great text, thanks for sharing.

I agree with most of his points, it's a pretty good analysis of the commodification of social interaction and city spaces, and how that "formality" expresses itself in centralizing everything around corporate nodes. Visa is just his example, the node, on closer look, is of course a bunch of companies that are also sometimes battling out different interests among themselves, but none of these in any way work to decentralize, informalize, or allow free space of connection. So from the outside looking in, as a pleb, it's "put them all in a bag and it it, you'll hit the right one."

It ends on how this centralization and formalization expresses it self, emotionally, as loneliness. Exactly, because what modern neoliberal structures do is separate people from one another to "re-connect" them only through central institutions. Your interaction with others is rhus structured by that order, it becomes that order.

He makes that clear in the end, when he reports that paying cash gets him worried stares by his friends: his relationship is dependent on being a good obedient cog in that machine. All the social outrage campaigns trying to ostracize people from their family and friend networks, make them untouchables be revealing som "shocking" information about them, falls in the same category: don't you dare jeopardize all your social relations by being disobedient to the order of the day.

Just one part of the processes of formalization and centralization, among many, but maybe adding that makes it more connectable for others.