It should also be borne in mind that the media are not independent entities. All of the major news media derive their primary income from advertising, which means that, in a structural economic sense, what we normally think of as their “content” is just decoration, and their main functional communications flow is from advertisers to reader/viewer/consumers.

This effectively puts the businesses that do the advertising in the driver’s seat of contemporary media, giving them more than a little complicity in the dissociations that our current media-centrism engenders.

Moreover, as later chapters will show, this is by no means the only way that today’s businesses exert a dissociative influence: a number of fundamental business processes are themselves becoming virtualized. It is no exaggeration to say that at the CEO level, all contemporary businesses are communications businesses. And it is only a slight stretch to say that today, every business is show business.

What happens when we can no longer take it for granted that business will be the most pragmatic and reality-grounded of social institutions?   When even the economic order loses its way in a maze of insubstantial images, where will any of us get our grounding?

And as social power shifts more and more to a new corporate order, with numerous national governments having already crumbled in the wake of this new order’s displeasure, a tendency toward dissociativeness in the world of business cannot help but have major dissociative effects on the world at large.

But perhaps most important of all, business continues to be the primary means by which our status and social position are defined to the rest of society—and even to ourselves. To a large extent, our experience in the world of business tells us who we are.   Because of this, a virtualized business system almost cannot help but send us dissociative messages about who we are, and how we should expect to fit with one another.