Fight evil with evil
But it's all for the good.
It's a tale of whiny Sparts today. Lawrence and Lina hate the e-Ville Corporation in all its forms and join some activist group called STUMP (no doubt run by skinny boys with pathetic excuses for beards – good guess me, it seems). It's time for a little non-violent civil disobedience. Yeah, that means a bunch of dippy hippies playing guitars. If I were the e-Ville Corporation, I'd be running up the white flag so as not to suffer the horrors of guitars, caftans, and twentysomething, eunuch-like boys who strain to grow beards.
The protest was a great success in that it was well managed and there was little disruption, but it didn't get much media coverage which focused on the response from the e-Ville Corporation.
STUMP decides to up the ante to civil disorder (I suppose that means things like paying for something in a shop and then running away without it or the change). Lina and Lawrence are opposed to violence, but since the e-Ville Corporation already uses violence as a business model, if you can't join 'em, beat 'em.
Is it right to fight violence with violence?
You could be polite and civilised, but large companies, which like any unelected power are at most only accountable to a small number of people who probably have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo (sounds like a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail), aren't going to pay much attention to a mob of whining Sparts. Democratic governments would like to behave in much the same way (it probably motivates their childish obsession with secrecy), but they have an electorate to deceive. In other words, PLCs are only worried about their shareholders since they don't have to answer to anyone else.
There seems that some version of the social contract underlies this. If the rulers make themselves odious to the people, then the morality goalposts get shifted if there's no peaceful means of removing a tyrant from power. Corporations are fundamentally a sort of tyranny. No one votes for them and yet they may have extensive control over some aspects of our lives (e.g. Microsoft, Google). If being nice doesn't help, then you may have to be nasty. Pity, but tyrants tend to listen when they're on the business end of a cruise missile.
It's a tale of whiny Sparts today. Lawrence and Lina hate the e-Ville Corporation in all its forms and join some activist group called STUMP (no doubt run by skinny boys with pathetic excuses for beards – good guess me, it seems). It's time for a little non-violent civil disobedience. Yeah, that means a bunch of dippy hippies playing guitars. If I were the e-Ville Corporation, I'd be running up the white flag so as not to suffer the horrors of guitars, caftans, and twentysomething, eunuch-like boys who strain to grow beards.
The protest was a great success in that it was well managed and there was little disruption, but it didn't get much media coverage which focused on the response from the e-Ville Corporation.
STUMP decides to up the ante to civil disorder (I suppose that means things like paying for something in a shop and then running away without it or the change). Lina and Lawrence are opposed to violence, but since the e-Ville Corporation already uses violence as a business model, if you can't join 'em, beat 'em.
Is it right to fight violence with violence?
You could be polite and civilised, but large companies, which like any unelected power are at most only accountable to a small number of people who probably have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo (sounds like a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail), aren't going to pay much attention to a mob of whining Sparts. Democratic governments would like to behave in much the same way (it probably motivates their childish obsession with secrecy), but they have an electorate to deceive. In other words, PLCs are only worried about their shareholders since they don't have to answer to anyone else.
There seems that some version of the social contract underlies this. If the rulers make themselves odious to the people, then the morality goalposts get shifted if there's no peaceful means of removing a tyrant from power. Corporations are fundamentally a sort of tyranny. No one votes for them and yet they may have extensive control over some aspects of our lives (e.g. Microsoft, Google). If being nice doesn't help, then you may have to be nasty. Pity, but tyrants tend to listen when they're on the business end of a cruise missile.
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