Lately I’m running into more and more situations where I am forced to patronize a private company in the course of doing a transaction with my government. For example, a government office stops accepting cash payment for something (e.g. a public parking permit). Residents cannot pay for the permit unless they enter the marketplace and do business with a private bank. From there, the bank might force you to have a mobile phone (yes, this is common in Europe for example).
Example 2:
Some gov offices require the general public to call them or email them because they no longer have an open office that can be visited in person. Of course calling means subscribing to phone service (payphones no longer exist). To send an email, I can theoretically connect a laptop to a library network and use my own mail server to send it, but most gov offices block email that comes from IP that Google/SpamHaus/whoever does not approve, thus forcing you to subscribe to a private sector service in order to do a public transaction. At the same time, snail-mail is increasingly under threat & fax is already ½ dead.
Example 3:
A public university in Denmark refuses access to some parts of the school’s information systems unless you provide a GSM number so they can do a 2FA SMS. If a student opposes connecting to GSM networks due to the huge attack surface and privacy risks, they are simply excluded from systems with that limitation & their right to a public education is hindered. The school library e-books are being bogarted by Cloudflare’s walled garden, where a private company restricts access to the books based on factors like your IP address & browser.
Example 4:
Twitter decides who may microblog to their public representatives.
So where are my people?
So, I’m bothered by this because most private companies demonstrate untrustworthyness & incompetence. I think I should be able to disconnect and access all public services with minimal reliance on the private sector. IMO the lack of that option is injustice. There is an immeasurably huge amount of garbage tech on the web subjecting people to CAPTCHAs, intrusive ads, dysfunctional javascript, dark patterns, etc. Society has proven inability to counter that and it will keep getting worse. I think the ONLY real fix is to have a right to be offline. The power to say:
“the gov wants to push this broken reCAPTCHA that forces me to feed a surveillance capitalist --- no thanks. Give me an offline private-sector-free way to do this transaction”
There is substantial chatter in the #fedi about all the shit tech being pushed on us & countless little tricks and hacks to try to sidestep it. But there is almost no chatter about the real high-level solution which would encompass two rights:
- a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
- the right to be offline
Of course there could only be very recent philosophers who would think of the right to be offline. But I wonder if any philosophers in history have published anything influential as far as the right to not be forced into the private sector marketplace. By that, I don’t mean anti-capitalism (of course that’s well covered).. but I mean given the premise is that you’re trapped inside a capitalist system, there would likely be bodies of philosophy aligned with rights/powers to boycott.
(update) The famous Leary quote “Turn on, tune in, drop out” seems to be kind of consistent in an abstract way. Not necessarily as far as the ideology but in inspiring action.
Here's a zen koan for you; On Hexbear one of the recurring disagreements is whether capitalists can be coercively reformed, or if they should be dragged out in to the streets and shot in the back of the head.
I mean this is the gentlest way possible, but you are an incredibly ignorant child living a pampered life in a country that exists because it's not important enough to be subjugated by people with real armies, and your replies are extremely foolish. Empty your mind. Nothing you think you know is true or useful. Throw it away and start over. and for god's sake crack open Marx.
This is Hexbear.net. You were given resources that would answer your question. You rejected them because you are trapped in the false world of liberalism, unaware of your imprisonment. We're not here to coddle you or walk you step by step through the labyrinth to the real world. If you're willing to take your beatings as silly posts like this are torn apart again and again then maybe you can get there, but I'd suggest starting from the assumption that everything you've ever been told about how politics, economics, and culture work are lies intended to make you docile and manageable, and tear yourself apart until you start to see the real world. It'll be easier on your psyche.
yeah, I might not have put it quite as bluntly as you but this is a pretty great example of how the slightly more intelligent libs create these absolutely befuddling internal worlds that end up turning into gordian knots, and communism is the sword that cuts through it all.
I can remember being like with things like "Oh, okay, we don't need to bring down capitalism, that's unnecessary, what we need to do is introduce a set of rights, with a dozen differen subcategories, and these rights will be governed by X committee and then guaranteed by Y organization, and then the private corporations will be bound to this because of Z reason, and so we can merely reform the profit motive by creating incentives elsewhere for rights-based actionable plans, and then..."
and by the end of it you realize you're literally just spitting words you don't even really know or care about into the aether in order to sound like a very smart person who has does a lot of very important thinking inside your very important and educated brain, and then somebody comes along and dunks on you and tells you that we need to overthrow the bourgeoisie and sooner or later you're like "yeah, actually, this would be much simpler and honestly much easier" and then you're a communist
I think this person does genuinely have promise though, I used to be a lot like them like 6-7 years ago, he's one of the first people I've seen outside of here and lemmygrad which is trying to engage in good faith, there just needs to be beatings until morale improves
I too thought like this, it would go..
B-but maybe down the line there is some emergent thing we couldn't possibly account for which would make more sense than planning it in advance as our goal!!1!
Really by denying there's a possibility for the impossible, you are the fool!