We have no shortage of monsters, real and imagined, in our world. And while I will personally always be most terrified by the endlessly hungry, black-eyed shark from Jaws—watching that film at five is a primordial experience that forever hardwires you to fear great white death—there is a much more fairly maligned entity that has rightly earned its place atop the menaces of modern horror: the corporation.
Weyland-Yutani. Umbrella Corporation. North Central Positronics. Cyberdyne Systems. Even reading them off has a real Four Horsemen vibe. And you know what they represent—unrestrained greed and human hunger, bureaucratic systems of oppression and division, the reduction of the human being to either a statistic or a usable asset, each a modern Prometheus pursuing perpetual advancement, dominion, and an ever-higher stock valuation, and all of this couched in a structure which purposefully removes personal liability and separates us from responsibility and dominant moral codes.
Okay…I know. I know. You weren’t looking for an AdBusters article from the guy who writes about cockroach suits, so I won’t get on my soapbox about the broader empirical combination of corporations, governments, and banks which form what John Perkins calls “the corporatocracy” and their destructive gospel of economic growth as a universal benefit. But I’m going to at least hint at its presence, and I promise I’m going to tell you a weird story amidst these crazy-old-man-rejects-society-and-buys-cabin ramblings.
So: In my earliest fiction I wrote about intimate, personal monsters—addiction, parasites, familial trauma. It wasn’t until a thirteen year stint in banking, and my work as a Special Compliance Analyst during the Great Recession that I truly saw the scope of the corporate monster, and how deeply its tendrils were rooted in our lives. And the irony is that while I was attempting to exorcise and express what I’d seen—via a completely psychotic first novel titled Skullcrack City—I had a very strange experience which only served to broaden my sense that the corporate monster was unbound, and would conspire against even the smallest threat to its sovereignty.
***
I think the first thing you should know is that I wasn’t wearing pants when the FBI knocked on my front door. There are other, more important details about the how and why of their sudden appearance, but I think the pants detail is important because it shows how improbable I thought it was that the Feds might ever appear on my stoop. It’s not like I was fully-dressed at all times, kitted up with a bug-out bag, anxiously waiting for the other foot to drop on some dark crime from my past. I was a new dad using a precious few hours of daycare time to pound away at another chapter on my novel. The office was hot. I’d been slamming espressos and Red Bull all morning. My heart was in hummingbird mode and I was sweating even with a fan pointed at me, so I’d decided to work in my boxers.
Putting panic and paranoia on the page was the order of the day—the protagonist of the novel, S.P. Doyle, was in the midst of a month-long binge on an awful drug called Hexadrine, and had discovered that the bank he worked for was indeed involved in criminal collusion with a shady medical supply company that was engaged in illegal testing. I’d taken a method approach to the work, and spent the prior days researching actual corporate and/or government testing atrocities (e.g. Tuskegee, Project 4.1, the Dow Chemical/Johnson & Johnson/U.S. Army “Agent Orange” collab), and following the new media revelations about radical NSA overreach. On top of that, my wife had just returned from a security conference and told me two things: Delete your Silverlight plug-in, and cover your webcam. The feeling of being watched was overwhelming and inevitable. My trust in the government and the companies with which it collaborated sank from low-tide to subterranean. The night before diving into my fictional world of conspiracy I had actually covered up my webcam with a little blue Post-It note, so by the time I was writing Doyle’s story, the sound of helicopter blades and police sirens playing on my audio, I was deep into some Henry-Hill-on-the-run mind state.
Then came the knock.
I popped up, threw on my t-shirt and shorts, and hustled to the front door, expecting to have to explain the meaning of a “No Soliciting” sign for the hundredth time. But instead of Witnesses or pest control experts “who just happen to be in the neighborhood today” I opened the door to a very professional-looking young woman in a black, well-tailored suit. A large, black SUV was parked at the curb. It felt like a prank show’s version of a Fed more than your average workaday agent. Still, when she showed me her credentials they looked both very official and suitably worn, and I suddenly felt I had made a mistake in opening my front door.
This is how they get you, right? You unlock the door, they claim they see or smell something suspicious, and you’re done. Who would pick up my son from daycare?
But obviously slamming the door closed was also, at that point, an overtly suspicious move. Besides, I hadn’t done anything, right?
Right?
I ran through a mental list of my transgressions—the kind that assail you on loop at three in the morning—and still couldn’t figure out why the FBI could reasonably be at my door.
The agent spoke. “There’s a person of interest in your neighborhood that we think you might know. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions?”
I said, “Sure” and I wanted to feel relieved, but I couldn’t help but notice the way she had looked me over when I opened my door, and the way that she was peering around me, down my hall. Looking toward the office where I’d just covered my webcam.
“How long have you lived at this residence?”
“A little over five years, I think.”
“During that time have you ever interacted with [redacted]? He lives next door at 3927.”
