Don't tell me what to think.

We are always being told about consumer choice. It's an interesting notion. It suggests of course that shops and businesses are somehow democratically obliged to fulfil the wishes and desires of its customers. Sounds awfully like a cooperative, of course. Unlike a cooperative however, most shops are only accountable to their shareholders, and only accountable to them in the sense that their shareholders require profits and more profits.

So what then is consumer choice?

Lets look at this by exploring the instance at which you, the consumer, made a choice. Take apples for instance. Presented with a great long shelf of hundreds of apples, and maybe forty different choices, which apples will you pick? You will pick the reddest, shiniest, waxiest apples that you can reach. Why is that? At what point did you take a wonderful red, shiny and waxy apple and compare it with a dull, yellowy apple and decided (indeed choose as a consumer) that the apples the supermarkets tell you are the best, are indeed the best?

Consumer choice is something that is not a choice of a consumer but a label used to shroud the instances where businesses tell you what you want in order to increase their profits. It's a discourse, nothing else. It is the result of this consumer choice that good quality British apples are no longer on our supermarket shelves, replaced with the cheaper, notionally 'better', redder, waxier, shinier options from Europe and New Zealand. The supermarkets tell us that this is because we've chosen to have these apples. The more they tell us it's our choice, the more it becomes our choice.

A corporation is complex. But it is also dangerous. The documentary that partly inspires this piece, the inventively titled The Corporation goes into a great deal of depth not only in exploring the ways that the corporation as the legal entity a 'legal person' shows all the requisite attributes of a psychopath, but also explores the way that a corporation is both the sum of its parts - a total whole made up of owners, directors, shareholders, employees, consumers - but it is also a separate entity which is conveniently and dangerously independent and unaccountable. This separate entity is also however an active part of the make up of the work of the Corporation. It's the bit of BP that Tony Hayward blames, that then makes Hayward seemingly unaccountable and able to get on with his life; and the bit that tells us that decisions they make are 'consumer choices.'

Corporations have the capacity to develop into unaccountable and independent discourse-creating machines. The supermarkets were our first case in point re those red, shiny apples. A second much more worrying case arose on the front page of the Guardian website today, exploring the way that security industries have become deeply embedded in our school system. The biometrics industry have convinced us that it is in our best interests to use fingerprints to dish out school lunches, allowing a neat database of fingerprints to be kept (something that used to be solely kept for criminals and now is used on the under-10s - people too young to even become criminals if they wanted to). The reasons cited for why these systems were in place most often cited the fact that most other schools were also using them. They were clearly the consumer's favourite choice. The reasons given by the biometrics companies cite efficiency. Privacy never seems to come into the equation. I'm sure it has something much more to do with the fact that our current under-secretary of state for children, Tim Loughton, also used to the chairman of Classwatch, a CCTV company that specialised in schools technology. Loughton, like any other member of the corporate machine is accountable to one thing: not privacy, not even efficiency, and certainly not accountable to children or parents, but only to the profits of the ever expanding security industry. This security industry can only exist with a discourse that presents itself as a necessary part of our existence.

Be critical of who tells you what. The next time someone tells you something is the choice of the consumer, remind them not to tell you what to think.