America, Inc. - How We're Watching the Soul of Our Nation Die in Real Time

Why Does Every Town in America Looks Exactly the Same Now?

Small town America is being fed into the corporate machine. Main Street dies. Dollar General rises. Every town the same. Every soul consumed… unless we stop it.

I don’t leave my house much anymore. After getting stabbed investigating a child trafficking operation out west a few years back, I developed severe PTSD and became something of a hermit. Most of my food comes from the internet. Tech and supplies arrive in brown boxes from Amazon. But every now and then, I need something immediately and have no choice but to brave the great outdoors of what we still call civilization.

Today was one of those days.

Town is a few miles from where I’m staying, so I bundled up against the freezing winter temperatures, climbed on my e-scooter, and zipped down to the local Dollar General. The fluorescent lights hit me first when I walked in. That harsh, institutional brightness that makes everything look slightly poisonous. Then the smell. Plastic and cardboard and something vaguely chemical that I couldn’t quite place. The aisles stretched out in perfect symmetry, lined with products in packaging designed by algorithms to maximize shelf visibility. Bland colors. Warehouse styling. Everything organized with the cold efficiency of a distribution center rather than a place where human beings might actually want to shop.

The prices caught me off guard. For a store with “Dollar” in the name, nothing cost a dollar anymore. Five bucks for a box of cereal. Seven for shampoo. The kind of inflation that would have been scandalous ten years ago but now just feels like Tuesday.

Standing there under those fluorescent lights, surrounded by mass-produced garbage, I felt something I can only describe as suffocation. This wasn’t a store. It was a factory warehouse that happened to let customers walk through it. There was no warmth. No personality. No sense that human hands or human hearts had any role in creating this space. Just corporate efficiency optimized to extract maximum profit from minimum investment.

And that’s when it hit me.

This is everywhere now.

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I thought back to what America looked like when I was a kid. Before the superstores. Before Amazon swallowed retail whole. Before Dollar General showed up in every small town like an invasive species and choked out the mom and pop stores that used to line Main Street.

It is almost hard to believe that America once looked this diverse. Now? Same cookie-cutter, corporate slop in every town.

I remember hardware stores run by guys who knew your name and could tell you exactly which bolt you needed for whatever you were fixing. Diners where the waitress knew how you took your coffee without asking. Bookstores where the owner would hand-select recommendations based on what you’d bought before. Video rental places where you could argue with the clerk about whether Blade Runner or Alien was Ridley Scott’s masterpiece.

These weren’t just businesses. They were gathering places. They were part of the fabric that held communities together. The owners lived in town. They went to the same churches and schools and Fourth of July barbecues as everyone else. They had a stake in the community beyond quarterly earnings reports.

All of that is gone now.

In the last ten years alone, I’ve lived in half a dozen different places across this country. Different states. Different climates. Different demographics. But the same stores. The same restaurants. The same everything. Drive down any commercial strip in America and you’ll see the exact same lineup. Walmart. McDonald’s. Starbucks. Dollar General. CVS. Taco Bell. Subway. The buildings might be painted slightly different colors, but the architecture is identical. The products are identical. The experience is identical.

We’ve turned the entire country into a strip mall.

Norman Rockwell’s America is dead. That vision of small-town life with its quirky local characters and distinctive regional flavors has been paved over and replaced with corporate homogeneity optimized for maximum efficiency and minimum soul. Every town looks like every other town. Every city has the same chain restaurants serving the same menu items prepared according to the same corporate specifications. We’ve sacrificed authenticity on the altar of convenience and consistency.

And it’s only going to get worse.

Right now, we’re in the early stages of the final consolidation. Amazon owns retail. A handful of companies own all the grocery stores. Private equity firms are buying up veterinary clinics and dental practices and medical facilities and turning them into standardized corporate entities. Housing is being purchased by Wall Street investment firms that will rent it back to us at ever-increasing rates while we own nothing.

Twenty-five years from now, if we don’t stop this, there will be maybe five corporations that own everything. Every store. Every restaurant. Every service. Every piece of infrastructure. You’ll travel from one end of this country to the other and see the exact same handful of brands selling the exact same products in the exact same buildings designed by the same algorithms for maximum profit extraction.

