Dear humanity,
Let's start with water.
Not metaphorically,
Actually water.
There's a company,
You may have heard of them,
They're called Nestle.
And you probably know them from chocolate or coffee or any number of products arranged cheerfully at eye level in every supermarket on earth.
And for decades,
Nestle has been taking water.
Groundwater from communities in Pakistan,
In India,
In Sub-Saharan Africa,
In rural North America.
Communities where people were already walking miles to find something clean to drink and they took it,
They bottled it and then they sold it back to them.
When challenged,
Nestlé sent lawyers.
And when the lawyers were not enough,
They sent more lawyers.
This is not a conspiracy theory.
It's in court records.
It's in UN reports.
It is well documented,
Well verified,
And largely ignored because either the chocolate is very good or all too busy to care.
Coca-Cola did something similar in India,
Drained aquifers in communities that had no other source.
Local farmers watched their land dry up while a few miles away a factory bottled the same water and put a red label on it.
There were protests,
There were reports,
There were strongly worded letters from people with very little power to people with a great deal of it.
And the factories.
They're still running.
I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty about your soft drink.
Guilt is not the point,
And guilt,
Frankly,
Is just another product they will find a way to sell you eventually.
I'm telling you this because it is a clear example of something very important.
The world is not broken.
It is working exactly as designed.
The design is simply not for you.
Marcus Aurelius,
Roman emperor,
Amateur philosopher,
Man who had more power than almost any human being in history,
And spent his evenings writing notes to himself about,
Humility said something that has stayed with me.
He said,
Confine yourself to the present.
He didn't mean to ignore the past or abandon the future.
He meant,
See what's actually in front of you.
What is actually in front of you if you look without the story is a set of systems built over centuries to extract the maximum possible value from human beings while returning the minimal possible in exchange.
Labor,
Attention,
Trust,
Water,
All of it quantified,
All of it monetized,
All of it optimized.
And at every stage of the process a great deal of effort is spent making sure you're looking somewhere else.
The Romans have a phrase for it,
Panam et Circensis,
Bread and circuses.
Keep the population fed and entertained and they will not ask difficult questions about who was running things or why.
The emperors of Rome understood that compliance does not require chains,
It requires distraction.
A good enough show,
A full enough stomach.
And share the enemy to shout out.
So we kept the formula.
We just upgraded the circus.
An outfit's in your pocket and learns your preferences and serves you exactly the kind of outrage,
Beauty and absurdity that's most likely to keep your thumb moving.
The Coliseum had 50,
000 people.
Your phone holds everyone you've ever met and several million strangers in an algorithm that has studied your behavior longer and more carefully than any person.
In your life ever has.
And it's not doing it because it likes you.
Carl Jung spent a great deal of his career trying to understand why intelligent people consistently acted against their own interests,
Why they repeated patterns that hurt them,
Why they followed leaders they knew were corrupt,
Bought things they knew they didn't need,
Believed stories they had already watched unravel.
His answer,
Simplified,
Was this.
Most of what drives human behavior happens below the level of conscious awareness.
We think we are making a choice.
We are mostly running programs installed in childhood,
Reinforced by culture and exploited by anyone with enough resources to exploit them.
The advertising industry discovered this approximately five minutes after Jung published it.
Here's what I want you to take from this letter.
Not despair,
And not a boycott list.
This is not a manifesto.
Just this,
The fact that you feel something is wrong is not a malfunction.
It is not anxiety or negativity or a failure to be grateful.
It is an accurate perception,
The feeling that you are being managed rather than respected,
Sold rather than served,
Distracted rather than informed.
And that feeling is correct.
You're not paranoid.
You're paying attention.
The question is not whether the game is rigged,
The question is what you do once you know that,
And the choice you keep living anyway.
That is what these letters are all about.
More soon.
Sincerely.
Nobody.
