The Self-Help and Psychology specialty courses ‘Gordon Gekko’ for Dummies, known among common people as “MBA Masters”, charge you a few tens of thousands of euros to explain a few commonplaces about the business world, but in reality the price you pay is access to a recruitment agenda. As the content of the specialty is stuffing and business memes, they really like to use bombastic expressions such as thinking outside the box, which is an allegorical way of stimulating the search for solutions and ideas beyond from the catalog of those available. It is necessary to underline the paradox of this fashion when we are surely going through a historical moment in which the ways of doing business have become more vulgar.
And the favorite, the most vulgar of all and the most repeated, is to charge for what belongs to everyone. What happens to primary health care is simply this: inconsequential consultations, those that give us peace of mind with hardly any treatment, are obviously the ones that yield the highest rate of profit, that’s why in Madrid to look at that strange pimple that has out and that sure is nothing, but oh, health insurance is needed. That is why the sidewalk you were walking on no longer has benches and terraces. We close the Retiro park when it is very hot because El Corte Inglés is open. As you can see, freshness can be privatized.
This process even affects political rights. The opposition of certain social classes to abortion does not intend to eliminate it, but to privatize it: they always could and will always be able to pay for it here or in a neighboring country. It is to you that they privatize that right. The same thing happens with sexual freedom: all sorts of sexual freedoms have always been practiced on Lord Carrington’s estate, even with the service –especially with the service– and in the basement there has always been a BDSM venue. What we don’t like so much is that you exercise sexual freedom in your own city and without paying. And that you also strut in a sleeveless shirt.
Elon Musk, who everyone knows by now was not the sharpest pencil in the case, just did the same thing on Twitter. After a year of layoffs –another of those rude vulgarities that appears as an audacious solution to everything as soon as a business loses steam–, it has gone into the phase of privatizing the commons, and it has done so by limiting the number of tweets you can read at day. Of course, that amount varies depending on what you pay: privatize access. Musk wants to privatize the last tree on Easter Island, make Twitter a development with security guards and closed-circuit television. The problem on this occasion is that limiting access to participate in a social network whose attraction and product is the multitude of discussions is to open the guts of the goose that laid the golden eggs with a scalpel: bloody criadillas for today and hunger for tomorrow.
