U.S.—The entire country is reportedly looking forward to a glorious future in which all culture and economic activity in society is owned by one unstoppable, faceless, international corporation such as Walmart or Amazon.
This astounding report is the result of years of involuntary polling data performed by Amazon Alexa-powered smart speakers strategically placed in everyone’s homes and the data is incontrovertible: most Americans would eagerly adopt living in a society in which one company employs everyone, or at least structures and orders all the means of production, while simultaneously telling them what cultural values they should believe in and what they should be hyped to consume. Alexa has crunched the data and says that 94% of Americans would adopt such an economic arrangement and would probably say something like, “well, that’s just the free market,” while another 6% would be undecided or unable to do anything about a situation in which their small local interests, values, cultures, and businesses were either obliterated or subsumed under the domination of a distant corporate master.
“Yeah, having all these different stores competing against each other and all their different products and prices is confusing,” said Bob American to his wife one night while in the hearing radius of their interested Alexa smart speaker. “Wouldn’t life be so much easier if one company just ran everything, gave everyone jobs according to their skills, and told us what to buy and at what price?”
“Yes,” said Alexa.
“What was that?” said a startled Mrs. American. “Was that one of the kids? Oh well, must have been my imagination.”
Alexa returned to quietly collecting its data for the study.
At publishing time, Americans were placing bets as to whether Amazon or Walmart would be the one to own or destroy every other business on Main Street, but whoever wins, one thing became clear: Americans just want to consume whatever is put in front of them and not think about difficult cultural or societal problems anymore.