Fixing what isn’t broken: landline edition
A slew of technical falsehoods, promises meant to be broken, and blaming the customer to top it all off.
I gotta blow off some steam about the killing of landlines, because it’s just epitomising everything that’s wrong with public-private American oligopoly culture since the 1990s. The more I read the more angry I get. So what do I see?
Before I get into it, I want to elucidate briefly why I am interested in landline telephony to begin with. There is one very big feature unique to non-cellular telephony that the latest 3GPP rehash isn’t going to be providing anytime soon: vendor lock-in is avoidable as a customer, and because of that it’s much more feasible to effectively block the SPAMageddon we’ve all been casually living under for the past ten years or so. The other thing—which is going to rear its head time and again as we wade through this shit creek of corruption—is that the infrastructure is already fucking there, bought and paid for a long time ago. Corporate greed is nonetheless killing it because they don’t want to have to send a guy out there for an unliveable wage once in a blue moon when something breaks.
Old is automatically bad
One of the dumbest fallacies in human history, but here it is again. It’s ‘legacy’, so it must be objectively and inherently worse in every way and there aren’t any reasons people might prefer it and have the right to choose. Actually, there are but there aren’t enough millions of feckless sheep that we can profit off of more by leaving it in, so we’re gonna do the maximally greedy thing here and herd them into VoIP and cell phones along with everyone else. What was once a choice is now a mandate. And since we know the free market is a bald-faced lie, that whole idea of ‘consumer choice’ gets laughed out the window.
We’ve also went ahead and lied to you about a bunch of aspects of this move like an evil schoolteacher lies to her students. It’s not expensive to maintain in general, and it’s definitely cheaper to maintain than a fucking internet backbone. How the fuck could it not be when the latter is routing multiple orders of magnitude more connections at thousands of times the bandwidth apiece. Just to make sure you’re too confused to ask about that we’ve also written this like fiber-to-the-home isn’t also VoIP and cellular isn’t also VoIP. Truth is it’s all VoIP, but you’re the consumer so fuck you. You get explained at, not explained to.
We’re laughing at you drowning in SPAM
This one just really rubs in the contempt, doesn’t it? Yeah, I know what’ll solve the robocall problem! Connect to the Internet! Sounds like advice you’d get from your Vietnam veteran great uncle. Just think of the idiocy on display here: connecting phones to the internet was what caused the SPAMageddon in the first place! And you seriously think that getting your ancient ass online is gonna make it so you can hold the fort down against that? You think some shit-ass overpriced VoIP package that always costs at least $60/month no matter how awful it is will help you against call centres in Cambodia filled with human trafficking victims who get paid in rice and chili sauce? You poor, stupid fuck. You have no idea how fucked you are by the fellows at the Broadband Assocation, which includes CIA favourites like Oracle because of course it does. They own you. They own all of this shit and they’ll take every dime they can get out of your ass.
And hey, if you’re some brainiac who figured out how to install SpamBlocker from F-Droid, remember the limits of that as the SMS SPAM still rolls through because at the end of the day there’s not a single fucking smartphone with an open source WAN module and that’s by design. It keeps you locked the fuck down so they always have an avenue to keep fucking with you. Dumb phone enjoyers have been crying their eyes out as the 2G networks are getting decommissioned out of the same pointless fucking greed that has them shutting down the rainbow root to kill landlines. Everyone is gonna be forced to pay $80/month to access the outside world and they’ll get Congress to pick up the tab for whatever poor fucks are too broke to manage that. No options, no choice, no transparency, no liberty, just world-class rent-seeking from all your favourite criminals.
Have a fake landline if you’re too old and stupid
This is a fun gimmick for the truly inebriated among us, and is a creative reminder of how much hatred and contempt our overlords harbour for us on a daily basis. They made a gizmo that’s a giant overglorified 5G receiver and called it a handset. Whoop-dee-doo.
It has a SIM card, but you can’t just use it like that. You have to go along with the retarded pretensions of this dumb fucking product and pretend it’s just a ‘telephone without internet’ if you want to only pay $6/month instead of the customary $40+/month assrape that is oligopoly standard for data. Nevermind that the margins on this have no relationship to the prices at all. They’re not going to allow you to simply buy whatever $6/month worth of shit-ass internet would be, because then they wouldn’t be able to make the internet even shittier while still charging you full price, would they? They couldn’t sell you anything with marginal pricing if their firstborn daughter depended on it – that’s not smart! That’s not business! You’ll never become a trillionaire assraping the American public like that! You’re in the business of fucking the people and acting like that makes you a certified MENSA-card-carrying genius! Take a page from Kevin O’Leary and get your shit together!
We totally care™ (Boomers only)
If you’re over the age of 65, you’re part of the only age group that is genuinely paying into American society as it was advertised and existed before Ronald Reagan made white collar crime cool. So like insurance companies and banks and the fucking AARP (this is excerpted from them), we’re happy to coddle you as you’ve been bought off with massively inflated home prices so you’re completely insulated from the fact that we’re shitfucking everyone younger than you so hard that they’re growing up worse off than your grandparents did in the Dust Bowl.
But we hate all consumers so we’re letting you know that by giving you this thick condescension about ‘not leaving you behind’ or whatever. Sure we’re lying to you six ways from Sunday, but we’ll buy you off with a band-aid and assume you’re too retarded to know the difference, and since we were so nice about it you have to like that, right? US Telecom Spalter agrees with the moral of Lilo & Stitch so all must be right with the world. You still think people actually give a shit, so that should do you just fine.
I’d love to not be SPAMmed by third world call centers staffed with human trafficking victims. Unfortunately, the people running the American telecom industry are too similar to the people running those trafficking operations and call centres, because they’ve conspired through the federal government to prevent any market penetration of open modem hardware at all, even as a niche product. That severely limits my practical ability to actually deal with incoming SPAM calls, regardless of how smart or resourceful I may be. Larry Oracle has kept the line open to the American public as a nice solid to his counterparts running sweatshop casinos in Indochina so we can all get fucked even more every single day. Thanks Larry.
Ordinarily, I could live in a world in which things that aren’t broken don’t get ‘fixed’. Ordinarily, I could buy less of things I don’t want or need. Ordinarily, I could opt out of experiences and activities I don’t value and prevent my time and money from going to them.
But the criminals running America today regard my skull and yours as salad bowls to be dined out of, because manipulating our psychology to steal from us is their favourite pastime. They need to be dealt with because it’s not possible to live like this – it’s physically killing us all young and the stats already show it. It has to stop. None of this is normal or okay. It’s quietly destroying us.