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.
I just want to say I appreciate you engaging here in good faith and not just calling us tankies or whatever and running off. I think you'll find a lot of people here who share your struggle to disconnect, but honestly we are quite committed to "scrapping capitalism entirely" as you put it.
I second Psychopolitics as a pretty good and quick read if you want an explicitly philosophical text. But I will warn you it does not view the ubiquitous technologies that have come to dominate society as merely mistakes that the state should correct or allow us to opt out of, but as fundamentally a new form of control over society that uses our own minds against us to achieve more societal control despite employing far less blatant physical coercion (not in a "there's a big cabal controlling the world" way, but in a "this phenomenon emerged from the material conditions of capitalism in the 20th and now 21st centuries" way). At least that's my recollection, I haven't re-read it in a couple years
You aren't wrong that this is a problem, and I'd likely support a "right to logoff", were it proposed, but the problem is definitely inherent to at least our current stage of capitalism, and no neoliberal state has any incentive that I can think of to grant people this right.
Edit: further thoughts - The toilet paper is a bad example. It's a physical commodity and is being bought without conditions and put to use, which yes is pretty much fine. A better example might be outsourcing the provision of bathroom supplies and cleaning entirely, which would allow the capitalists to nickel and dime their way to a situation where the bathroom becomes unusable, or the toilet paper dispenser becomes coin operated, etc. You give them an inch and they will work tirelessly to take a mile.
You can waste your energy until eternity constantly fighting with their inherent drive to rip the government off and take more power for themselves, with varying degrees of success, or you can accept that private property rights only serve capitalists, and choose to actually wield some power to, at the very least, bring capitalist enterprises to heel, if not eliminate the private ownership entirely. Every "right" you secure in a neoliberal society is at risk of just being undermined again in the future because you refuse to attack the root of the problem.