The Disservice Economy and its Bad Goods; Fuelling The Global Money Making Engine: 3 (Part 2)
Whilst the utility companies are calling the shots like this on all the terms and conditions for Smart Meter usage you can be sure that all holes and all untoward customer advangtages have been plugged up firmly by them – all those they have thought of. This sort of preclusive action is standard practice amongst most corporate companies; leaving no room for any loss to their maximum lawful profit/advantage. I believe the corporations generally are cooly callously consciensiously religious about doing this sort of thing.
A customer gets as it were a new toy to play with -at least – for the great majority of SmartMeter owners – for a while until novelty wears thin and bother-fatigue kicks in and the SmartMeter is left by customers to run in a set configuration indefinitely. But the corporate utilities, who have employee-others to wear themselves down with bother-fatigue and whose employment is to weather being so worn down; will demand from their employees that these SmartMeters instaled in homes are gleaned for every piece of advantageous data about customers that they are able to supply.
(Supermarkets in the UK offer loyalty cards – as do many large chainstores with branches. Some small perks are available to those shoppers who use these loyalty cards each time they shop. A few pounds (£) perhaps over the course of half a year say. In return for their ‘loyalty’ shoppers are scrutinised electronically most particulalry; their data being gathered and procesed in great amounts so as to give stores demographics of their customer bases and much much more inside data which stores could otherwise never have obtained elsewhere and so cheaply without some such system attracive to customers such as loyalty cards. The bottom line is that loyalty cards do the stores who issue them far more benefit than they do for their shoppers. Of course loyalty cards are pitched to customers as boons and as ‘something in return for shopping with the store’; and little if anything is heard of as a thankyou for all the data your loyalty card has supplied us with; nor any great public fuss is made about what this data is and what it tells the stores. Hush hush. Trade secrets. Other stores might enjoy some advantage should we reveal anything!! One for oneself. Dog eat dog.)
Likewise SmartMeters will be able to offer utilities companies huge amounts of detailed data about customers; just as loyalty cards do for stores. None of this background is aired at all in any marketing pitches made for placing SmartMeters in the home.
But there remains the ‘public-spirited’ ‘environmental’ and at the same time highly personally arttractive pitch which says that SmartMeters will help you reduce your energy footprint – and, by the way, your bills also. You are being virtuous, doing the general public a benefit by having a SmartMeter fitted in your home; and this is a powerful prompter to have one because of the social thing; which says somewhat in bad faith, you are conscious that you are ‘helping the community’.
Of course most of the time there’s no way of telling how or whether and how much money you might have saved; how much then that you have ‘helped the environment’, if at all. Generally all of us with our money live the most part for today; and are happy to leave tomorrow’s bills to tomorrow. Few amongst us really regulate with rigour what we spend, unless when we are really straitened for cash.
The utilities companies on the other hand, again because their employees are constrained to apply the discipline demanded of them by their bosses so that their employment is retained; carfully, precisely formulate and give their orders to their employees which lay their stratagems so as to maximise money making. Thus the utilitities companies see SmartMeters as useful for dispensing with personnel who arrive on your doorstep to read your meters once every so often; personnel whose wages saved are a considerable saving to their companies when they are laid off and SmartMeters do their work electronically and at no cost.
Likewise the utilities companies obtain via placing Smartmeters in your home a more centralised and a more broad and deep grasp of control over you as customers; your needs and desires in regard to utilities. Customers who fall behind with bill payments, or who are in dispute, are more easily able to have their utilities swiftly cut off; more variant and on and off peak rates in greater subtleties can be programmed to be charged by SmartMeters than by use of old-style plain metering. This is the future – technology in the service of those who hold power so as to marshal and to keep tabs on those from whom their power derives and over whom is weilded. This again is a continuous theme of The Global Money Making Engine and its predations on commonplace private lives and families.
Finally, of course, there is no way back, in particular for SmartMeters everyone will eventually be constrained to have one installed; and generally, with the march of technology, so there wil be a firmer hold and greater grasp of control via mass data mining and surveillances, over a population which is tutored somewhat disingenuously that it is free and democratically governed. The scientists are the technocrats whose knowledge is retained to them as elites; but who are all in the pay and the pockets of the business barons; these same barons, who buy the services of the technocrats. Whenever the busines moguls see a chink, a place into which to intrude and so increase their sway, dominons, powers and wealth, they will be taking it; and in the taking they will regardlessly be diminishing your scope of life and quailty of life palpably so.
This is the drift and tenor of The Gloabal Money Making Engine. It and its adherents have no other greater goals in their visions for life; which represent a crushing and general misapprehension pressing heavily down upon us all.
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