For decades now we have sat quietly and let whatever happens happen. We have sat idle-by while those in power have engaged in all manner of debauchery. From minor inconveniences like hording (in terms of wealth and assets) and payout bailing1 to turning a blind eye to dozens of crimes committed in broad daylight 2. Our placidity has allowed their tastes to become even more perverse over time. First they played “Product Roulette” 3 to show just how easily they could fool the masses. A relatively benign but still insulting game, and now they have moved on to actioneering 4.
As most people will know actioneering was ruled to be legal (surprise, surprise) as outlawing it would take away from people’s “freedom to association” (more on this later). This of course coming from a judge who was appointed to commissioner of commerce for his “excellence in industry relations”. But I digress, let’s get back to the topic at hand with a hypothetical. Imagine you have just arrived on the U of O campus. As you walk through the courtyard there are lushes exotic plants, and incredibly complex buildings that look like they have come out of a utopian novel. You walk up to your orientation councilor for your first day, and pass under the famous logo of The Org. You think to yourself how great it’s going to be to go and get your degree, and maybe even land a job with The Org down the road and contribute to the “innovation” that brought you the campus you are on. You express this sentiment to the councilor when she asks you the classic “And what do you want to do at the end of your degree?“. Her eyes light up and she tells you “well if that’s what you’re looking for, then you’re in luck. We have some actioneering positions available on campus that can help you actualize your dreams right away. They’re difficult to get into, but they pay well if you’re willing”. You know you’ve heard of actioneering before, but don’t really know what it is. Still you decide that this is a great oppurtunity, and on the way during the walkthrough tour you decide to throw in your resume.
Fast forward a few weeks and you get a message through your student messaging center telling you that an Org representative wants you to come in for an interview about the actioneering position. Excited and nervous you setup a time and begin to pick out what you’re going to wear, panic over what questions will be asked, and frantically try to look up what actioneering even is (fyi details on line are suspiciously sparse). Arriving to the interview you go through and nervously answer all the questions, and at the end are invited back for 1 more round of interviews. Happy with yourself you go out to the bar that night and have some fun, and then eagerly await the next interview. You walk in with your head held high to find you are now being interviewed by 4 major executives of The Org that you recognize from news outlets. Your heart sinks and you go back to nervously answering the questions 1 at a time. Then, one of the executives drops a pen and tells you to pick it up. You find this odd since you are across the room from them, and the pen is right under her foot but you oblige. Once you get underneath her she tells you to stop and stay where you are. You freeze and assume she thought the worst of you trying to “sneak a peak”, and begin trying to explain yourself. She then tells you to stop talking and arch your back, once you do she puts her feet up on your back and says “He’s much bigger than the last one, I don’t feel like I’m balancing my feet on a twig” and then chuckles with a sterilized laugh that was probably “workshopped” over several weeks with a PR team.
The next hour consists of some of the most embarrassing tasks of your life including having to massage their feet, and even being forced to act out various scenes from plays with another student you vaguely recognize who has been doing this for a year apparently. After all this the woman from before says “Well done. Since you seem a bit shocked I will let you in on what’s going on here. Essentially your job will be to do whatever I, or anyone else in this room says when we say it, and however we tell you to do it. In exchange not only is your degree going to be covered, but we will make sure to give you a great recommendation going forward”. Gulping you respond “I… I’m not sure I can do this. I wa.. wanted to thank you all for this op.. oppurtunityy but I think I’m going to go no…” she cuts you off to respond “And of course, since you signed the contract on entering you will be expelled if you decide to do otherwise. Oh, and also the contract had an NDA, so if any of this get’s out we will find you”. Unfortunately for them, the student they did this to found me. As did the dozen or so other students with nearly identical stories to this one, which means I am obviously not going to reveal the student’s details, but also it will be impossible for them to tell which of the students was involved.
While I could go on for hours with the abuse that people have dealt with over this “fun new game”, not the least of which including forcing people to engage in sex acts and crimes for the enjoyment of their “owners”, I think it is better to get to the heart of this argument. Even without the borderline (and over the line) criminal activity actioneering should have been shot down where it stood in the courtroom for the Commissioner of Commerce. It is one thing to hire someone as an assistant to do odd jobs, it is another to rent a human being for the express purpose of humiliation, and/or assertion of dominance. These victims are not being used to do work for a company. At best they are used to make executives feel big about being able to tell people to do literally whatever they say, and at worst to live out sick vicarious fantasies. There are laws that exist to protect people from this sort of behavior, but they are being overridden by a bought and paid for bueurocratic lackey in a bowtie (nearly an actioneer himself) signing whatever paper falls under his nose that the executives who have him on a leash tell him to sign. Actioneering goes above and beyond essentially every form of labor protection, and we have done nothing about it. Only allowed to work 100 hours a week, nope you’re on call 24/7 for when your boss wants you to get up at 3am so they can watch you walk around their lawn naked for their amusement 5. Oh, your a pacifist, well if you want to keep your job you better get your ass in that boxing ring and beat the other actioneer that’s tied to a chair or your career is over 6.
