Most of the Money we Pay is Protection Money
But protecting us comes at cost of the planet, as stands, so it’s not protection at all.
Did you know that what you pay for your electricity bill is protection money?
When we stop paying it, because maybe we ran out of money to pay, it’s switched off. Trust me I know, I’ve been there, done this, as a result of having to work non profit on my current research on the global energy problem, which I now necessarily have to appear to be insane, to be allowed to carry on doing.
Being cut off is all part of my research, right?
It adds another dimension to my life experience, which includes hardware and systems design of digital electric energy metering equipment, for both industrial and domestic power applications. I even have historical patents, which are arguably related to that experience.
Electricity is a basic requirement, a modern human necessity, and yet we have to pay protection money to keep it available to us.
I now have a key-meter, which requires to be charged at a local supermarket, once every month or so in summer, two or even three times in winter, at a charge of about £200 GBP per go.
{Yes of course I could diddle it in a second, but that would be cheating, right? In a weird kind of way, it would invalidate my effort, and the efforst of others, “The good guys”, genuinely interested in truth, all the time invested, seven years now and counting}.
The same goes for the internet. Stop paying for it and it’s removed. But its another requirement for the life of modern humans. My building of residence of 15 years so far (On and off, between the odd excursion for work) has a life-long deal (Whatever that means, its the default state), with one company, Virgin Media, giving the latter monopoly on internet. I have to pay more than £60 GBP per month for that alone now.
In internet services, I pay for hosting space for emails etc, and VPN. Folk argue the latter is not necessary, but I argue its completely necessary, to protect oneself against further enshittification which is going on, on the internet. A VPN itself is an enshittification, required by all the other enshittification, and it’s only when we have one, we realise how much enshittification it protects us from.
Anyone who doesn’t use a VPN, please consider yourself unqualified to comment on VPN use, as you can’t know, if you don’t use one!
Something that gives VPN users considerable advantage over non-users, is the ability to side-step geographic biases built into the system. We can use the servers in countries considered to be politically “Wrong” by our own mainstream media, to get local news etc from those places, giving their side of every story. So if you want to get an unbiased, actual world view, the first starting place is to get a decent VPN. For now the best are charged for, but this will maybe change soon, if the work some of us are doing to disenshittify the whole system, comes to frution.
What that also means, is if the servers in one or another places become unusable due to cyber or physical attack, you have alternatives to use, so you are less likely to be cut off by crises. This is resilience.
When was the last time you tried to watch a complete video on youtube?
Have you noticed all videos of more than a few minutes are now randomly peppered with “Ads”?
If you are really interested to hear or see the video with any sense of continuity, you have to be constantly ready to cancel each ad as it appears, as soon as the randomly set pre-cancellation count-down sequence appears, counting down the seconds, and click to carry on watching.
So it’s impossible to get the full depth of whatever it was we were trying to get from the video.
Do we actually watch any of those “Ads”? No, all we want to do is get to the countdown, to carry on with our intended viewing, picking up where it left off, each time.
How do we get these “Ads” cancelled completely? We either pay Google, or pay for an app maintained to suppress the ads.
More protection money. Google’s business now is not about ads, it’s about protection.
Welcome to Enshittopia folks, this is what we live in, mostly oblivious, because we are mostly energy-slaves, blinded by commodified education into single disciplined energy-slave-ants, serving the live system that actually controls us, to keep feeding it energy, extracted from the planet, and which is ending the planet, until we can stop it.
Again I say needing to pay for all this and more, is all part of the global energy problem, and the energy flow in this enshittification is what we have to recognise, is the problem, all of us, protection racketeers and all.
All business is being driven further and further into these practices, which we would once have defined as crime, when it was optional, when there was relatively abundant energy to extract, so profit, and that energy in money was easier.
Fix that, and we fix everything. No more protection needed.
Solar indexed stimulus fixes it all, removes the need for all, both the racketeers and the victims, to stop engaging in the destruction of the planet.
It even puts the energy back into money. This is the only way to pipe the energy of the sun to all people needing it.
It looks like nature, maybe the biggest protection racketeer of all, has it all stitched up. She is at check with one move to mate.
Admittedly I’ve been saying this for at least five years now, I thought we’d be over this by now, but moving billions of people away from established, errored, worldviews takes a while I guess.
And there was yet another move by nature that none of us anticipated, its the solar powered Ai, and we might see that as key in the overall solution of administering a general solar indexed stimulus. What more appropriate controller of it could there be? I don’t think any human could be trusted with it, far less even be capable of doing it.
It’s arguably the protection racketeers that siezed the development advantage with Ai, but ironically, it’s turned out to be exactly what they didn’t want — the instrument that will, and is in process of decimating all business for profit.
We just need to sign up with it, make our own agreements with it, to get our own solar indexed stimulus, maybe.
Remember this comes at nobody’s expense, not even the rich. To be rich, we need to have a rich world.
It’s impossible to be rich in a poor world.
Everybody wins, when everybody has the energy supply they need, and that has to include removing the requirement of everyone to pay protection money.
This will happen automatically, when we finally correctly value the energy coming in from the sun which is already creating valuable economic product, lots of it, trillions in fact, since around 2005.
Will they wait for their own businesses and personal affairs to become bankrupt, before they do this, or not?
I like to think they are more clever than that.
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credits: Cory Doctorow, for the original definition of Enshittification. I’ve extended it slightly, but hopefully you get the reasons why.
