[...] In a post from February 2017 with the heading "Building Global Community," Mark Zuckerberg was ostensibly reacting to the trauma caused by Donald Trump's presidency. [...] "Are we all building the world we all want?" The sentence's rhetorical test lies not in its content but rather inits form, which subtly extends the reach of its pronoun. Though the speaker of the sentence's first "we all" seems to refer only to Facebook (the previous sentence is about the company's tireless work on products and updates), the second "we all" consolidates the business and its customers indiscriminately in a single group. The merger complete, the users are suddenly shifted into an active mode: global businesses and users build the world side by side, united beyond all questions of power. And isn't it true that "we" are actively involved? We all maintain our profiles and press our like buttons, don't we?

The emergence of modern management theory coincides with the birth of business consulting, an indication of their shared genesis in the new culture of efficiency. [...] Harrington Emerson (1906), Gilbreth Inc. (1912), and Booz Allen HAmilton (1914), were founded. The nearly parallel development of management theory and consulting can be convincingly explained by the fact that the latter was presented as a special form of expertise with which the newcomers promised to provide orientation to executives bewildered by social and technological upheavals. [...]

[...] The emergence of the novel in the sixteenth century and its development since the eighteenth century are inconceivable without the incorporation of economic and media-related conditions. In particular, the realistic novel owes its existence to the upheavals in economics and media in connection with the formation of the bourgeois class. The same goes for literature today: its relevance owes entirely to its dependence on the social and economic contexts in which writing takes place. Since the eighteenth century, literature has classically stood for a lofty realm above economics, an idealized conception that literature itself requires. But this realm apart is tainted from the outset since it attempts to reject the economic conditions attached to its genesis. As the warrantor of a liberated subjectivity and society, literature is credible only if it exposes itself to the very thing that this emancipation simultaneously impedes and annihilates. This is particularly true of contemporary capitalism, which destroys precisely that which modern literature and art traditionally seek to preserve or even to call forth in the first place: the reconcilation of the past and the future, subject and nature, society and language, work and love.

Steve Clayton: "If Microsoft was a children's story, it would be about a collection of wizards who live inside a castle. They'd invent amazing things that would be the source of progress to many people, but nobody would know where these magical inventions came from."

It would be useless to unmask this story or object to it as an unacceptable simplification that amounts to infantilization. The if-then formulation calls on the imagination and the willing suspension of disbelief familiar from literature. It's also unclear whether the narrator in this example is a wizard himself or just a messenger bringing tidings into the world from the programmers and engineers, the real wizards in the enchanted Microsoft castle. You can reject this communication strategy and refuse to allow yourself to be placed in the position of a child. But that neither negates its claim to validity, nor is its power in any way diminished. It simply requires others who are willing to be enchanted - or even just our belief that these others exist.