There will be no variety. No local character. No regional differences. No mom and pop anything. Just corporate efficiency from sea to shining sea.

And it won’t stop there. They’re already building the infrastructure for what comes next. AI assistants that will track every purchase and optimize your consumption patterns. Robots replacing human workers in every sector they can automate. Digital currencies that will allow corporate and government control over every transaction. Social credit systems that will reward compliance and punish dissent. A world where you interface with screens and algorithms and automated systems instead of human beings.

You remember when Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum said “You will own nothing and be happy”? They weren’t making a prediction. They were announcing a plan.

I’m already flat broke as it is. I basically own nothing now. And I’m miserable. But not because I’m poor. I grew up poor and managed to find joy in it. I’m miserable because I don’t even recognize my nation anymore. The America I grew up in, the America that promised opportunity and freedom and the chance to build something of your own, has been replaced by this corporate dystopia where everything is owned by someone else and your role is to rent, subscribe, and consume according to patterns determined by machine learning algorithms.

The Republic is dead. We might as well start calling it “USA, Incorporated.”

This future terrifies me. Not just because it’s ugly and soulless, though it is both of those things. But because once we cross this threshold, there’s no going back. Once every local business is gone, once every distinctive regional culture has been homogenized into corporate sameness, once human workers have been replaced by machines and AI, once ownership has been consolidated into the hands of a few massive corporations working hand-in-glove with government, what recourse will we have?

None.

You won’t be able to vote your way out of it because the corporations will own the politicians. You won’t be able to boycott your way out of it because there will be no alternatives. You won’t be able to build your way out of it because the regulatory capture will be complete and the barriers to entry insurmountable. You’ll be a serf in a corporate feudal system, dependent on your corporate overlords for your housing, your food, your healthcare, your entertainment, your ability to function in society at all.

And they’ll call it progress.

They’ll tell you it’s more efficient this way. More convenient. More optimized. They’ll feed you through their algorithms and their AI systems and their automated customer service hell and tell you this is better than dealing with messy, inefficient human beings who make mistakes and have emotions and don’t always maximize shareholder value.

But efficiency isn’t a virtue when it comes at the cost of everything that makes life worth living. Convenience isn’t worth sacrificing community for. Optimization isn’t the same as flourishing.

Standing in that Dollar General, feeling that suffocating sense of being trapped in a corporate wasteland, I realized we’re watching something die. Not just businesses. Not just buildings. But the soul of America itself. That intangible thing that made this country distinctive and vibrant and full of possibility. That sense that you could build something unique, something that reflected your vision and your values, something that bore the mark of your personality and creativity.

All of that is being strangled by corporate efficiency and replaced with algorithmic sameness.

If you notice the rot too, you’re not alone. Millions of Americans can feel it even if they can’t quite articulate what’s wrong. That vague sense of unease. That feeling that something essential has been lost. That recognition that the places we live don’t feel like home anymore because they’ve been turned into standardized nodes in a vast corporate network optimized for extraction rather than enrichment.

We’re standing at a crossroads. One path leads to USA, Incorporated. The corporate robot AI wasteland straight out of a dystopian science fiction nightmare. A world of perfect efficiency and total soullessness. A world where you own nothing, rent everything, consume according to algorithmic recommendations, and spend your entire existence interfacing with screens and machines instead of human beings.

The other path leads back to something resembling the America we used to have. Not perfect. Never perfect. But authentic. Distinctive. Human-scale. A place where you could build something of your own and leave your mark. A place where communities mattered more than corporate quarterly earnings. A place where you were a citizen with rights and dignity rather than a consumer with a credit score and a consumption profile.

We’re running out of time to choose. Every mom and pop store that closes. Every local restaurant replaced by a chain. Every human worker replaced by automation. Every transaction tracked and analyzed and optimized. Every step we take down this path makes it harder to turn back.

If we don’t do something now, while we still can, we’re going to wake up one day in a world we don’t recognize and realize we gave away everything that mattered in exchange for convenience and efficiency.

And by then it will be too late.

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