How about a U.S. Medical Academy: Free Medschool and then serve for five years to pay it back? Why TF not?
The Internet was born a pure communications medium — like the telephone or the postal system. Nobody owned it so nobody could charge you for being on it.
Then we made a fatal mistake — we started allowing ads. This was the Internet’s original sin. Communication mixed with commercialism. And the Net started evolving into what it is today: a massive toxic surveillance operation fueled by ad revenue.
But now imagine this: We impose a #DATAFEE. We ding the mindlords a fraction of a cent every time they harvest a bit of our personal data.
Then we impose an #ADTAX — we ding them another fraction of a cent each time they show us an ad.
These things add up . . . but this time in our favor, not theirs.
Pretty soon that avalanche of small fractions moving from one side of the ledger to the other will change the game. Just like that, Zuck, Musk, Bezos and the boys will no longer make billions of dollars off our backs . . . the money will flow back to us . . . and they will lose their stranglehold on our psyche.
Why not?
Why the fuck not?
If the hard Right can disrupt constitutional democracy and upend global trade, then why can’t we on the hard Left heave surveillance capitalism in a brave new direction?
A corporation has no heart, no soul, no morals. It cannot feel pain. You cannot argue with it. That’s because a corporation is not a living thing but a process — an efficient way of generating revenue.
It takes energy from the outside (capital, labor, raw materials) and transforms it in various ways. In order to continue “living” it need meet only one condition: its income must equal its expenditures over the long term. As long as that happens it can exist indefinitely.
When a corporation hurts people or damages the environment, it will feel no sorrow or remorse because it is intrinsically unable to do so. (It may sometimes apologize, but that’s not remorse — that’s public relations.) Buddhist scholar David Loy put it this way: “A corporation cannot laugh or cry; it cannot enjoy the world or suffer with it. Most of all a corporation cannot love.” That’s because corporations are legal fictions. Their “bodies” are just judicial constructs, and that is why they are so dangerous.
-Adbusters