruent sentiments harmonize into a symphonic interplay, turning this domestic war against the Invisible Enemy into a conflict that entails massive and staggering human sacrifice but no accompanying militaristic pomp.

The idea of dispatching “essential workers” onto the front lines against an invisible and indifferent disease at a moment when it was neither under control nor especially understood was both classically Trump and a logical culmination of America’s sickening dynamic.

Trump found his war, after all, one that perfectly fits with the brutal and grasping moment that made him a wartime president—his persistent tantrum about the grand re-opening of the economy last May, backed by American industry and its associated lobbyists. This course of action is not just willful and half-assed; more fundamentally, it is tacit surrender staged as a triumphant ribbon cutting. The rationalization behind sending millions of poor workers to their deaths for the greater good of the “economy” is a flowery sentiment obfuscating a perverted and demented actuarial calculus; casual eugenics weighed against the seamless maintenance of Wall Street profits. It also marked America’s explicit embrace of a sociopathic denial of consensual reality, one that is the true casus belli of a perpetual wartime nation.

The term “essential worker” was popularized during World War II, but it is clear that a public health crisis is different from a war. It is equally clear that Trump, America’s hollowed-out administrative state, nor the bipartisan pro-business consensus have what it takes to do the urgent and difficult work necessary to prepare for either challenge. The failure of the state has been totalizing, and deeply bizarre to observe—chaotic and begrudging and multiply insufficient in response to the vulnerable, and queasily subservient to powerful interests. Everything that unfolded this past year looked less like expressions of incapacity and incompetence and more like flagrant frontal assaults. The economic conditions that required “essential workers” to dispatch to the trenches were not borne by a pandemic; they were created by America’s relentless corruption and ambient grift.

In the pandemic’s baroque phase, there wasn’t much distance—in broadcast time or in pure blank weirdness—between throngs of performative patriotism and those meticulously hedged “in these uncertain times” ads. There would be images of a beleaguered and embalmed-looking nurse with the signature Dove tagline, Courage is Beautiful, or a Dunkin’ video saluting the heroes that Keep America Running as a faint piano loops in the background. Despite the solemn covenant pageantry of these aspirational campaigns, the term “essential worker” has no legal standing or even mutual understanding across state governments. The ways in which this manifested into priorities and policy is markedly more obvious to those who are harmed by political consequences than to those who are merely unsettled by them.

For instance, Vox has noted:

“In Arizona, the governor deemed golf courses essential. In Pennsylvania, liquor stores were shuttered as nonessential; in New Jersey, they were not. Guidelines as to whether construction workers are essential vary from state to state, and not everyone who is considered essential wants to be. There is federal guidance laying out parameters around the essential workforce, but for many people, whether they’re expected to go into work and what sort of protections they’ll get depend on their state governors and their company bosses.

Millions of essential jobs are low-paid ones, where paid leave isn’t an option, let alone the offer of employer-subsidized health insurance. They are jobs disproportionately held by women and, particularly, women of color. Black and Hispanic workers are able to work from home at lower rates than white and Asian Americans, and so if they’re working in essential posts, they’re likelier to be in person. The higher representation of black and Hispanic people in the ‘essential’ category likely contributes to the race gap in coronavirus deaths in many parts of the U.S.”

Last April, in an open letter to Amazon employees, Jeff Bezos wrote, “We’re providing a vital service to people everywhere… I’ve received hundreds of emails from customers and seen posts on social media thanking you all. Your efforts are being noticed at the highest levels of government, [including] President Trump.” Elon Musk sent a “note of appreciation” to Tesla workers last May after he reopened a Tesla factory in California in defiance of health authorities ordering it to stay closed. He wrote, “An honest day’s work spent building products or providing services of use to others is extremely honorable.” In March, it was revealed Tesla omitted hundreds of deaths from its workplace reports. Darren Woods, CEO of ExxonMobil, sent a message to his employees expressing how “grateful” he is to his team “for their focused response efforts.” And the CEO of Starbucks wrote, “During times of adversity, values are tested. I remain inspired by your resilience and am optimistic that together we can overcome this challenge.”

This simulation of gratitude feels like a slick and shiny insult, especially when it wafts from insulated industry titans hymning America’s unrelenting output of collateral damage.

