A recent post by Cory Doctorow describes the quandary of the “consumer” when we are incrementally coerced into accepting more and more restrictions, impositions, invasions of privacy, junk fees, and obstacles in access to and use of what we buy, even while the staggeringly wealthy oligopolies that provide these “services” are exploiting an ever-growing lack of regulation and control over their often abusive and anti-consumer practices.
He uses as an example DRM (the scourge of “Digital Rights Management”), which urges you you to “own” something “today“, but endlessly reminds you that you don’t really own it, because all the benefits of ownership (like being able to share it with someone) remain with the “digital rights holder”, while you receive only the liabilities of ownership (risk of loss, destruction, corruption etc). And of course, the thing you “own” only works on some proprietary platform that you don’t and can’t own, and which the owner can make you pay for over and over again (“upgrades”) at their leisure, and at whatever price they choose to charge you.
He lampoons the absurdity of this by comparing it with a dangerous but popular old quack cure — radium suppositories! — and with the inevitable conclusion that was finally, reluctantly realized: The correct amount of radium to shove up your ass is zero.
Analogously, he says:
- The correct amount of DRM to allow in consumer products is zero.
- The correct amount of collusion between realtors representing sellers and realtors representing buyers is zero.
- The correct degree to which government officials should cycle back into working at the industries they oversaw and then come back to work in government again is zero.
- The correct amount of surveillance data that can be collected and sold to others, and the correct amount of warrantless surveillance that should be allowed against citizens is zero.
- The correct amount of monopoly, oligopoly, price-fixing and collusion of corporations that should be tolerated is zero.
Making such claims, Cory says, is now characterized as “unreasonable”, which is as absurd as saying it is “unreasonable” to assert that the correct amount of radium that you should insert in your bodily orifices is zero. Surely, their advocates argue, some amount of these things is acceptable and perhaps even inevitable and possibly beneficial?
It’s an insane argument, and we should not put up with it.
Cory was on a roll with this, but he has a lot of other corporate and political malfeasance to write about, so he concluded there. I’m under no such restriction, so here are my proposed additions to the list:
- The correct amount of genocide, apartheid, and high-tech terrorism that a country should be permitted in order to exercise its right to self-defence is zero.
- The correct amount of acceptable old-growth cutting and other unsustainable forestry practices is zero.
- The correct amount of acceptable fracking and other new hydrocarbon exploration and development is zero.
- The correct amount of tolerable additional increases in global average land and ocean temperature is zero.
- The correct number of wars, sieges and coups that your country should be starting, arming, provoking and otherwise enabling in the interests of “national security” is zero.
- The correct amount of lies, propaganda, censorship, and mis- and disinformation that politicians, governments, and media should be enabled to propagate is zero.
- The correct number of people who should be left without free or readily-affordable health care and education is zero.
- The correct amount of unhealthy food that Big Ag should be allowed to sell into the marketplace without unmissable warning signs on it is zero.
- The correct amount that Big Pharma should charge governments for essential medicines, beyond the identifiable direct costs of developing those medicines, is zero. And the price that governments should charge to their citizens for those medicines is zero.
- The correct amount of lobbying, bribes, kickbacks, campaign financing and other coercive activity that corporations and political pressure groups should be allowed to engage in, and the amount of government subsidies they should receive, is zero.
- The correct amount of pollution of our air, water, soils and land, and the amount of waste that industry should be allowed to produce, is zero.
- The correct amount of acceptable coercion of employees, through abusive labour practices, threats and intimidation, non-compete ‘agreements’ and non-disclosure ‘agreements’ and other mechanisms, is zero.
- The correct number of employees that can be laid off when executives have recently been or will soon be paid bonuses, or when stock buybacks have recently occurred or are planned, is zero.
- The correct amount of acceptable confinement, torture and other abuse of humans, and of all living creatures, is zero.
- The correct amount of inequality — of wealth, physical and mental health, and opportunity — between any country’s or region’s most well-off and most struggling and suffering citizens, is zero.
Whether we can actually achieve these objectives or not is not the point. The point is that we should strive, as a matter of principle and basic human dignity, to achieve them, and that arguments that dismiss even our attempts to achieve them as being “unreasonable”, and that assert that we should tolerate any of the above injustices, abuses, and atrocities, to even a limited degree, are dangerous and corrosive, and should be loudly called out and denounced.
When we allow “reasonable” amounts of injustice, abuse and atrocities, we open the door to much more, we become tolerant of situations and behaviours that are, by all human standards, intolerable, and we invite the kind of decay of our institutions, our principles, our practices, and our thinking that we see now, rampantly, everywhere around us.
So when we hear arguments from people that it’s “unreasonable” to refuse to accept the inevitability and appropriateness of a certain amount of injustices, abuses and atrocities, in every area of human endeavour, perhaps our best response might be to suggest to them where they might place their radium suppositories.
