Sushi with a fork

Peru is a very culturally diverse country. It was conceived as a state not because people from just one nation inhabited it, but because it was how the viceroyalty of Peru was organized. The South American independence process was achieved by declaring the independence of the different viceroyalties created by the Spanigh government. The Peruvian viceroyalty was the last one and probably the one that have had the bigger influence from the Spanish culture and was closer to the Spanish government than to the libertarian cause. This is important because it is why Peru's main hurdle was to create a national identity. It has been said that Jose de San Martin, the General of the Liberation Army and the person who declared Peru’s independence, stated that Peru needed to do more work than the other liberated South American countries towards creating a national identity. Many states have made the effort to create a national identity that raises above all the local identities that initially composed them; others, like Peru, haven’t been able to do it. Peruvian territory served as home for many cultures during history. At the time of the Spanish colonization, there was a vast array of Andean and Jungle societies. The most technologically and economically advanced were the ones from the Andes. Many of these societies had been conquered or annexed to a culture from Cusco that became the Inca Empire. The Inca Empire was a relatively young organization composed by several nations that was still struggling for control of its territory. While the cultures of the jungle remained isolated from western influence for many centuries, Andean cultures were exposed and transformed by their contact with the western culture and the colonization systems that ruled the viceroyalty of Peru for almost five centuries. The huge displays of gold and precious metals that the Incas had impressed the conquistadors that immediately decided to conquer and exploit the vast reserves of minerals available below the ground of the Inca territory. Mining was the main economic activity promoted by the colonial government and in order to get cheap labor Andean people were classified as second class citizens who were only allowed to perform basic jobs and weren’t given any political power. Only the Spaniards were given full rights by the government while the decedents of the Spanish people born in Peru were assigned the ‘criollo’ label that granted them some privileges over the Andean population.

Class separation was justified with an ethnocentric view that stated that the locals were less developed, ignorant, and of inferior race. It is important to acknowledge that the differences in culture, practices and language were immediately labeled as a characteristic of the race. Given that all the Spaniards were white and all the Andean people were olive-skinned. The history of class separation, to use a Marxian or Weberian term, as explained by Julio Cotler in his book ‘Clases, Estado y Nacion en el Peru’, was based initially on cultural differences. The Spanish saw the new, different culture as technologically undeveloped and thought that Andean people weren’t capable of The Spanish government classified Andean people as members of a lower class because they didn’t originally believed in the Christian god and their practices were seen as primitive, in opposition to the most ‘advanced’ western practices and developments.  The cultural practices of the different Andean communities were seen as less developed, as a product of ignorance, or as negative.  These factors created what later became the racial segregation. As all the people classified as lower class were of Andean physical traits, suddenly all the people with Andean physical features were generalized as  ignorant, less developed and poor. This is the same process to which the black population of Africa was subjected to. It is important to notice that the main reason for racism wasn’t race per se, but a series of characteristics that people from a race had in a particular moment that were later generalized to the whole race.  This fact is relevant because to understand the current situation of discrimination in Lima we need to stop considering race as the only factor and incorporate others.

Saying that the racial differences are not the main reason for discrimination can make people classify this paper as part of the ‘neoliberal racial project’, but that will be shortsighted. While the ‘neoliberal racial projects’ aims to say that matters of race should be minimized, I’m trying to find the complex system by which discriminatory practices are born in order to have clearer perspective to conduct a change in our behavior.

As a product of the economic and social organization the values of the population changed and regarded all the things related to the developed north as better. This is why for many centuries people from the coast still tried to maintain their relationships with Europe as current and travelled often. In fact the relationships to Europe, like having an European passport, are still signs of status in some parts of Lima.  The development of a capitalist economy in Peru has also lead to the creation of a economic division of classes. The old classes that had access to the political power during the times of colonization are the ones that had the control over the land and capital when the capitalist economic system was deployed. This created a burguiosie that was mainly of European descent and a proletariat class that was compossed by Andean workers. Of course that the class division in Peru is much more complicated than Marx's division of classes. For the purposes of this article and future artciles I'll prefer to use Max Weber's concept of social class that includes economic, social and political power as the sources of status in a society.

