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Life as a prisoner of the neoliberal mind palace must *suck*: it's a world where every person who suffers under predatory business practices is a "consumer" who has "revealed a preference" for being screwed:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/07/water-thats-not-wet/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/08/take-it-easy/#but-take-it
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@pluralistic
I have some (Canadian) smart electric baseboard thermostats, which are very nice, but rely on their app and Internet connectivity for remote access and other features. They support Homekit, so I can control them locally with #HomeAssistant, but I simply don't understand how they'll continue to offer free server support indefinitely.
I assume they're relying on hardware sales to keep the wheel spinning, but I don't know too many people that keep buying *more* thermostats. It's also possible they've designed a server infrastructure that is so low-overhead, it's not a cost center.
@pluralistic
Link is broken today.
Working link: https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/
And the companies *doing* the screwing? They're blameless: they're just rationally pursuing profits, upholding the fiduciary duty dictated by "shareholder supremacy":
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics
In this Hayek-pilled cosmology, businesses are prisoners of the profit imperative and can be forgiven for everything, and the public are "consumers" whose bad choices are to blame for all the world's woes.
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It's a worldview with no room in it for political agency and no theory of power:
https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/
The problem, of course, is that power is real, and it sets the rules of this game. Even if you stipulate that it is management's duty to do whatever they can to make the largest profit for the company's owners, "whatever they can do" isn't a free-floating concept. It is inescapably tethered to the rules of the game set by *politics* (that is, *power*).
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A company cannot charge infinity dollars and pay its workers zero dollars. In the former case, customers might reasonably take their business elsewhere. In the latter case, workers might sell their labor elsewhere.
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