How Big Tech and Right-Wing Governments Are Making You an Inmate, Not a Citizen

In the late 1940s, the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury was strolling after dinner one evening with a friend to a bus stop in the Wiltshire district of Los Angeles. What happened is wonderfully retold in The Bradbury Chronicles by Sam Weller. A police car pulled up beside them because the officer was “dumbfounded to see two pedestrians out walking in a city not known for foot traffic.” He got out and demanded to know what they were doing.

“Putting one foot in front of the other,” replied Bradbury, who was munching on soda crackers at the time.

The officer asked again as he didn’t like Bradbury’s casual defiance. Frustrated that he had no excuse to detain the pair, he erupted, “Walking, eh? Just walking. Well, don’t do it again!”

An indignant Bradbury went home and wrote one of his classic short stories, The Pedestrian, which is considered a sort of precursor to Fahrenheit 451. No doubt he would be appalled by a moronic demagogue converting the entire downtown of LA into “an unlawful assembly area.” But then this is what tyrants do. Make the law into an excuse for bullying and thuggery.

Unfortunately, we have more than the threat of governments curbing our rights to walk freely and go where we like. Sometimes the threat is indirect and subtle.

A friend of mine is very conscientious — reasonably so, in my view — about the condition and ingredients of the stuff she orders from Amazon. And let’s face it, most of the time we’re ordering from one big supplier: Amazon. She’s run into some crappy and defective products, or sometimes just one of Amazon’s suppliers sending the wrong item. This doesn’t inspire trust, and it’s understandable if she — or you — want your money back instead of requesting the item again.

But a while back, Amazon warned her there was a limit on the number of refunds she could make, and she could be cut off from service or kicked off the platform entirely. I’ve been told this is standard policy these days.

To me, it’s creepy as hell. It flips the script, and instead of the consumer having the right of appeal and a retailer bending over backwards to replace or refund an item as in ye olde days, now the retailer is warning you, “We’re beginning to think you’re a troublemaker. Knock it off.”

You can rationalize this as, Oh, but there’s a whole marketplace of consumer items where she can find what she wants, but there frankly isn’t. Not anymore. A mega-corporation has become the place, sometimes the only place, to get certain items urgently, and at affordable cost. What Amazon did amounts to a threat. A threat on where she could go in the larger sense and certainly a threat on her time.

You can only pull that kind of stunt when you have global power and huge leverage. And it is not a good thing.

But few, I suspect, consider the darker ramifications of what’s been going on for years. Our capitalist world is turning into the stalker creep who wants to be your boyfriend, who kidnaps you and promises he loves you, and everything you need is here — right here in the house! No need to go out at all.

In fact, no need for you to go anywhere. It’ll just be you and him forever.

Think about it. Think about what online retail — in fact, what the entire span of the Internet — has done to the quality of life in a city.

What does your neighborhood look like? Do you even have a neighborhood anymore in the now-antique sense of the word? I live in Toronto, and during the 1980s to early nineties, I could make a whole afternoon of browsing the bookshops on Queen Street West. They’re all gone. In that same era on that same strip, you could go to a whole selection of vintage clothing shops to freshen up your wardrobe. With only a couple of exceptions — gone. You could pop into Queen Street’s Dragon Lady Comics. If you wandered back east to Yonge and crossed up past Dundas Square, you had the now departed and much missed HMV store and A & A Records.

The above paragraph is not meant as “cranky old man gets nostalgic,” and of course, the digital world wasn’t entirely responsible for these outlets fleeing the Queen Street strip. The greed of property owners and leasers played a huge part as well. But my point is that there were neighborhoods downtown that had character, and Big Tech played a key role in killing what made them special.

