How has our world come to weaponize our own trust against us?
I just spend 50 minutes on the phone cancelling a subscription to a “local” news service. After losing their relatively reasonable introductory rate, they had pumped up the price to $30 a month! Now, I am very, very happy to support local jobs. But the whole time on the phone line, that desire to try to make the world better was being weaponized against me.
The cheerful robotic “please hold” messenger tried to massage me with images of running into a local journalist, photographer, or editor in a grocery store, at a church, or at a high school baseball game. There were no less than 4 attempts from the poor woman who eventually picked up the phone to offer me a very slightly lower rate, to please keep supporting local news, to get an “ad free online news experience.”
Meanwhile, I was rolling my eyes at the blatant attempts to manipulate and discourage me from giving them an absurd amount of money for only a tiny handful of actual local news per week. I also know that the people staffing these call centers get punished for failing to retain subscribers, and so I took zero pleasure in having to firmly repeat myself: please cancel my subscription.
News is only a small part of it. These attempts to manipulate us are all around us, every day; in the cheery ad jingles we’re assailed with day in and day out; in the persistent car insurance scam calls; in phone queues and digital algorithms and social media that we can’t peel our eyes away from. It seems like our entire world is about trying to get you to part with your money using every trick in the book. It’s terrible. It eats away at you. It makes you suspicious of everyone and everything.
I’ll even go one step further: it’s evil. Have you ever wondered why it seems every other young person is struggling with depression? Why no one knows who their neighbors are? Why we purportedly have a dating and mating crisis? Look no further than the tools that make us mistrust ourselves, our environment, and our neighbors, stripping us of our connections to one another. Look no further than the Sham, Spam, and Scam economy.
But why? Who would willingly make the world like this, and for what purpose? I don’t want to make this too long, so I’ll cut right to the chase: we are being robbed and turned against one another because of the careless pursuit of private profits. When our businesses are ran not by neighbors, but by distant, faceless investors, they have no reason to be a good neighbor to us. They can focus on robbing us blind as much as they can and then running away with the money because there’s no consequences for them.
This is why we must buy, build, and broaden locally-owned and especially employee-owned businesses, ran by our friends and neighbors and not by bully billionaire investors. That’s why our local economy is a big part of my platform, and what I will work toward building with my time in office. But I can’t get there by myself.
Will you join me?
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