Joys of Digital-Age Consumption (or, The Fed's REAL Challenge?)

"Only the best for OUR CUSTOMERS!"

So shrieks - rather like a goblin or banshee, if you ask me - our Modern World of Enlightened Commerce. Always the same refrain, going on for - what, 25 New Economic years now? Even as it proceeds more and more to regiment its workforce, and to militarize (or "Communistify"? I almost want to say) its workplace. And all of it with such conviction, such self-vindication in fact, you'd have sworn at least every other employer out there was operating from the same rather novel premise: namely, that worker hell invariably means customer heaven. Or rather, more precisely, that we have all been split in two, with one's Working Self being required to endure a kind of secular Purgatory-verging-on-Hell, so that one's Buying Self might enter the Secular Paradise. And that, as a result of all this unprecedented wisdom-cum-progress - beginning, say, c. 2000? - the global human condition (leaving aside individual countries for the moment) was going to be not only immeasurably bettered, but ministered to, alleviated, uplifted in such ways as to leave forever in the dust the progressivest dreams of all our most dynamically enlightened forebears: Bacon, Newton, Locke, Paine, Priestley, Jefferson, Godwin, perhaps even Bentham and Ricardo. All merged into a sort of conglomerate Moses, constrained to view our 21st-century Promised Land from the far side of the Jordan.

Again, as great as they were, all in the dust. Not to mention everyone else, of every other political stripe and degree of error: Burke, Adams, Hamilton, Disraeli, Churchill, Kirk, etc. Which is to say, pretty much every Traditionalist Conservative, to use the current parlance (and really, who in his right mind would ever dream of conserving a tradition?).

In sum, just consider for a moment the sheer volcanic breakthrough of the Present Age: Everyone, no matter how close or far they were from Today's Consummate Wisdom, all to be Left Behind Irretrievably. Talk about a triangulating Singularity.

But to return to my first paragraph: Who, then - even now - is this sacred customer, basking as never before in the soothing waters of an unprecedented company concern, solicitude, appreciation?

All I know for sure is, it can't be me. Far from feeling even remotely any greater "love" from whatever company happens to be serving me - or even, in fact, its usual mercenary kindness and hospitality - I'm if anything more than ever aware of the stress of its workplace, the anxiety, the demoralization, the terror of being fired. Not to mention the superconfidence, if not smugness of its management  ("Seriously, could YOU do what we do?"). Conditions not exactly calculated, one might think, to please your average individual customer. Though they may hardly at all bother - or may even greatly reassure? - a very different sort of patron. A fellow-corporation, for instance. Or an (exceptionally big?) investor.

So again, who is this more-than-ever revered and cherished customer, on account of whom the customer servant - i.e., pretty much every employee outside the boardroom - must be increasingly regimented, terrorized, automatized (that is, when she isn't being automated completely out of the picture)? Just who is it these days that the Servant is being sacrificed for? Is it really a humble creature of God - like, say, you or me? Or just another glorious creation of Man's, to which neither of us can ever hope to measure up anyway?