Certain unique shops and ones like it helped drive a momentum that set up cafés, restaurants, sidewalk sellers of tie-dye T-shirts and cheap jewelry, performing buskers, activists, all looking to get business and attention. When you walked into Dragon Lady, nerds did not run the world yet, but they could still debate whether Watchmen was losing its focus with the latest issue or argue that Frank Miller was a genius writer but not a great artist. If you went into Bakka-Phoenix Science Fiction and Fantasy Books, you might get a chance to see a book signing by William Gibson. You saw authors in the flesh and heard them speak, and yes, that’s still done with the big names at Indigo or on a university campus, but it’s increasingly rare at little independent bookstores today. They can’t afford big names, and besides, how many people will they reach in person? And so we lose again because it shouldn’t be just about numbers but reaching a community.

You went into HMV, and you could chat with strangers about music near the listening bar on different floors. Yes — yes, you can listen to music far more easily today with a keystroke, and that poor artist will get paid shit to nothing after she played her fingers until they bled and poured her soul out to make that composition that you grabbed for free from YouTube. But you lose as well, because it used to be wonderful to discover music by happy accident in a store. It was fun to talk about it with like-minded fans on the spot and check out LP album art. Every cool shop was a potential salon for the exchange of ideas.

In other words, there were places to go. But even when we try now to go somewhere, we’re not really going anywhere. How different is the layout and aesthetics of one Indigo bookstore outlet from another? Because it’s a chain. And today, we all live as if we’re inside a chain outlet. More and more, a walk around my city is a tour of a vast petrified forest of condo buildings and with new ones going up each year. Yet except for maybe a nearby Rabba variety shop outlet — again, pretty much interchangeable — if you live downtown, you have no neighborhood.

And that’s fine by Big Tech and right-wing governments. They would like to keep you busy and happy and submissive with things, not thinking about intangible qualities. Big retail makes the individual happy — screw a community. Why on earth should we invest more money in public parks, or even a parkette? What for? Your building has a gym, right? You feel like a walk? Go use a treadmill. Why invest in public transit? The people who matter own cars.

We live in a world where practically everything we do is surveilled, ranging from the simplest door-cams to sophisticated CCTV, and while these can be easily upgraded, your subway — if it’s anything like Toronto’s notorious TTC — is a horror show with breakdowns and service disruptions every single day. Yet we’re told there’s not enough money to fix things now. Companies and government know how to watch you move, but you can barely move anywhere.

Have you noticed that in tragedy after tragedy of some lunatic getting into a vehicle and ramming it into innocent pedestrians — whether it’s Vancouver or New Orleans or Mannheim, Germany — that American media does a post-mortem on each monster’s mental illness, and yes, there is plenty of footage of loved ones’ tears, but…

No one points out that these incidents can be hugely decreased if we just change the fundamental model of cities and stop letting cars be king.

But we don’t. It sounds counter-intuitive, but this attitude is exactly what the establishment wants. No investment in public infrastructure or transit because the perception is: the poor use transit. The middle class still drives and votes, so we have to mollify them with a highway. But we can drag out the process and corrupt it, and it won’t matter much because if you are middle class, virtually all your entire needs are fulfilled for you from your home — make that your cell.

Want food quickly? Order it online. Want to cook for yourself? No problem. You don’t even need to hit a grocery store and pick out the produce yourself — we’ll do it for you (great way to unload our stock of wilting, almost expired vegetables on you.) And we don’t even have to talk about Netflix. Instead of you stepping out on a sunny day and passing a hardware store, a flower shop, a bookstore, a hairdresser’s, you might pass a “dark store.”

You can’t go into one of these. You’re not welcome. It takes up space like a regular building, but its whole purpose is to serve orders online, not ever an individual in front of a clerk. Big surprise that these dark stores turned out to be more ugly blots on worker rights and sometimes ignore zoning laws. The concept itself is an anti-human abomination.

In fact, lost in all the discussion about the absurd trend in idiots dating their own phone with AI lovers is the fact that you are still not going anywhere. Your AI “boyfriend/girlfriend” comes instantly to you.

Which brings us to the heart of the issue. It is a world increasingly without curiosity and discovery for the average citizen/consumer/inmate. You don’t make mistakes anymore with that bad sweet potato you bought at a corner market. No mistakes either with that date at the Italian restaurant with a physical human being. You know, the kind who might show up ten minutes late. Your cell phone hubby is guaranteed to be punctual. He’s perfect because of course, he is. Never challenging you, never calling you out on your shit, never going anywhere himself, because he’s not a he, it’s a friggin’ it. An app.