To my relief I was able to honestly answer “No. Never heard of him.” to the name she’d asked about. I’d known my actual neighbors Tom and Kaye since the week we moved to the neighborhood. It was just them, their kid, and a dog over there. Sure, Tom’s band used to tour with G.G. Allin, so maybe he’d done something awful with G.G. and changed his name, and maybe it was him they were looking for, but that was a huge unknown, and I’d answered truthfully, and I was ready for her to go before she noticed how sweaty and nervous I was and I’d have to explain that being a new father means hyper-dosing caffeine to accomplish anything and it doesn’t always mean you’re guilty and should be pulled into a black SUV and mysteriously disappeared.
But I didn’t have to say any of that because she gave me one more long looking over, nodded to herself as if making some final decision in her head, and said, “Thank you for your time.”
I always wonder if she heard how hard and fast I slid that deadbolt into place as she walked away.
***
I spent the next few hours vacillating between fear, confusion, and anger. What kind of bizarre subterfuge was that question? A simple records review would tell them who lived next door. She didn’t even knock on the door to 3927. Just knocked on my door, looked me over, asked me about a person I’d never heard of, and left. And all this the day after I’d shut down my webcam and typed the words “government participation in illegal human testing” into my browser bar. Maybe the rumor about Feds keeping an extra-close eye on Portland was no rumor. Were they tracking my history or keystrokes? Were the corporations and hideous experiments I’d researched flagged on some government list? Were they protecting partners in current projects? Why had she come? What were they trying to do? And worst of all, why would they waste taxpayer money scoping me out? I mean, the book certainly had its share of counter-culture elements, but it also had brain-eating monsters and telepathic turtles, so…why?
Or was it all my ego, the writer pretending to importance and influence that few possess, the FBI agent present due to a clerical error created by a faulty data merge on some spreadsheet? Could I really imagine them watching me from their surveillance van, seeing that Post-It note come down to block the view. “We’ve lost eyes on the asset. Quick, send in an agent!”
No. That’s one hundred percent fucking absurd.
Or is it? That’s the problem. That question. The unknown. You couple that with everything I’d learned about decades of government/corporate synergy in illegal human testing—the impunity with which they violate unknowing human subjects—and you’ve got a perfect recipe for some real “fear is the mind-killer” paranoia.
Still, I’ve never filed a FOIA Request to see if my name appears in any paperwork. Because: the hubris of that. But perhaps I should, just to know one thing. In the meantime uncertainty reigns supreme, swirling and fueling the flames of conspiracy. And not just in my household, in my petty delusions of grandeur, wondering if the corporation that makes the world’s most popular rejuvenating cream has me on government watch because I wanted to write about how their head scientist once said that he saw the inmates at the Holmesburg Prison as “acres of skin” for experimentation. No, the whole world is now awash in conspiracy. Everything is questioned. Every certain fact is countered, every expert dismissed. Amidst this destabilization, small business atrophies at a rate we can’t comprehend while monolithic multi-national corporations facilitate record cash grabs for the privileged few. “Shareholder theory” still infects our economy, stokes a hunger which can never truly be met and in which growth is the only option. Carefully monetized marketing engines figure out exactly which kind of uncertainty keeps you clicking. Trust is not a thing we do anymore. Consensus feels like a mythical bird that none of us will ever see. Disinfo agents work overtime on corporate cash, hardwiring their calls for dollar-driven death cult sacrifices into our dopamine compulsion loops.
You can picture Ash aboard the Nostromo, admiring the ruthless efficiency of the mega-corp. And each one of us is hiding away—more so than ever—confused, hoping for comfort and safety, waiting for the moment we’ll be claimed as a human resource.
(Yes, I still drink too much caffeine. Yes, I know this is drifting back toward manifesto. And yes, I can see the deep, deep irony in writing this at the same time I’m promoting a new novel about all of these things [plus parasites!] which is, itself, being sold by a massive corporation.)
But that’s the state of things, or at least how it feels. We’ve created something, and we can see the harm inherent, and yet it continues to expand and subjugate, and the uncertainty around us makes us wonder if it can ever truly be stopped.
That’s why Skynet’s uprising rings true. That’s part of why the T-Virus terrifies. They are palatable, monstrous echoes of the true horror we can feel as we scrap our way through each day. Like the no-longer looming tempest of climate change, the spread and dominance of the corporation often feels immutable.
And this feeling of cancerous growth can be especially confusing when one thinks about the immense benefits of modern corporatized medical science—I’ve twice had my life saved on a surgical table—but then we think about Biogen’s vulturine testing on people in abject poverty in India, or Purdue pushing a barrel of Oxys on anyone who ever stubbed their toe, and we are forced to wonder, “What are they doing to us?” It’s a question which feels sadly inevitable when we have tied healing and all else to a structure which serves predatory profit over everything, where each person’s sought after dollar value is greater than the intrinsic value of their natural life. The rise of the corporation has created a world in which you can’t be certain of anything other than the fact that these entities have to keep feeding and growing to survive, and though they often keep us as pets we are just as easily food.
So, sure, any time I’m floating on the surface of the water—whether ocean, lake, or honestly, even a swimming pool—I’m waiting for the massive, toothy maw of a great white to clamp down around my midsection and drag me to the depths. That’s irrational, though. But when I think about the way we live right now, about our deep uncertainty and the way we have created a system in which we conspire against ourselves in service of the corporation, I know which monster I should truly fear.
