Every so often, I “give gambling a go,” in the sense that I may be willing to invest a highly minimal amount of income ($1-3) on gambling machine games, usually to get nothing back and to experience a highly underwhelming, anti-climactic sense of disappointment from playing the game and observing the players around me, who are either outwardly disgusting or, for all intents and purposes, entirely normal looking, and yet this is how they vent, getting back at their stupid kids for asking for too many treats at the supermarket, or maybe to get back at their boss for making them work an extra two hours on a Thursday. I cannot help but feel a deep sense of loss for these people, who clearly have misplaced priorities if they are willing to slip twenties into their “lucky machine” for discrete little encounters in innocuous looking drinking establishments. These are the very people who are supposedly the fabric of society; the glue that holds our families together, but they are wasting all of their money – their children's education, for God's sake – on their chemical imbalance that is only alleviated by these mindless games and their financial connotations. At least crack smokers have a more thoroughly embedded sense of family and community (in some cases).
This is not about stereotyping anyone, nor is it about casting unfair judgments. Making patently exaggerated generalisations about people is exactly what got us into trouble in the first place (well, depending on who you ask), and only leads to deeply ingrained social class barriers which essentially damn a fixed percentage of the population only because of the accident of birth. Bearing all of this in mind, however, we have examined this issue a little bit more closely and have come to the stunning conclusion that we are able to learn all sorts of things about people if we just know a few simple details about their life background, education status, income, sex, sexuality, ethnicity, and intelligence level. These simple, basic details – which anyone would be willing to answer on a census form, or something similar – are exactly the sort of thing that obscenely wealthy corporations would benefit from if they were to compile all of them into a computerised database. (The exciting potentials of information-based marketing are already being tested, to your annoyance, all across the Internet.) What is the difference, one might ask, between designating separate public toilets for whites and blacks, and a company sending you advertisements on the basis of your past purchases of bright green flip-flops, Family Guy Season 4, The Faith Based Purpose Driven Life, and double Oreo fudge Domino's microwavable pizza? (The company in question has unfortunately already classified you in its 'Lower Middle Class' and 'Gullible Doctrinal Adherent' databases.)
The difference is simple: your choices remain the same, just like everyone else! You can entirely ignore the carefully tailor selected for your own interests advertisements, if it is your prerogative. The corporations, after all, are just utilising their sacrosanct right to freedom of speech. They could be doing just about anything and it would fall under that good old umbrella. Anyway, it's nothing for any of you lot to worry about. Questions to which the answer is No: 'Are we being slowly and meticulously brainwashed to the point of total surrender to global conglomerates?'