And this is also why there was tremendous effort from major corporations to pull workers back into the office after the pandemic. For a short window of time, people woke up and realized, My gawd, I can be away from so much BS, from breakroom politics, from micro-managing bosses and get stuff done in my own time! To be fair, many businesses have adopted the enlightened view of shifting to a hybrid work model, but too many want to turn the clock and control, control, control. We want you here. We don’t want you to go anywhere. We want to be able to keep tabs on you. It doesn’t matter if you are more productive when you choose the environment, we want to assert our control.

Now stay there.

I am not suggesting we give up the conveniences that the digital world has given us, but you may have noticed that society — if there is one anymore instead of a consumer report — has no voice. We do not get to tell corporations what our boundaries are, while governments have abdicated their responsibilities to keep us safe, let alone guard our privacy. It fits, given that the two keep working together.

The tightening squeeze on our freedom of movement has a connection to the artificial “migrant” crisis (take your pick where, as the U.S., Britain, France, you name it all want to shove people back on boats that will sink or dump them in concentration camps in distant lands).

There is a blunt truth about the rising hate and oppression of migrants. Doesn’t matter whether it’s the “illegal” migrant trying to carve out a life and have a family, or the young student or asylum seeker. You see, the truth is there are two kinds of hate, and one gets discussed by hand-wringing liberals and media, and the other kind doesn’t get attention because it would really call out the establishment.

There’s the loathing from your average, uneducated bigot. The easily manipulated fool who buys MAGA nonsense, who happily goes along with Alternative for Germany.

But the second kind of hate is arguably more sinister because it’s a corporate attitude. It realizes there is no big revenue stream from an undocumented worker. There is no steady order history from an asylum seeker.

These are ordinary people, dealing with stressful, sometimes humiliating circumstances, but their grim situations simply don’t work for cashless cafés where you buy your Moka latte with a debit card (they’re often too busy trying to get into a hostel or shelter first, thanks).

Time and again, increased exposure to and familiarity with immigrants have proved to wear down paranoia and bigotry, but it’s in capitalism’s interest to keep you in your space and keep out those who can’t afford a box that passes for an apartment.

Which brings us full circle back to Los Angeles and the protests against the ICE raids on migrants. Protesters don’t buy, they boycott. Protesters don’t take whatever they’re given, they complain about shoddy goods. Protesters sometimes vandalize. It is intolerable to corporations and right-wing politicians to have people thinking for themselves. Because they often get the bright idea to go outside and express those thoughts.

Just wait. The future will be: “This National Guard overreach is brought to you by Chrysler. Or Apple.”

It is an irony that one of the last of the “white privileges,” if you want to call it that, is being eroded: international travel. Because those who cavalierly write off diminished freedom for others don’t recognize when the process begins targeting them. More perceptive critics get it. Left-wing talk show host David Pakman, for instance, put out a video about how he was warned by “multiple immigration lawyers” not to leave the United States; the implication being that his views made him an easy target for the Trump administration, especially given that he’s a naturalized citizen. As I wrote in a popular Substack piece in April, the ICE raids are not just about keeping certain people out, they’re about keeping you in — intimidating you so that you don’t go anywhere.

Almost a century ago, a couple of literary prophets brought us two different flavors of dystopian nightmare. Aldous Huxley suggested we’d be lulled into a future of shallow, soma-taking hedonists and then you have Orwell’s boot stomping down on a face forever. They were both right. And this is the diabolical brilliance of the two-pronged attack we all face. We keep failing to see that capitalism is not the “good cop,” it’s not the ideology of freedom, and certainly not our way out of economic crises. It’s the psycho-ex boyfriend. And he has a pet Rottweiler, trained to bite your throat. He won’t let us leave.

We have to escape our cells. But that will only start with putting one foot in front of the other.