How Many Slaves Do You Own?

How Many Slaves Do You Own?

Just in time for Christmas it's nice to find out how many slaves you actually have doing your bidding. What? I thought slavery was abolished?! You say. Well, after you watch The Help tonight (new on DVD!) you can find out how many slaves you currently have working for you with this helpful new guide.

HOW MANY SLAVES WORK FOR YOU?

It's the feel good link of the year. Now if only someone would create a "How many Slavs do you have" website and my life can be a little bit closer to being complete.

The defaults for technology are all sorts of messed up. I clicked gamer because you know, I'm a male that uses the internet even though I haven't played a game for ages, and then whittled it down to the technophobe and still had to delete half of the shit on that list.

For a moment there I was going to give up because I got to the closet part and I literally had no idea what clothes I own.

Oddly enough, according to this I'm a middle class white piece of fucking shit. Over all I got 24. I know I could fine tune it with a couple of more minutes of tweaking around with it but does it really matter? Especially after I did one fine tune of it to account for rum and alcohol consumption and my slave count jumped from 24 to 35.

I'm curious as to where is the part I can put in that I'm a CEO of a fortune 500 company and then watch as the results just blow up in themselves trying to figure out how many millions of slaves are under me.

In retrospect, I'm guessing that their findings showed that the average person who'd actually use this and feel uncomfortable about this website are mostly college educated liberal, white middle class, so they've tailored their options accordingly as per google/facebook advertisement assessment of their possessions. Because it's literally impossible to be poor according to that website.

Or maybe what I'm getting out of this is that we need to relax child labor laws to compete in today's global market. The website just assumes that all the seafood everyone eats comes from South East Asia. Like, there's literally no domestic fisheries in existence to them.

Though it is important to address both ends of the slavery system - It's creation and our cultural dependence upon it. The machine is never going to come down until The People are willing to bring it down, after all. I don't think that happens just through people shopping at Goodwill and asking for fair-trade coffee at Starbucks, but consumer choices are certainly a step in the right direction.

I don't think that your average American is necessarily to blame for the fact that they depend upon slave labor, and it is going to take a massive change from within the industrial complex to eliminate these problems. I don't judge the millions of people (including myself) who can't afford an all-local, all-organic, all-fair-wage lifestyle. But I do judge wealthy people who willingly engage in hyperconsumption of slave-made commodities, even when they are financially capable of buying fairer goods.