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:

  1. a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
  2. 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.

  • Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]
    ·
    1 year ago

    So some other commenters (@YearOfTheCommieDesktop@hexbear.net and @Frank@hexbear.net) have made some good responses to you. But I'd like to a little further into some of what you are saying, as you seem to be trapped with a very individualist end-consumer idea of these problems which makes it a difficult to understand what is a social problem.

    It’s not inherently a problem that the gov uses private enterprise. E.g. the courts have bathrooms and those bathrooms have toilet paper. I would find it a silly extreme to draw a hard line and say the gov must produce its own toilet paper, for example, in order to be freely separate from the private sector.

    Like another commented said, the toilet paper is a bit of a silly example and they extrapolated on a better one. But the specific example does bring out a blindspot in your thinking here. The toilet paper does not just appear, it is produced. While you may not care whether the toilet paper is produced in the private market, it is the product of a chain of production produced by the exploitation of labor. Just because you don't care where it comes from, does not mean we shouldn't care.

    This is a mystification (or fetishism as Marx describes) of the comoddity, and of the function of Capitalism itself. You cannot abstract and compartmentalize these issues.

    But in some cases indeed the outsourcing is reckless. Such as when the US gov outsourced flight services to Lockheed Martin who was then caught asleep at the wheel (not responding to air traffic safety radio calls).

    I agree fully here. Transportation is such an integral element of our society, that leaving it to the market to cut costs is reckless. Subjecting transportation to the profit motive helps no one. But this also applies to literally everything else.

    I don’t think so. But perhaps you are thinking of them as absolute rights. None of the rights we have today are absolute rights AFAIK. The two rights above could be protected at least to the extent that they don’t interfere with other rights under capitalism.

    I'm sorry, but if you want the right to be free of the private sector marketplace, you will not get that under capitalism. And again, if you want that right, it should also extend to others. Otherwise you are just demanding an aristocratic position.

    The private market in that context is optional in most of the world as I know it.

    Lol no. I cannot understand how you can actually believe this.

    You don’t have to work for someone else under the umbrella of a private company. If you want, you can work in the public sector directly for the gov, or you can scrap employment entirely and do the off-grid survivalist Henry David Thoreau thing.

    Even working for the state under this situation does not remove you from the logic of capitalism or the private market. The primary purpose of the capitalist state is to make legal exploitation via the market. And the state itself increasingly behaves in ways shaped by the market.

    To the latter example, sure, like I said, you can abstain from all this, but you will be excluded from society at large. If you want to go live out your Robinson Crusoe fantasy, do so. But again, you are viewing all of this from a highly individualistic lens, and will find few people here who agree with that. None of us are free until all of us are free.

    Find your class solidarity.

    I don’t think so. I’m not trying to stop Alice from working for Bob. Live and let live. We need not scrap capitalism entirely just to have alternatives. Alternatives can coexist.

    The alternatives will be marketized unless large enough to supplant the capitalist mode of production. The way the Internet as a whole, leaving out the production of hardware which is sorely missing in your analysis, seemed to be resistant to comoddification and marketization through the way we could share information freely, look what it's become. Capital consumes all.

    If you are interested in this vein of analysis though, then look into the autonomists, communization theory, and anarchism more broadly. But in each of those, the circuit and logic of Capitalism is abolished.

    I'm not going to respond to the rest of your comment as I don't have the time and I'm on my phone. So best of luck in your research!

    • YearOfTheCommieDesktop [they/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      The toilet paper does not just appear, it is produced. While you may not care whether the toilet paper is produced in the private market, it is the product of a chain of production produced by the exploitation of labor. Just because you don't care where it comes from, does not mean we shouldn't care.

      This is a mystification (or fetishism as Marx describes) of the comoddity, and of the function of Capitalism itself. You cannot abstract and compartmentalize these issues.

      Yes! No half measures!