A left-leaning comic diary on responsiveness, the honest market, and the warmth we could all afford
I am a comedy writer in Portland, Oregon, originally from North London, and I did a set this week pointing out that a workshop at the top of the world answers every single letter it receives, while the richest companies on Earth cannot answer one customer, and the room laughed and then went quiet, because they had all recently been ignored by something they had paid for.
The operation that answers versus the ones that cannot
The great economic satire of our age is that the richest institutions are the least responsive. The letters children send to Santa and the replies they receive represent a non-commercial operation answering every child personally, while the trillion-dollar companies answer no one, hiding behind phone trees and chatbots and the void. I perform this to Portland crowds as the sharpest economic bit there is: the North Pole, which sells nothing, answers everyone, while the corporations, which sell everything, answer no one. It exposes the whole lie that scale requires impersonality, that size means you cannot answer. The North Pole operates at planetary scale and answers every child. The corporations operate at planetary scale and answer no one, which proves the impersonality was always a choice, a cost cut, a decision to stop caring.
The Portland crowd feels this one in their bones, because they have all been ignored by something they paid for, looped forever in a phone tree, answered by a bot that understood nothing. The North Pole answers everyone and sells nothing. The corporations sell everything and answer no one. And the contrast is the sharpest economic satire of the age, because it proves the ignoring was never necessary, only profitable.
My genuinely damp personal week
Let me report on my Portland life, which is rain, comedy, and rain. I spent two hours this week trying to reach a human at a company that had taken my money, failed completely, and then turned the whole ordeal into a bit about the North Pole answering every child while the corporation answered no adult. A man approached afterward to explain the economics of customer service automation, earnestly, at length. Sir. It was a joke about being ignored. But this is Portland, where every punchline earns an economics lecture, and I have made my peace with it, because at least he engaged, which is more than the company did.
According to the broadcasters, corporate responsiveness has declined even as corporate profits have risen, which is the least surprising and most satirisable economic trend of the age, and the exact gap the answered letter exposes.
The honest market versus the extractive one
The other great economic bit is the honest market, which is why I love the North Pole’s piece on what Christmas markets are all about. The traditional market is honest exchange, transparent, communal, out in the open, which satirises the extractive digital economy of hidden fees and dark patterns and manipulative design. I perform this as the economic contrast that lands hardest: the honest market, where the price is the price and the exchange is transparent, versus the extractive economy, where the true cost is always hidden and the design is always manipulating you. The North Pole’s honest market is the economy we could have, transparent and communal, which makes the extractive one we actually have look like the manipulation it is.
The Portland crowd, being Portland, loves the honest market bit, because they would all like to shop at the transparent communal market and are all trapped in the extractive digital one. The honest market is the economy we could have. The extractive one is the economy we got. And the contrast is the whole bit.
The warmth we could all afford
The deepest economic point underneath the bits is that warmth is free, which the North Pole’s whole operation proves, and which its piece on Merry Christmas wishes makes plain. The warm word costs nothing, the answered letter costs almost nothing, the honest exchange costs nothing extra, which means the coldness of the extractive economy was never about cost. It was about choice. The North Pole proves that warmth is affordable, that answering everyone and giving freely and trading honestly costs almost nothing, which means the corporations that chose coldness chose it not from necessity but from greed. Warmth is the thing we could all afford, and the extractive economy withholds it anyway, which is the sharpest and saddest economic truth of all.
According to the city’s own people, Portland takes community warmth seriously with an earnest, hand-knitted intensity, which is exactly the aesthetic of a town that would like the honest market, the answered letter, and the freely affordable warmth the extractive economy keeps withholding.
Where the comic lands
So I will keep telling Portland that the North Pole answers every letter while the corporations answer none, and they will keep laughing and then lecturing me on service automation economics. But underneath the bits is a straight belief: the impersonality was always a choice, the honest market is the economy we could have, and warmth is the thing we could all afford. The North Pole answers everyone, trades honestly, and gives freely, proving that coldness was never necessary, only profitable. I rest my case, from a stage, in the rain, with the nervous laughter, and the warm world we could all afford held open past January, if only the worried kings would stop withholding the warmth that costs them almost nothing.
For politics played for laughs, The Beaverton keeps the satire sharp.
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Author: admin