Discrimination based on race is still very strong in Peru, especially among the older white population of the coastal cities. A lot of people still assign status to others based just on their skin color and physical features. However, recent incidents point out that discrimination is based on other factors such as clothing, language spoken, occupation, among other reasons. These factors are part of a complex equation of assignment of social status that everyone makes according to their cultural and social backgrounds. Some people with Andean features that display cultural traits common to Lima are not discriminated against. For example, a person with Andean physical features wearing Abercrombie & Fitch clothing can get into a cinema without problems, but the same person with traditional Andean clothes will get discriminated or at least will get uncomfortable looks from the other people in the area.  It is true that certain races (understanding race as a social construct and not as a biological fact) have a negative connotation in certain places of the city. For example, if a white person from Lima goes to the cinema in a wealthy distric wearing Andean clothes they will get into the cinema. That is because despite having Andean clothing, the white person speaks a coastal Spanish, is accustomed to the social norms of the city – social proximity, slang, etcetera -.

Social discrimination is believed to be a product of a combination of factors that have different weight.  I think it will be interesting to develop a study to identify the factors that people use to assign status in order to get a clear perspective of where discrimination finds its origins. And how the process of socialization, understood as the process by which people gain social skills, needs to change to create a more tolerant environment. Discriminaton occurs both ways in Lima. Andean people also discriminate against white people because of the stereotypes they have about them. This area hasn't been studied as much as the discrimination that Andean people are vicitims of. Anyway of discrimination should be discouraged and all Peruvians should learn to appreciate the diversity that the country has. Only by appreciating this diversity Peru will be able to construct a national identity composed of different identities within the country.This effort will allow government officials, parents and the private sector to reform education to avoid social discrimination in a country that has a population that is racially and culturally diverse. 

When I was a kid I used to watch the Nickelodeon cartoon Rocko's Modern Life. (Who am I kidding, I still watch it these days). Rocko is a subtle critique to the modern world and the industrial ways of living. Today I was reading an excerpt of Arlie Hoschield's The Managed Hear: Commercialization of Human Feeling  and I was immediately transported back to O-town the city where Rocko lives. 

In the cartoon one big corporation owns most of the businesses in the town (Conglom-o), this corporation had many employees that look the same and act the same. Conglom-o, who owns the town has a really funny motto: "We own you". If one was to make a lighter interpretation of these motto one would conclude that they're saying that it doesn't matter what you buy, you'll always end up buying from Conglom-o. But if we make analyze the scene in more detail we can find out that all the workers of Conglom-O look the same because they've lost their personalities and emotions to those of the corporation. That's exactly what Hoschield proposes in her book.  

The extract from the book shows us how Delta Airlines trains its stewardesses to smile, lose their emotions, and apply an emotional role while doing their job. I immediately started to think of many examples where a job does not only requires you to give your labour for a wage, but to give your emotions and to fake an emotional state for a wage. The first example that came to my mind was the phone representatives of my cellphone carrier that I have been in touch with for the last week. Everytime I call I get the same answer, the same speech, the same joyful tone of voice and the same happy way of dealing with an angry customer. It doesn't matter if it's a male or female representative I always get the sense that I'm talking to the "corporate personality". That was true up until last Wednesday when I was left on hold for about 20 minutes and the rep forgot to switch the hold music on. I got to hear all the conversations that were going on in that call center and especially the one being held by the representative next to where the headset my rep was working with was left. This guy started giving out the same speech I was given and I started to imagine a room full of people dressed in the same way, wearing red ties and black suits, with the same faces. It was the clone wars (from Star Wars) all over. About 4 minutes into the call (and into my hold - assholes who make their customers wait) the representative started to lose his temper and his personality came out as he started to demand some respect from the customer. He was clearly overwhelmed by the angry customer. Having worked at customer service for a period of my life (heck! I think I'm still in that area right now) I knew how he felt. I've never felt that having a corporate speech and losing your personality to that of the corporation is a good thing to do. Even though all the experienced managers who are control freaks want it that way (it's my blog, I don't have to be politically correct, right?).

So, to make a long story short the representative lost his corporate personality and showed that its really difficult to sell your personality as part of the whole package you sell as work. The problem I see is that the idea that people need to hide their emotions at work is a bit too much for anyone to handle and stay un-alienated by their work.  Let's define alineation as the loss of your true personality and values for those of the corporation you work for. Alienation causes you to become resentful and even violent towards the institutions that make your life lose meaning. 

