I'm sick of needing to spend weeks researching which couch or mattress to buy because corporations will happily sell me a terrible couch for $3,000 that only cost them $50 to make. It'll fall apart in a year or two, conveniently after the warranty expires, but hey, their profits are going up so who cares about the buyer?
I'm sick of events like the Boar's Head listeria outbreak killing 10 people happening with regularity now. Last year it was eye drops causing blindness. The companies don't care beyond the lawsuits they'll face, who cares if people die as long as their profits go up?
I'm sick of oil companies lying about the environmental harms they cause. Their profits are going up, so why should they care about climate change or the tainted groundwater their fracking causes?
I'm sick of seeing ads and billboards for corporations everywhere I go. I'm sick of being tracked because corporations can make x% more money with my data than they can without it. Installing uBlock Origin is easy, but we now have facial recognition systems with physical cameras in the real world. Can't do anything about those unless I just never leave my home.
I'm sick of people defending this behavior by asking "what tangible harm have you experienced?". The tangible harm is that I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of living in a society that requires expending so much mental energy just to exist.
I should be able to just trust (within reason, of course) that a $1,000 mattress will work for X years without needing to research whether the company is decent or known to be awful. I should be able to buy chocolate from the grocery store without needing to research whether the corporation (or any of its 24 parents and subsidiaries) used slave labor to produce it. I shouldn't need to worry about bottled water being stolen from aquifers by corporations that will simply move on after destroying the communities that depend on that water.
I vote, because it's all I can do, but that accomplishes nothing because we're stuck in a two-party system that won't let me vote for a candidate far enough left to actually fix things. Instead we continue to maintain the status quo, because corporations have more money and political power than civilians.
I'm well aware that this reads like an overdramatic manifesto. I'm just sick of everything feeling like it's getting worse all the time, and it seems pretty causally linked to the rise of corporations. Is it too much to ask that I be able to live without them invading _every single aspect of my life_? I don't think it is, but I think we're too far gone at this point for it to ever change.
100 years ago well before the invention of so-called surveillance capitalism, people were making soft drinks out of radium, and inhaling asbestos.
Many things are better since then. Some new things are probably worse, but every reasonable measure of human welfare suggests we are better off than we were previously.
Something some subset of us are worried about right now, whether it’s WiFi or 5G or Covid vaccines, will turn out to have had horrible consequences and you can’t really fault the rest of us that we didn’t listen to the crazies.
Just embrace panglossian optimism because the alternative is to just be angry and exhausted and indignant all the time and then you’re no fun at parties.
When you go across a long enough timeline variations occur. Nothing over time in human history is a constant linear improvement. We may be better off than we were in 1924 in terms of health and safety, but we're definitely not better off than we were in 1994. Legislation hasn't kept up with chemical science and social engineering, and enforcement has been tentative as fights between executive power and judiciary power create years long arguments that get in the way of preventing harm. For example Red 40 is a dye that's well known to cause cancer with a high degree of certainty (not probability, certainty), while the artificial sweetener sucralose is genotoxic. You go drink a can of Faygo Cherry and it's got both. The FDA hasn't been able to regulate either because they haven't been legislated the power to do so, are now even more crippled thanks to the overturning of Chevron, and companies keep funding "alternative studies" that they can present to lobbyists.
It's hard not to be angry and exhausted when you have to be a chemical engineer just to know what's even safe to eat.
So tired of people making excuses so that some billionaire can buy another yacht. Can we finally actually start investing in people and putting people first instead of corporations.
I'm sick of events like the Boar's Head listeria outbreak killing 10 people happening with regularity now. Last year it was eye drops causing blindness. The companies don't care beyond the lawsuits they'll face, who cares if people die as long as their profits go up?
I'm sick of oil companies lying about the environmental harms they cause. Their profits are going up, so why should they care about climate change or the tainted groundwater their fracking causes?
I'm sick of seeing ads and billboards for corporations everywhere I go. I'm sick of being tracked because corporations can make x% more money with my data than they can without it. Installing uBlock Origin is easy, but we now have facial recognition systems with physical cameras in the real world. Can't do anything about those unless I just never leave my home.
I'm sick of people defending this behavior by asking "what tangible harm have you experienced?". The tangible harm is that I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of living in a society that requires expending so much mental energy just to exist.
I should be able to just trust (within reason, of course) that a $1,000 mattress will work for X years without needing to research whether the company is decent or known to be awful. I should be able to buy chocolate from the grocery store without needing to research whether the corporation (or any of its 24 parents and subsidiaries) used slave labor to produce it. I shouldn't need to worry about bottled water being stolen from aquifers by corporations that will simply move on after destroying the communities that depend on that water.
I vote, because it's all I can do, but that accomplishes nothing because we're stuck in a two-party system that won't let me vote for a candidate far enough left to actually fix things. Instead we continue to maintain the status quo, because corporations have more money and political power than civilians.
I'm well aware that this reads like an overdramatic manifesto. I'm just sick of everything feeling like it's getting worse all the time, and it seems pretty causally linked to the rise of corporations. Is it too much to ask that I be able to live without them invading _every single aspect of my life_? I don't think it is, but I think we're too far gone at this point for it to ever change.