Illusory Choices 8/11/02

When we enter the marketplace, the mall, the store, we have a sense that we are making choices - choices that count. Somewhere, in the back of our minds, we believe that what we do has impact, that someone, or some machine, is tallying our selection and registering our preference as a kind of vote: "Consumer John Smith has selected Friskies Salmon Select. Salmon Select is a winner."

The conglomeratization of the American market often works behind the scenes to make this choice an illusion. The link to the Coca Cola website (http://www2.coca-cola.com/ourcompany/brandlist.html), for example, shows that whether you select their flagship cola, or Nestea, or Barq's Root Beer, or Fruitopia, or Hi-C, or any of the hundreds of products they own, you are funneling your money into their corporation regardless of the decision made in the aisle.

The corporation wins no matter which choice you make, and thus you have no choice at all.

Not a groundbreaking observation, of course, but one feels a definite unease at the prospect of top-level groups merging to render consumer selection meaningless. We are bred and trained to respond to advertising just as we compete to labor for the companies that offer us these products. The circle closes and the wheel of samsara clicks shut like a shackle.

The movement to privatize essential services like water supply (see http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020812/biztech/12water.htm) suggests that some sort of cycle is at work that will force us to demand that more than a handful of major players control our electricity, our phones, our roads, our homes. Failing that, we will elect our governing rulers with our own dollars. When will John Brunner's _The Sheep Look Up_ become reality? It already has.