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.
My workflow is to start at lemmyverse.net, do a community search (philosophy in this case), and ignore all the results ending in lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, and lemm.ee. That’s what brought me here.. having no idea what I would step into.
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That might work but it’s the nuclear option. It’s like a asked “help me kill this chicken”, and ½ dozen guys show up armed to the bone and use a human-mounted helicopter machine gun like Arnie used in Predator. I have to clarify: I intended to eat the chicken, not paint the forest with it. My bad for not being more clear.
There has been a right to be online movement underway, which is largely to get broadband out to rural areas. I generally agree with that movement & not leaving people behind. The problem is, the right to be online movement will likely be so successful that a “#digitalTransformation” (like Europe is pushing down people’s throats) will go as far as forcing everyone online. This is actually happening already. In Europe there are a lot of public services which were once available to everyone but now the government excludes offline people. So the right to be online must be coupled with/offset by a simultaneous right to be offline.
And to be clear, I’m not personally opposed to doing things online. But most technologists are doing a shitty job. If a Google #reCAPTCHA is put in my face, I demand an alternative path and if that means paying for a stamp, I will. I would personally cherry-pick and use the right to be offline as an escape from technology done poorly while still interacting with online services done well (however rare that is). For other folks (like elderly people), they may really want to be wholly 100% offline. I don’t, but those people are on my side nonetheless.
That’s really out of scope. You can draw the scope how you want but you’re basically asking for a right to live as far from a gov office as you want, and you want the gov to schlep your ass back and forth. It’s a really tenuous stretch to relate that to a right to be offline. Though a simple right to be offline would remedy your problem nonetheless. That is, if you are offline the gov could not force you to use their website, but they could satisfy offliners by offering snail-mail service and/or over-the-counter service. That’s good enough. If it’s too far to walk to the office, it’s your own problem. If you choose to live in some remote part of Alaska only reachable by a bush plane, the consequences of that decision are on you & it would be unreasonable for the gov to send a bush plane to fetch you (matters of survival aside).