Earth-Sized Company Towns

For a program that has created so many original, prescient musical numbers, South Park’s most blunt commentaries on common complacencies are sometimes found in straightforward reflections scored with throwback tracks. The decades-old song usually functioning as two reminders in one – of the cyclical lessons we face and their almost routine repurposing behind different masks.

Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man’s made outta muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that’s a-weak and a back that’s strong

This version of 1946’s “Sixteen Tons” (itself referring to a coal mining practice in the 1920s) was sung in 1955 by Tennessee Ernie Ford. It relays, as effectively in 2024 as back then, the forceful allying to an exploitative entity. Except today, the company towns are earth-sized; the swelling digital monopolies that tie themselves to our collective political economies at immeasurably large scales. The Titanics that carry with them the fate of markets, elections, freethought, and our environment.

You load 16 tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter, don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store 

It is a strangely vanilla, yet efficient, montage in an episode with quite a few absurd zeniths. (Not every day does a man in a box end up the leader of a union drive.) No mystery why it came to mind as I went out to grab some takeout today. The two individuals ahead of me were on their phones, each awaiting a number of orders to be placed within a large, thermally insulated bag, each with a different food delivery app’s logo stamped across it.

I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the min
I loaded 16 tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said, “Well, a-bless my soul”

The laboriousness of labor may change, but its structure remains consistent. And we have done not-too-well to find ourselves in similar places in relation to the power brokers of society, nearly a century apart.