Other than the robust helping of dense corporate fudge, mega-companies like Target, Kraft Heinz, Molson Coors, Rite Aid, Kroger, and Amazon offered “hero pay,” where they were briefly granted a nominal bump in their hourly salaries. Companies like Walmart and CVS paid one-time bonuses instead. The term “hero pay” was passed off to a press corps well-versed in chugging whatever it’s handed as works of PR trickery and artful conning. Calling these fleeting pay hikes “hazard pay” would tacitly acknowledge these workers are being ushered into a death trap; it would also mean the definition, and being on the hook for a token pay raise, would last as long as the pandemic persists.

Overall, this was a lot of work to avoid speaking aloud something that was otherwise easy to grasp—hailing workers as “essential” and sicking them to face a life-threatening disease was a convenient justification for oligarchs to do whatever they want to do. Of course, the prospect of passing rent and mortgage moratoriums, or extending unemployment benefits, or codifying paid sick leave and universal healthcare was too challenging, so CEOs and bagmen politicians opted for the trendy deference to buzzwords.

The relentless and obliterating inequality warping every facet of American life is increasingly difficult to ignore, even if it can be vexingly difficult to comprehend. The scope and scale of these chasmic disparities are most readily seen through the bizarre inequities coming to light. 

Between last March and last December, 73 million workers lost their jobs, and nearly 100,000 businesses permanently closed. Jeff Bezos’s net worth swelled by $75.6 billion from March to December of 2020 while $1.8 billion was distributed to 1 million Amazon employees as “hero pay”—meaning Bezos made 42 times more than his workers. Similarly, the Walton family’s wealth skyrocketed by $40.7 billion, which is 26 times more than the $1.6 billion in “hero pay” allotted to 1.5 million Walmart workers. According to the Brookings Institute, Amazon and Walmart “could have quadrupled the extra COVID-19 compensation they gave to their workers through their last quarter and still earned more profit than last year.”

The all-but-official big-business omerta of fishing for every last quarter out of the toilet has long since exited its plausible deniability stage. It’s clear “essential workers” are mostly stubborn abstractions to America’s reigning plutocrats.

As drab avarice and ravenous self-interest devour a theatrically authority-positive culture, it’s breathtaking to witness how this whole arrangement stems from an implicit devil’s bargain that exchanges precarity and despair for creature comforts and convenience. The lingering belief in the superior firepower and deal-craft of the private sector has only accelerated into something infinitely more goonish and servile. Cacophonous lectures from taut-faced mansion creatures and post-human media grotesques drown out dissent, their sentiments either preposterously gullible or criminally arch. Their main conclusion, of course, is all this compounding and preventable misery is a necessary sacrifice for capitalist innovation—or at least a dozen different brands of chicken sandwiches.

In close-up, innovation, tech, and Silicon Valley are colloquially synonymous, but in the longer shots, the consensus answer to what does innovation entail? dissipates utterly. When asked to name the most important technological advancements, Barack Obama mentioned the iPhone in contrast to the Blackberry. Last May, Casey Newton, the senior Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, tweeted, “If you’re a nerd and feel hungry for a story about human progress today, I recommend watching this stunning demo of the next Unreal engine running on a PlayStation 5.” Since 1997, cars, clothing, and cell phone services have reduced by roughly 50% while flatscreen TVs and software have reduced by about 100%. In the same timeframe, hospital services, college textbooks, and college tuitions have increased by over 250%, and childcare has increased by 100%. In recent months, housing costs have accelerated at an “alarming pace” to a 13-year high, triggering what financial analysts are calling an “inflation storm.”

This limited scope of what innovation entails, if viewed from a sufficiently cynical perspective, exists both fully inside and oddly outside the churn of America’s consumer/service economy. There is something deadening and bleak about the way in which business pundits and politicians alike center the idea of consumer goods as the hallmark of innovation and progress, if only because it leads to the idiotic premise that things like universal education or housing are not worthwhile societal investments. The deliberately opaque outfits of Silicon Valley are supposed to drive America into a righteous techno future, and while they have wholly reshaped social and labor relations, they haven’t invented any real new technologies or generated any mass employment.

Uber and Lyft, for example, have developed convenient apps that offer a more elegant way to hail a taxi, and in the process, circumvented labor laws and regulations. According to the National Employment Law Project, “In 2016, Uber and Lyft deployed 370 lobbyists around the country — more than Amazon, Microsoft, and Walmart combined.” These well-funded lobbying efforts exist primarily to prevent legislation that would elevate their drivers from contractors into employees. In 2019, Uber and Lyft spent a combined $2.46 million in lobbying in California, more than major lobbying player Pacific Gas & Electric, and more than Apple and Facebook spent on lobbying in the state combined. Uber also expended $300,000 in Massachusetts to protect and expand the gig economy and repeal taxi regulations. The big, innovative business insight of Uber and Lyft was building gilded bulwarks against regulations, which would, in turn, create a pool of precarious workers for whom they don’t have to pay a salary or health insurance.

