Thursday, January 8, 2009

What our systems cost us

People try so hard not to meander me into a category of ridiculousness when I state that I'm an anti-consumerist. That means I'm against the world's industrilization. Why, you can even say that I'm a communist. By creating our lingering, not-good-for-anything systems and globalizations, we have created a certain system and working pattern that is so larger than life that it overwhelmes us. "This is how it works over here," how many times have we heard this in our lives, but the question is- who said it works that way? Through this stream of consumerism driven world we have conveniently negated away the facts that three quarters of the world is suffering from poverty, that the 'humanity' that 'progressing' is just a small chunk of what exists.

So, coming to us, the 'progressing' kind, how many of us are restricted by lines and restrictions that our very own hands created but has now grown to be larger than what we are? The mechanical life that we are condemned to living in is for one, coupled by the fact that the globalized and corporatized world has made everything mobile and secure that the world has become so tight to run. One snap in a trasnportation system that people rely so heavily on and everyone gets affected- thousands actually. Its horrifying to think that the more we get used to the commodities and mobility with security, we will simply fall apart when things go wrong for us. Stress causes us to committ suicide, and a system that we created is now overwhelming us and rendering us as ineligible to proceed with life. As a friend of mine remarked recently, our lives are becoming very dependent on a certain Ctrl+S, which literally means the save button in our personal computers. We created a commodity of creating data and storing it with such ease, but we have become so reliable on it that at the end of the day, our lives depend on that data which was only created as a luxury. Everything which was luxury when we created then have slowly grown into a necessity, and this chain doesn't seem to stop.

And it is in the very same vein that landed us to a lawsuit currently taking place in United States. Roy L. Pearson has filed a $54 million lawsuit against a South Korean dry cleaner store for failing to fulfill their main advertising board which sounds like this- "Satisfaction Guaranteed". All they did wrong was to mix up Pearson's pants during the cleaning process and the rest was history. We have laws in this world to even cater to these kind of cases, such a small negligence could make the dry cleaning store lose (lose? I think even if they shut the store and sell it they won't be able to muster the amount of compensation in lawsuit) $54 million to a single man's pants. Pearson is indeed a smart man as much as he is appearing as a ridiculous man, he knew the kind loophole the intricate law that we have created has thus he is taking advantage o it with a view of earning $54 million. Probably he is just a man frustrated by the entire system that he decided to take all he can through the very system that has complicated everything in life. If even dry cleaning has to be done flawlessly and something as subjective as satisfaction (which depends on every individual) would be called into question and be objectively-dressed up to serve a conspiracy, I wonder what the system is coming to.

Karl Max isn't dead, some of us are being reminded of him.

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