The ultimate manifestation of this is, of course, prison-tech. A duopoly of private equity-backed prison-tech profiteers have convinced prisons and jails across America to get rid of calls, in-person visits, mail, parcels, libraries, and continuing ed, and replace them all with tablets that charge prisoners vastly more than people in the free world pay to access media and connect with the outside.
Capitalists, after all, hate capitalism. Capitalists want monopolies, they want captive audiences. Few lock-in arrangements are harder to escape than the landlord-tenant relationship. Landlords know it, which is why they conspire to rig rents through illegal price-fixing apps like Realpage:. And why they fill your home with Internet of Shit appliances that pick your pockets by requiring special, expensive consumables, and why they tack so many junk fees onto your monthly rent:.
Ironically, monopolists love each other. I guess if you loathe competition, a certain kind of cooperation comes naturally. In reality, tenants who live under these arrangements have produced a deep, unassailable record proving that they pay more for worse broadband than the people next door who get to choose their ISPs.
The idea that government should serve up the American people as an all-you-can-eat buffet for corporations that use tech to supercharge their predatory conduct has been with us for a hell of a long time. Keep reading. After all, America is the most prolific imprisoner of its own people of any country in world history.
This may seem like a losing strategy. But for a certain kind of depraved sadist, the poor are an irresistible target. You can enjoy total impunity as you torment poor people, make them so miserable and afraid for their lives and safety that they will find some money, somewhere, and give it to you. Mexican cartels understand this. They do a brisk trade in kidnapping asylum seekers whom the US has illegally forced to wait in Mexico to have their claims processed. The families of refugees — either in their home countries or in the USA — are typically badly off but they understand that Mexico will not lift a finger to protect a kidnapped refugee, and so when the kidnappers threaten the most grisly tortures as a means of extracting ransom, those desperate family members do whatever it takes to scrape up the blood-money.
