Social Media’s Plantation of the Mind

by Charles Hugh Smith
Of Two Minds

The Company Store is open, buy whatever you want on easy credit, and don’t forget to take an approved narrative with you.

I’ve been discussing the neocolonial-plantation structure of the U.S. economy since 2008, and now this model has reached perfection in social media’s Plantation of the Mind. Once you’re firmly enmeshed in this social media Plantation, you lose sight of the fact that there’s a larger world outside the plantation: social media platforms aren’t exploitive plantations in the World Wide Web/Internet, they are the Internet as far as their users are concerned.

Since I spent some of my youth in a classic Plantation town (and worked on the plantation as a laborer in summer), the concept of a Plantation Economy is not an abstraction to me, but a living analogy of the way our economy works.

In the classic Plantation, everything is managed by those in charge to benefit the owners. Workers are forced to buy their necessities at The Company Store, and since the entire town and plantation is owned by the corporation, there’s no private ownership of land or housing; everyone is a serf, beholden to the owners, and since costs are artificially high at The Company Store (due to the lack of competition), the serfs have to go into debt to survive: they become debt-serfs.

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