More and more people are becoming sick of the emptiness and destruction of corporate-constructed social reality. As the weather gets warmer, as the traffic jams get longer, as the oceans become emptier, as children become more alienated, as we work longer and harder, as suicide and drug-use rates increase, and as the gap between rich and poor becomes surreal, more people are suspecting that the global economy is a doomsday machine. Defense of the status quo ignores the fact that many of the richest people in the world are finding the nonmaterial aspects of their lives harder and less meaningful. The maintenance of corporatism in the face of such facts depends on the fiction that the subjects of modern sophisticated marketing have freedom of choice.
Freedom requires the discipline of responsibility if it is to have any meaning.
Certainly not those who attend or influence WTO and G8 summits. Despite its reach, corporate capitalism is only another ideology, and growing numbers of well-educated, socially and environmentally aware, and intensely committed individuals are dedicated to its replacement. Many of us around the world see the Seattle protesters as heroes articulating a truth that is hard to hear through the thousands of commercial messages we are subjected to daily. What author John Rossant complains about is called cultural and societal differences. Note the glee of others when the WTO talks in Seattle failed.