JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

We live lives so completely dominated by commercialism and monetary exchange that we think of everything, even ourselves, in the terms of the marketplace. Not content with turning time into a commodity (to be earned, spent, wasted, saved), we now endeavor to turn ourselves into commodities, brands, our own tiny little multinational corporations - Me, Inc.

We fret over our corporate image, as reflected in our blog layouts. We design our Yahoo, eBay or Etsy stores to communicate the right message about ourselves as brands. We attend network marketing seminars where we learn to ’sell ourselves first’. We wonder if our varied interests (if we have any left that are not market mediated or created) present a unified, sellable whole to the world.

To help us maintain our fantasy world of individualistic isolated commercial success, we pretend to have relationships with people we do not know, people who do not even exist. We have relationships with other peoples carefully crafted personal marketing messages. We develop emotional connections with the marketing messages (blogs) or commercial output (oh, I meant to say ‘lovingly handcrafted art’ but then I threw up a little in my mouth) of complete strangers and fancy ourselves on the cutting edge of a glorious return to an idyllic cottage-industry past starring us, now, here.

We sit, slowly spreading from the middle, on antique couches and ironic office chairs and hand painted porch furniture and stare at our shiny Macbooks or our sticker encrusted Thinkpads and pretend that we are going somewhere, doing something, having a relationship, when we might as well be sitting under a dryer at Flo’s Beauty Palace in pink fuzzy slippers reading Woman’s Day. No, on second thought, there would be actual real human beings at Flo’s, so that’s not it.

Whatever the analogy may be, congratulations to us. We have finally managed to become exactly what Maggie Thatcher said we were - individuals without a society. As long as the market provides each and every one of us the raw materials to construct a story out of in which there is a society, and it revolves around us, we won’t need, or want, a real society, what with all the messy multiplicity and sweaty, odoriferous interaction with competing starlets down at Flo’s.