What my empirical observation tells me is that the raise of all the self-help industry, the proliferation of so many new cults and religions and the creation of opposition groups is all a result of the alienation created by "control freak" corporations who want all their employees to act and smile in the same way. Employees who fake their emotions to fit certain work persona are in fact being hypocritical during work. They are hiding their emotions and they're learning how to control their emotions to give certain images to the customers they're serving.  Finally, these customer service employees will end up feeling distant from themselves and commiditising their emotions. 

Emotions are considered to be very personal feeling and that are indeed part of our originality and our essence. Losing it to corporations is the ultimate sacrifice for work, and as a world of broadening inequality arises the only way to achieve a higher income is to sell your emotions to others. The selling of emotions is out in the market since very long, but now it has permeated the majority of fields of work.All establishments want happy people so we need to fake it in order to be employed. This situation has made many workers feel unhappy about their work and their lifes in general. People do not know who they are any longer, they don't know if they're faking their emotions in their personal lifes as they do in their work life.  They're trying to find meaning for their lifes in activities and institutions that are removed from theirselves.

Consumerism, fundamentalisms, radical religious cults, tribes of drug users,  and tribes of any kind are all activities and groups that emerge and gain power as we lose the ability to find our essence inside us. We end up being Conglom-o employees who look the same and act the same. We all smile and are supposed to be happy at work, to show no sadness and to become robots. 

The simple solution for this will be for the company to strive to make their employees find true happiness rather than teaching them how to fake it, or forcing them to learn how to fake it. Of course this will require for managers to trully care about their employees which seems to be too much to ask to the average manager who has also selled his emotions to the corporation. Having happier people will lead to better results and also to a culture where consumerism and meaning are not products that one can buy, but states one can achieve by socializing with the group their living with. 

This post proposes one problem that is a result of the evolution of work and consumer expectations as our economy turns from a product economy to a service economy. This is turning people unhappier with their living situations and especially with their emotional situations. How do we change this? How can we change the culture of standarization? What can it be done to reduce alienation? What other problems emerge with this one? These are all questions we need to ask ourselves and work on if we want to help us find a true meaning in our life. 

In conclusion, capitalism and especially the evolution of consumer expectations as they're faced with more human interaction everyday has made companies believe that they need to control the personality and the experience of their employees. Even though it is true they need to provide a excellent experience the path of control to provide that experience is a bad idea. They need to focus on the wellbeing of the employee in order to guarantee the better experience for their customers and not force their employees to become something they aren't and to commiditise their emotions as they do it.  This subject is much more vast than the parts I've covered and I hope we can continue the discussion in the comments. 

In the last couple of weeks the Occupy Wallstreet movement has gained much more press and the campaign has been joined by several protestors from many cities in the USA and around the world. Tumblrs such as "We are the 99%" had been created and have many inspiring protests. I believe in their concerns and that they are tired of current situation of the system we're living in, which has lead to an economic downturn of huge proportions. In fact, probably all the economic growth that brought that wellfare in the first place has been made out by a "fake value" economy that has brought by this consequences upon us. And my concerns start to raise right there. It seems to me that people protesting at the Occupy Wallstreet movilizations are fighting to maintain the status quo, or to go back to the state of affairs that caused the status quo, and that is a very dangerous thing to do for all of humanity. 

The emergence of the Information Age has changed how social systems are organized. We can talk about the world systems theory, or about the network society as proposed by Castells. Actions done at Wallstreet can affect all the world's economies, labor markets, standards of living, and any other system in general. According to Castells (and to any educated analysis of the news of the last couple of decades) the powerful, first-world, developed states have been making decisions that affect the whole world considering only on the consequences for their nations and not of the consequences for other actors in the system. Nobody thinks about what would happen to Latin America is the USA raises traiffs to create "American Jobs" or if they subsidize farmers from the midland states. All of those actions will have consequences for people outside of the US and while the economy will be better for a couple of years, the position of the US in the world will generate a huge chaos and more insecurity. The fact that these decisions impact other countries generates animosity of those nation-states against the developed world, which are probably the cause of many world tentions around the world. The probelm that surfaces from these points is that the actions asked for by the Occupy Wallstreet movement will probably have a positive short-term effect in the United States, but will (without the shadow of a doubt) bring terrible consequences if other actors in the networked society are not taken into consideration in the decision making process. To achieve this, people will need to start thinking globally. The idea of a global village regains validity once again, and not because globalisation has produced a unified culture or system, but because all the systems have become interrelated due to globalisation. 

