The Truth about Capitalism
The full extent of Mr. Harrigan’s wealth is never really known and can only be guessed at, though it is almost certain to exceed a billion dollars in net worth. It is known that he retired after an unusually successful business career. Craig learns earlier than most—and straight from the horse’s mouth—that even the nicest of successful businessmen do not get that way through being nice. “Business is like football, Craig. If you have to knock someone down to reach the goal line, you better damn well do it, or you shouldn’t put on a uniform and go out on the field in the first place.” The metaphorical comparison of business to sports is one that CEOs and other corporate executive love to make because it makes lends their cozy office job an illusion of masculine strength. Of course, they never see fit to mention that no quarterback has ever made 100 times the salary of the offensive linemen who keep him from suffering a concussion with every snap of the ball.
Thoreau, not Durden
Mr. Harrigan made a lot of money in high tech businesses, but is paradoxically light on technology himself. He doesn’t even own a television, preferring books as his portal into other words. On this issue, he expands upon a famous metaphorical observation a philosopher once made about the fetishism of possession, and it’s not Tyler Durden. “Henry Thoreau said that we don’t own things; things own us. Every new object—whether it’s a home, a car, a television, or a fancy phone like that one—is something more we must carry on our backs.” The additional point that Harrigan is making in his expansion to Thoreau’s fundamental concept is that objects are neither inherently good nor bad—or, perhaps more accurately—arrive with post positive and negative capacities. It is the use to which they are put and the dependence upon them that creates the avenue for transformation. This philosophical contemplation foreshadows the dependence that Craig will place on his phone later as it increasingly becomes a burden.
The Worm in the Apple
Mr. Harrigan is something of a Luddite on the issue of new technology, but Craig manages to convince him to start using the iPhone he buys with some of the $3,000 he won with a scratch-off lottery ticket. The fascination with the stock market ticker app soon grows into a speculative dread. “It’s like a broken watermain, one spewing information instead of water. I thought it was just a phone we were talking about, but now I see.” As he begins to learn that phones are no longer about talking to another person over a great distance, Harrigan comes to realize that cell phones are about communicating information. And his keen business sense recognizes that this means it is really about protecting proprietary rights to that information and monetizing it and how, until that has been perfected, it is the middlemen like Apple that reap the most financial gain.
Cinema and Literature
Craig mentions to Harrigan an idea about possibly pursuing a career as a screenwriter. As a person suspicious of how badly people tend to handle technological advancements, Harrigan finds this idea problematic and uses his will to express his opinion from the grave. “Films are ephemeral, while books—the good ones—are eternal, or close to it.” It is an observation one might expect from a man with a television set, but the metaphor actually cuts deeper than mere characterization. The story is only half-finished by the point of Harrigan’s death and the theme of eternal life—or something close to it—will prove to become even more central to the story than the issue of built-in obsolescence of modern communications technology.
Dangerous Business
For just a brief moment, Harrigan allows his benevolent billionaire mask to drop just long enough for Craig to get a quick peek at the capitalist vulture beneath. It is brief and quickly passes never to return, but also intense enough to inspire the young to grasp for what little referential experience he has so far acquired to construct a comparative simile. “I felt like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, using a spell he didn’t really understand to wake up the brooms.” The quote is a very effective example of the nature of metaphorical imagery. Craig is obviously writing his story from the perspective of his adulthood years after the events took place. As such, he could well come up with a more sophisticated reference point for comparing the use of magic with the magic of technology. Most of his narration projects the maturity of the adult recollecting the events of his childhood, but there are many moments like these that offer glimpses into the thought processes of the child he was in the moment.
