I’ve been thinking about the connection between packaging and politeness lately. When individuals say, “please”, or “bless you” or “thank you”, or "excuse me, it tends to make us more comfortable, to give familiar punctuation to the ryhthm of our lives.
Maybe the modern corporation has learned how to hack that circuitry with packaging. We’ve come to think of, “brand new” and “factory fresh” as better than pre-owned or homemade things, and I remember several deliberately ironic ad campaigns that imply our relationships with corporations are more reliable than our relationships with each other.
After all, the assumption behind 'big L Libertarianism" is that once you take away the troublesome element of government interference, private industry will finally be free to create the perfect world that consumers and shareholders and laborers deserve!
The video reminded me of these questions, because in the larger metaphorical sense, the ones being drowned by the robot, don’t even seem to be struggling. If anything, we seem to be taking bets on the robots chances even as we go under for the last time.
