Complex systems sold as making life easy, and the new consumer slavery

There is a new world system now. Everyone is supposed to need or want to do things that involve communicating with someone else. This is normally mediated by some company. That company will, under the false pretense that they are providing people with useful services that make their lives easy, require that you use some kind of computerized system to enable your interaction. This system will (a) be non-intuitive, and have a high learning curve, and (b) will frequently require a supplementary communication with someone at the company to facilitate it because of something that didn't work. The consequence is that, the more companies and systems there are like this, the more of every person's time will be consumed by this. I know professors whose resumes appear to make their academic degree and knowledge and expertise in their profession less important than their proficiency in a large number of these computerized systems.

It is hard now to find personalized assistance with anything, and the phone calls that frequently must be made to companies to get help using their systems and products typically involve (a) a long wait time listening to a recording that is designed to annoy and exasperate you, consisting either of endlessly repeated advertising messages or a sonic texture that has the feel of an audible equivalent of an intravenous drip, faux music that is repetitive and very sad, as if to suggest that the part of your life spent dealing with this garbage is miserably tedious and without joy, so that when a live operator actually answers you feel both relieved and nervously fearful of saying the wrong thing and causing them to hang up on you so that you must start over; and (b) the people who answer are not very competent, often trained to give particular “answers” to things people ask or tell them that are simply repeated from a kind of dictionary of responses to customers. All of this leverages the company’s time to a minimum by displacing work and time onto consumers. This effectively makes of the “consumer” a kind of employee of the system of companies profiting every way they can while depriving him or her of most of the free time for their own interests or projects that would otherwise be available to them.

All this is an aspect of "neo-liberal" capitalism, and it is sold, and so is supposed to appear, as wonderfully making things easy for people, but it has the opposite effect. That is because in every case the purpose of the system is just to give the company an opportunity to make more money while involving their personnel in as little paid time as possible.

I find that this makes life almost unlivable today. Soon everything you want to do will be mediated by unnecessarily complex information and communication systems. They are in principle easy to use, but in fact only have the effect of enslaving people as consumers into a life spent dealing with shit.

It is like a grand system of shit that is sold to you to make it easier for you to shit. We ought to call this what it is.

If something really seems not to work, a person will be blamed, maybe the worker, maybe the consumer. If there is a real break down, it must be that a person has broken down and is in a state of critical break-down. Then they will call that person “mentally ill.” This too is a way of avoiding thinking. There is nothing to think about; the meaning of the event is obvious. Wooden mouths open on cue to make such observations, and out of them comes the words they have been programmed to say. If something isn’t working right, someone, perhaps whoever seems frustrated by it, or maybe whoever it is they are faced with at the moment, will be said to be in the wrong. Such a declaration may not have any meaning anyone would care to be bothered to think about it; it will merely be true, all the more true for being meaningless and thus final in being so declared.

Another possibility is that in the near future, people who are very troublesome will just be cancelled, not by someone who claims to be offended by something intolerable they have said (like statements revealing a “prejudice” or other impermissibly bad attitude), but, more efficiently, by simply “unplugging” them. If your life consists of being plugged into a set of systems that are semi-automatic, and you can only do anything (write, read, enjoy a movie, music, or a book, talk with friends, do work or apply for it, etc.) while being so connected, if a government or a company whose activities other systems are dependent on, does not “like” you, then they cancel or shut you off with a flick of a switch, and you’re fucked. You might them be directed to the nearest facility of punitive correctional treatments, which they will say you “need.”