The Breatharian Economy

Back in the dismal ‘80s, there was a small group, led by a fellow named Wiley Brooks, that came together under the banner of the Breatharian Institute of America.  The core tenet of Bretharianism was that food and water are unnecessary, and that only sunlight and air are necessary to sustain the prana or life energy.  (Brooks himself occasionally would break his fasts with a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, which contains a “base frequency” and puts the eater in touch with fifth-dimension beings such as cows; and Diet Coke, which Brooks calls “liquid light.”)

I was put in mind of the Breatharians while moving the car today from one parking spot to another at work, listening to a piece on NPR about returnships.  A returnship, for those of you not in the know, is the opportunity to take an unpaid internship after a long period away from work as a way to regain work skills and convince your prospective employer that raising a child or caring for a sick parent doesn’t call your organizational commitment into question.  The more typical internship takes place earlier, commonly during or just after college, and is intended to give you a jump-start into professional life.

There are many critics of internship (me among them) who suggest that it offers networking opportunities and resume bolstering only to those whose families can afford to pay for them to have a summer or a semester off from work.  Us commoners often had to work during the summers in order to save for fall tuition, thus precluding the internship with Goldman Sachs.  And internship recruitment most often takes place at elite colleges anyway, since those are the kind of people born into the professional and capital classes who a) can afford to take the internship and b) already understand the unspoken rules for how to play the corporate game.  Good luck getting an internship while you’re a junior at Castleton State College…

It seems we’re moving more and more fully into a Breatharian economy, in which we are expected to be sustained only by the satisfaction of work well done and the complements and attention of others.  If we expect things like “payment” or “benefits,” then that only reveals our primitive and unenlightened state.  (The owners of the Breatharian economy, just like Wiley Brooks, are paid handsomely, but never mind…)  YouTube is part of the Breatharian economy, where people put together video entertainment of greater or lesser quality and post it for free; so are blogs, Twitter, freelance writing, adjunct teaching, and now “returnships.”  We already know that for the vast majority of Americans, incomes have been flat or declining for 40 years while at the same time the owners’ incomes have risen at supersonic rates. 

Almost nobody has understood how to make money on the Internet, where our expectation is that the world is available to us for the cost of a mouse click.  All the .coms try to live on advertising income—but eventually, somebody somewhere has to make something or offer a service that can be advertised.  The crass term is “monetize,” which is to convert an idea into money.  Really, we’re only able to monetize ideas through the proxy of converting those ideas into an object or a service or a labor that someone else wants badly enough to pay for.  And increasingly, we don’t want to pay.  Newspapers are digging their own graves by providing extensive and excellent online content; who spends two bucks for the San Francisco Chronicle when they’ve got SFGate.com?

We’re in the intermediate stages of the Breatharian economy, in which many people believe that they’ll be the one who gets noticed—the one whose video goes viral or whose blog gets them a book offer from Farrar Strauss & Giroux or whose excellent teaching as an adjunct puts them first in line for the next actual teaching position.   There are enough people giving away their work that it puts downward pressure on payment for everyone else; if you don’t want to write an article for my newspaper for $60, then there are twelve other people who will.  The fact that your article is good carries no weight in the Breatharian economy; the other not-so-good ones will still fill column inches, and we can get the product out.  To borrow from the Existentialist philosophers, existence precedes essence.  Who knew that Heidegger understood freelancing?

The terminal stages of Breatharian economics are when almost no one is paid, when the cult member realizes that his organs are failing and he’s too weak to stand.  At that point, when enough people are desperate, change can be made.  Until then, take a deep breath…