Now the cases I have brought up are the extreme, and in lieu of a lawsuit I figure I should be fair. At the lower end of the spectrum other people simply hire actioneers to only mildly humiliate and denigrate them, hell some of them even pick full fledged adults with families instead of students to pray on 7. But now let’s get into the details. I’m sure most people with a pulse are against actioneering, and if you aren’t then the good news is The Org is likely to be hiring for an executive position once they lay off the people mentioned above to save face! You may be wondering about how this is all legal. Even if the Commissioner agrees that actioneering is not illegal surely the other indiscretions are still admissible in court? Well no, thanks to a handy loophole added a decade ago. You see a decade ago there was an exception made in the law as a tax loophole for “gifts”. If you “gifted” someone money as a “friend”, then surely you shouldn’t be taxed on that, right? Well of course not, that wouldn’t be very nice now would it! Imagine having to make all your “friends” pay taxes on their “gifts” (if I had pearls I would be clutching them now).
Of course this loophole had another loophole in it (shocker). You see the definition of “friend” was incredibly loose, after all who can objectively define what a friend is? Clearly that’s not something a court should decide, and should be left to interpretation right? Well of course what happened is that all of the executives of a company instead became “friends” of the company, who were simply being given “gifts” of the same amount of money (or more) than their old salaries. But of course if you are a sick freak then you will realize something. You see now a lovely precedent has been set, a precedent that the court cannot interfere in the matters of “friends” and “gifts”. In fact the exact wording specifies this to the degree that you can use this for anything. So fast forward to today and executives realized that they can classify anything done by an actioneer as a “friend” doing something who then happens to receive a “gift”. Since this is the case it also means that necessarily this “friend” can’t legally be coerced to do anything, and all the actions they take are of their own volition. Therefore none of the labor protections exist, since there are no such things as “friend protections”. Likewise anything done that is illegal, or would be considered illegal is at the complete legal consequence of the actioneer, since they “chose” to do it.
This may all seem complicated, but really the solution to this is simple. As much as it is annoying this exemption in the legal code for “friendships” needs to be removed. I know this is annoying for people who have used this exception for it’s intended purpose. Unfortunately at the end of the day if paying an extra %10 on the cost of your new nonsense gadget you bought your friend that they will probably throw out in 2 years means people not having to go through all this, it’s probably worth it. So speak to your local government officials, protest and work to try to get this exception ultimately overturned in the Commissioner of Commerce’s office, so we can claim back just an inch of our humanity and a mile of humanity for the actioneer’s.
Footnotes
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Payout bailing is when an organization pays out someone they have wronged in order to bail themselves out of a potentially larger suit. This used to be referred to as “Hush Money” ↩
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For example the “Temperament Riots” where executives of several companies actively held thousands of paychecks and refused to pay them out until the most recent wealth taxes were revoked. The name stems from a line in a speech given by an executive of The Org “For too long we have sat quietly. We have allowed ourselves to keep being used by the masses that we have uplifted. Our measured temperament can no longer be accepted, and we must take matters into our own hands…“. None of the people involved were charged with any crime, and the tax was rescinded. ↩
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Product Roulette is a term referring to when several companies get together and put in a collective bet on which one can create an entirely useless product to market. The one who “wins” is whoever either sells the most units, or makes the most out of the product. This was done most famously for a pool of $85B in 2041, and was won by The Org when they managed to successfully ship and sell 150 million units of “Fresh” (Bottled air). ↩
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Actioneering is when someone pays another person to do whatever action they determine for an extended period of time. Essentially you rent another person. The term is derived from a speech several years ago when this practice just became popular in which a mayoral candidate in an American town said that “When will it [actioneering] stop? Elites have begun renting people. Picking them up and playing with them like action figures for a few weeks or months at a time…“. This practice is often done by hiring an individual as a contractor so as to avoid employment regulations that would usually apply. ↩
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Yes this happened, and we only know about it because a neighbor reported it in Florida (case no. 1006547897). ↩
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Unfortunately this also happened, and the one in the chair now has permanent brain damage. But don’t worry he’s been long since Payout bailed so even though he can’t speak anymore his girlfriend/caretaker is now financially stable! (case no. 10065479457) P.S. The actioneer who was forced to hit him threw himself off a bridge 4 weeks later (he was never paid out for his trauma and his family disowned him when they found out). ↩
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Like the executive who caused his actioneer (and mother of 3 kids) to die in a major car accident by forcing him to “drive like she’s in a need for speed game” without any training to satiate “his nostalgia and love of the game”. ↩