Whether this narrow scope of innovation is deliberately scammy or just a low-effort gambit is, at some point, irrelevant. That Silicon Valley does something less materially beneficial than, say, increasing SNAP participation is obvious, but also a sort of category error. The logical conclusion to this development is what Douglas Rushkoff calls the “rise of the prepper billionaire,” where the wealthy utilize this digital technology to design a reality that simply shoves existential threats to their peripheries. Last summer, the New York Times ran photo spreads of wealthy families retreating to their summer homes, fleeing the coronavirus to cocoon themselves from a sprawling and metastatic pandemic. The real promise of innovation is it allows those privileged enough to leverage their wealth and these available technologies to insulate themselves from the rest of the world.

FreshDirect or Instacart erases the externalized harm rendered unto its employees; delivery people don’t ring the doorbell, so instead, a photo of the package on the stoop arrives as a notification ping. Twitter and YouTube already offer a meticulously curated reality about the coronavirus or pressing present civic challenges; the wealthy can opt into a solipsistic digital realm that vaporizes dissent and the real-world problems disproportionately faced by women, the LGBTQ, and people of color. White-collar workers were largely able to skirt the worst effects of the pandemic’s apex with Prime delivery and Zoom meetings. Day traders can utilize the internet, their laptops, and some capital to generate income from a videogame casino version of the stock market. Some of the world’s most successful social media posses are bunking in luxurious “hype houses” in L.A. and Hawaii, where they can livestream their lifestyles and routines—and the sponsored products that integrate into them seamlessly—to their millions of followers.

The most highly engaged with this technology are lulled further into digital isolation; the more they accept the internal logic of a fully wired existence, the more they are severed from the rest of the world. The rest are left to service and flatter these bubbles, utopias that subsist on other dystopias.

In the absence of any collective direction or belief in a social order that deals in the universal, it makes a bleak sort of sense, then, that 86% of young Americans want to be social media influencers. If America is bound to a dance macabre of cynical transactions and self-serving market relationships, but is advertised as a way to maximize the individual will, then people will have to reckon with the cognitive dissonance between their insignificance and powerlessness in a world where they’re told their consciousness is the only one that matters. If Americans exist in a nation where the chief pursuit is rationalized selfishness, if they participate in a culture that asserts the sum total of human happiness is instant and constant ego gratification, then why not work a job that thrusts the self into the center of attention?

What was once considered a flawed but extant system grounded in variously compromised, but fundamentally good, institutions was suddenly exposed as a series of naked and individuated dealings. Creating something within a rough approximation of the common good was simply never in the equation. The term “American Dream” was coined in James Truslow Adams’ 1931 book The American Epic, which defined as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” The whole “according to ability” part was dropped from the phraseology in due time. Eventually, the term came to mean “a happy way of living that is thought of by many Americans as something that can be achieved by anyone in the U.S. especially by working hard and becoming successful.”

If America is to learn anything from this long and grueling shock, we could reconsider how our institutions and incentives can produce more purposeful work and an economy that services human needs. “Our evolutionary history has made us purposeful creatures,” argues anthropologist James Suzman. “There’s a deep psychological urge to do stuff.” The main issue here is not whether people want to work. It’s whether the types of jobs this economy creates establish a sense of fulfillment, to what ends these jobs serve, and if the people working them feel appreciated for their efforts. There’s plenty of noble work to be done—trees to be planted, rivers to be cleaned, clean food to be grown, infrastructure to be rebuilt and made sustainable, children and elderly to be cared for, underserved people to be attended to—but, of course, there’s no money in it. We’re all stuck in a system that demands we spend hours upon decades engaged in soulless and pointless jobs to pad someone else’s bank account, only to be browbeaten for the audacity to be adequately compensated and to have government programs secure our basic needs.

If work is to be redefined as something that purposefully expends energy or effort on a task to achieve a goal or end, that goal or end would have to be something universal, something that exists outside of this grift-stage capitalism. This will come if we achieve a phase shift in human consciousness, one that recognizes that serving our collective interests is the best way to exalt individual interests.

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