It really is quite odd, the contrast between the way in which we carry on thinking about ourselves collectively and the way in which we actually collectively exist. One brief example should suffice for now.
SEO writing is like a contemporary version of ad writing I suppose. And though the remote nature of freelance work does remove oneself from the actual firm where collective activities take place, in which one's contributions can be glimpsed - at least momentarily - in full, one does get satisfactory glimpses of the inner and hidden way in which things are now built.
I say "inner and hidden" because corporations do in fact generate powerful implicit images - not just in advertising - that convey the monolithic power of the products that they are bestowing on the public, in exchange for money. They have to do this because the exchange logic that undergirds market activity requires this cognitive process.
Upon every exchange, we can't simply converse with each other and coordinate all of our collective activities to produce something exchangeable for another mass of collective activities. It would be overwhelming. Instead the business says, hey this is fair, I'm going to give you this amazing thing that I produced, and you give me your offer in turn, the money you've worked for, and we're square.
But this basic compression, this social heuristic that allows daily social life to carry on without causing nervous breakdowns over their sheer complexity, eventually runs away from us. Through its repetition and fixing of convention, it takes on a life of its own, and the landscape of thought that it generates manages to conceal all of our true relations, causing all sorts of distortions. And on the these planes of distortion, further distortions are built, as over time distorting reality becomes the basic operating principle of society. But back to a more concrete example.
When you have to market for a given business, you tend to see certain things. You see what a business is willing to do in order to perpetuate itself socially, as marketing involves making a compelling appeal to the customer to initiate a "voluntary" exchange.
On the Internet, this appeal is coupled with a technical requirement to visually persist in the search engine landscape. So all of these companies that want to capture as much of the online market as possible are constantly having to expand and optimize their virtual content, their online presence so as to appeal to search engines. It is like filling up space with one's advertisement on a billboard.
So you have online company blogs that make certain appeals like, hey here is some advice straight from us professionals. For example, a legal company may offer legal advice on its blogs. This is intended to produce that feeling of indebtedness to the visitor: how nice of this company to offer free professional advice on their website, maybe I should check out their services? So companies proceed to fill up their corner of the Internet with blog posts that contain all of their advice. Except that it is often not their advice.
No, many of these companies simply hire freelance writers at rock bottom wages to put together blog posts for them. In freelancer practice, this means scouring the Internet for whatever can be freely gleaned on a given subject, and re-written for the paying company. It simply takes too much time and energy coordinating writers with companies that produce goods and services to provide quality content that reflects the actual knowledge the company has. Especially with the availability of a least path of resistance like the open Internet.
Much of the content is taken from online content generators, whether through free labor or online publications scratching around for advertising eyeballs.
What's more, this is merely a pattern overlaying countless other patterns that are similar in nature. All of this Internet posturing takes place over posturing in the real economy. A business presents its product as a monolithic and magical whole which comes solely from itself, whereas the supply chains and production centers are distributed all over the globe, and the actual effort from the developed nation company in question is merely a fraction of the finished product, which generally consists of concept, brand image, control of the company and its associated wealth, and etc.
So many of these businesses don't actually have any interest in producing something of genuine value for their customers, and you can forget about finding quality advice, or quality service for free on a blog post. Some companies do in fact do this, but the average mass of activity cuts the other way. These lies are structural in that they are constructed through the necessity of working with the actual logic of the system.
The actual logic of the system is horrific: it consists of spreading the means of production as far and wide as possible, that is, if the spreading makes economic sense, and to maximize exploitation of those resources - human and not - that possess the least protections, all for the enrichment of a center of power far removed from that center's sources of power. It is the image that is spread across this horrific landscape that denies and erases its existence, in the hope that the horrors can perpetuate themselves, layering over each other ever higher on the pyramid.
The practice of generating image, and working underneath that image within a sullied reality, is widespread and so everyone becomes accustomed to regularly furthering it. This destroys trust. It causes despair. And it cultivates the social tolerance for functional fictions. All processes I'd like to explore at a later time.
But for now, this basic practice of image maintenance seems to be an old human social function. Nothing new really. We've seen the old discussions around "commodity fetishism," and we also see this regularly and universally in interpersonal interactions: one represents only a portion of oneself in a given social interaction so as to temporarily preserve the integrity of the interaction.
The only difference is its sheer scale and extension in time and space. The weight of these multitudinous and interlocking fictions is so profound. For them to collapse would spell great calamity. No wonder then that totalitarian rule, as a modern phenomenon, has arisen in such conditions. The alternative to a world of horrors is the threat of oblivion itself.