As I read the demands of the 99% I can't help, but to feel concerned about what people are asking for. I see a myriad of posts and all ask for higher paying jobs so people can pay back their credits, the return of the wellfare state and the creation of labor regulations. All of these demands may seem to have a direct causality with the economic well-being of the population, but in reality are the causes of the current downturn of the system. What needs to be done is a totally different thing. I remember arguing about this with Liz Pullen on twitter and she made a very good point which i will paraphrase as I can't seem to find the tweet. Liz said that people making the revolutions rarely know what they want, they just protest to show a discomfort. Nevertheless, the problem is that authorities will listen to the claims of the people and will probably aim to give them what they are asking for, changing direction towards the new crisis and the further destruction of the economic system as whe know it. This will be natural evolution, but the problem is that this natural evolution will bring pain, suffering and death to many people before the system is corrected, if it ever is. We can do better and we need to do better.

I propose that the revolution needs to be one that upgrades our social systems and not one of returning to the good times of the past. One of evolving our current systems of values and socialisation towards the future. We need to start hacking our systems and valuing other things beyond money and our individuality. Many theorists, such as Ulrich Beck, argue that individualism is the sole cause of the current crises we're living in. I think that the lack of concioussness of the people we affect with our decisions is one the main causes of the huge damage the system has made towards the lower end of the class system. 

A new set of values needs to be set, the re-emergence of social capital as the key value of society should be a key component of the revolution. This will lead to the relegation of economic power to a second place and will end with the corruption lead by high paying corporations. A revolution of going back to the old systems will only make the "one percent" more powerful and will maintain the status quo for a couple of years, befeore we face the next world crisis. 

We have the choice to change or to repeat the cycle. What will it be?

Steve Jobs's life will mark moments in each and everyone of us. He changed the way we communicate, the way we appreciated technology, the way we thought of design. He made many of us design junkies. He made us love simplicity and changed many life philosophies with the creation of a single button. He changed industries, revolutionized every single aspect of modern life. He taught us amazing lessons. He cared about the humans, and the human exprience. He didn't care about customers, he just wanted us to suck on every beautiful icon of the Mac. He decided that black and white will never go out of fashion and that limiting our choices of color was actually the classy thing to do. We can't imagine the idea of a pink iPhone and we hope it will never come. 

Everyone has a story or a couple of stories influenced by Steve Jobs and I am no exception. He taught us that nothing was impossible and that we shouldn't be trapped by dogma. He revolutionized the way in which we communicate. He created a mobile device capabale of handling all the functionalities of a computer. He made it possible to broadcast an international IM for cheap. He gave me the iPhone and he have birth to the smartphone (even the G1) that made my last relationship possible. His invention kept me close to who I loved and made me part of every tiny bit of her life. Before that revolution it was impossible to be close to your loved one who was more than 4,000 km away. But he dreamt of a world where everyone was close enough, where distance wouldn't matter, and we dreamed with him. We believed because he believed. I shared many times of joy through Facetime, enjoyed the Gamecenter games, chatted through Meebo, and shared an appstore account. He made it possible for me to be as close as technology could get me, which was a long way. He made me believe that whatever is the hurdle we find, there's a way to overcome it and achieve true happiness. Even though that relationship is over, he made it possible with one disruptive invention.And even though he is gone I still keep with me his most valuable lesson: "Always remember that any dream can become true. You just need to be bold enough to make it happen".

Yesterday as I was talking to a friend who is the CEO of a big firm and  the topic of alienation in the workplace came up. He had a very curious problem happening with one of the teams working for him. It turs out that the employees of a department don't want to work for his business any longer. All of them want to go to other jobs, look for new opportunities or even retire. I couldn't believe what my ears were hearing! I've never seen something like that. I began to wonder what was going on there, what could make 20 or 30 people want to quit a job that pays well at the same time. The answer was simple: Culture.

For a long time the comfortable, used to a paycheck part of me has been battling my starter self. This has turned into an epic battle inside me that not always leads to good decisions on my part. Starting a business it's not an easy task. Not only because it's hard to do it, but because it's very hard to fight the programming in our brains that is set to looking for a job, waiting for a paycheck an doing the bare minimum to get through. Many of us fight this programming as a whole or in different fronts and that's what makes us go forward and stand out of the crowd that is still happy with conformity.