 Don't you wonder sometimes why citizens don't really turn out to vote, why students are tuned out, why workers aren't engaged, and why all these organizations are busy creating engagement strategies or gamifying themselves or something just to get people reconnected. Well, I think this is happening because we've been treating all these people as mere consumers. In fact, if you want to be really blunt, we've been treating them as gullets with wallets and eyeballs. Gullets that are appetites, wallets that was really what the companies are trying to get to, and eyeballs and of course ears and other senses to get to stimulate those gullets. And that's it. We've not been treating them as whole humans. This has had a tremendous number of effects on society. I'll try to enumerate some here. First, this notion of alienation is partly because we're competing against the Joneses. You know, he who dies or the most stuff wins. So of course we're alienated. There's a sense of loss of agency. In fact, I'll talk in a moment about two separations that are a lot of this, that encapsulate this. There is of course waste and pollution because we're buying a lot of stuff, we're making a lot of stuff, we're buying things we don't need, we're having companies sell us stuff that we really don't need, and they're perfectly happy to because it contributes the GDP into their quarterly results. In general, it leads to unhappiness because it turns out that having more money and having more stuff doesn't in fact lead to happiness. Something that we slowly as a civilization seem to be discovering. It's really interesting to see movements toward voluntary simplicity or towards having less or towards realizing when you have enough, whatever else it might be. This whole consumer model goes really, really nicely with this notion of gross domestic product as a measure of the national health with growth addiction, meaning as long as everything is growing we're going to be okay, we will be healthy, with the over-protection of intellectual property, with the ownership of all sorts of things. And all you have to do really is lather, rinse, and repeat this model, which is what we've been doing since, oh, 1900 or so. Let me go deeper for a moment into these two separations I've talked about. Consumerization, consumerism, this whole notion of treating us just as consumers, first separates us from one another. My job is to create my identity by buying Nike and you're going to buy Puma or Adidas or Skechers or something else. But we are in some sense competing for attention, competing for membership. We are not necessarily meant to be together in this consumer world. We're treated as individuals and individualism is one of the high goals of the American dream. We're also, and this is much more subtle, we're separated from the responsibility for the task at hand. If you're a consumer in the healthcare system, you're just a patient, you're not responsible for keeping yourself healthy, pills and insurance will cover things when you break. If you're a consumer in the education system, you're just responsible for showing up on time and regurgitating what they tell you in the tests. You're not responsible for learning and you're clearly not responsible for fixing things around you in the world that you could learn from. This goes really deep and it's very subtle and we've taken it for granted entirely. So it's important for me that we are not consumers. We're whole humans and I'll go into that more in the rest of this trip into the relationship economy. My name is Jerry Mikulski. Thanks for watching this Rexcast. There's a lot more at the links on this page.