Dude - it's really not so peculiar as that - "a movement out to regulate what people 'really' think about the products or services they're paid to sell." It's simpler and bigger than that, I think.
A whole lotta people put a whole lotta money into upgrading the IT infrastructure - for a while there, it seemed to be your patriotic duty to invest boom economy excesses back into the boom economy, and, using that same IT infrastructure whose further extension you were advancing, re-invest the new excesses, and so on, forever and ever, amen. It was like the space program gone interactive, for a lot of us anyway. In any event, and trusting that Tom Wolfe or someone will someday get around to writing the tragicomical epic of the Millennium (remember that?), millions of people were entering the marketplace for the first time, and, forgive us for our woeful naivete, we thought that the guys and gals in $3000 suits in skyscraper offices and on TV knew more or less knew what they were doing, and had no earthly reason to lie to us, blatantly, and wouldn't be allowed to handle so much of our money if they were deeply dishonest enough to lie to us, blatantly, in black and white and 256 and even 16 million colors - and when big, gigantically wealthy companies that had been around for decades, and had been watching over our grandparents retirements as well as the riches of the richest and hanging out with Lou, told us, over and over, that this and that and the other really did make sense, and really was not just a "buy," but a strong one... we believed them.
And now it turns out that they weren't just merely human, like us - we could forgive that - but that they were just as cravenly and ruthlessly dishonest as we might have feared in our worst, most "paranoid" moments. And you know, some of us - those of us who aren't so dispirited by the whole escapade as to have turned off the TV and deleted the web site, permanently - are angry, and we don't care whether it's good politics or philosophy or whatever, we want them to FEEL IT and to PAY FOR IT. Of course, they're well-connected, and well-protected, and god knows they're extremely well-financed, and we're a bunch of passive, powerless, and relatively impoverished losers, so they may get away with it...
We'll see, I guess... |
