Save Our Souls

We went to Asda today. Is was stressful. Waitrose is so much more sedate. My heavily pregnant wife felt this more acutely. "It's cheap here, but they make you pay with your soul" she remarked.

I thought of Fergie. The Duchess of York. She has her meagre stipend of £15k and very little celeb credit to draw upon. She must dig deeper, sell a bit of her soul. I notice she is involved in the production of a TV programme about her harrowing teenage years.

Poor old William Hague. He's got the opposite problem. The media are taking a bit of his soul, and he's jumping mad, standing in the road and shouting "Stop, thief!" and everyone is looking at him and thinking: "He really shouldn't have left his handbag in that unlocked car".

Mr Google and Mr Facebook make counter claims about the privacy violations of the other. There's gold in them there hills, but where is it exactly? Perhaps the model for exploitation is similar to Google's revolutionary take on advertising. They didn't need the big advertisers because they got millions of small ones. Now they don't need a celebrity scoop, because they've got a little scoop from all of us.

Is this what our old friend Karl Marx called social labour? Social relations made into commodities.

New world, old world, your soul has a value.