New York missive no 110 - Clockwork Oranges on corporate control?

Image by ~gsgill37 at Deviant Art

In an article about the writing of Clockwork Orange, recently re-printed in the New Yorker, Anthony Burgess focuses on the dangers of government control over our lives and particularly our minds. It struck me that it seemed dated, for the fact that corporate control didn’t feature as a theme in the book or his thinking about it (the article was written in 1973). Now there’s not only a lot of corporate control in our lives, but so much of government control is corporate control.

There are plenty examples of government repression in the old sense – look at the recent massacres in Syria. Even there, though, there is a corporate dimension. For example the fact that Russia is pushing for the “international community” not to intervene is no doubt connected to the fact that 10% of Russia’s arms exports go to Syria.

Here’s a very different example, less violent but more pervasive. Burgess says in his article: “…[W]hen patterns of conformity are imposed by the state, then one has a right to be frightened.” Among some of the prolific news coverage of Facebook’s public offering last week are commentaries on the way in which Facebook drives conformity. Like this one in Asia Times, which says Facebook's raison d'être is “to advertise one's conformity to commercial culture in a way that preserves the illusion of individuality.”

Another dimension, different again, is the privatization of detention and the way in which the pursuit of profit drives up prison populations. In Louisiana, where the prison system is largely privatized, the proportion of the adult population in prison is nearly double the US national average. As Charles Blow says in his powerful op-ed about a Times-Picayune investigation on the issue: “The state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing…[M]any with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it. The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.”

Fear of government control over our lives can now more realistically be placed in a fear of corporate control. Time for a Clockwork Orange or two to tackle these and other manifestations of it.