Week 13
Motion: THB 100,000 flies cannot be wrong
Role: MP (opp.)
Consumption and consumers are often viewed as the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith fame of economical theory. The idea is that masses always choose fit solutions for themselves, as they are smarter together in a mass. But, is it really like that or is it rather so that stupidity concentrates in a thicker crowd of people? I am going to focus on three cases of masses being behind a bad service provider or solution. You can then decide for yourselves what this means in practice.
Gmail as an E-mail Service
At some point Gmail became the world’s favourite e-mail-server, much like Google, its parent, became the world’s favourite search engine. I was never one to trust Gmail, as I had secured a Hotmail address for myself at the turn of the millennium. At one point I got to know Gmail, as it was the internal e-mail-server of a workplace I worked for for half a year. I soon discovered Gmail’s forte: it did not separate multiple answers as different e-mails but compiled all of them into a single thread. It was economical in a way the first e-mail inboxes hadn’t been.
Alas, Hotmail developed while Gmail was left treading water in other ways than that one way. Little by little, my sweet Hotmail has gone from a humble e-mail client to a sleek machine that can easily sort out the most bedeviling mixture of ads, bills, correspondence, matter-of-fact e-mails, receipts, spam and subscribed newsletters. It works equally well on a tablet as a desktop, while Gmail is a mess. Gmail’s inbox may contain e-mails dating back a few years, even if I knew that I had deleted or sorted them out in the past. It feels as if Alphabet Inc. was trying to turn everyone as disorganised as those people who never learn to delete mail or sort it into different subfolders, keeping everything in Inbox. As if a film director or producer who has his whole film as piles of paper on his desk, waiting to be finished, knowing where every document is and what means what. Outlook (est. as HM) is a clear victor in this respect, as it allows to keep organised.
Pizza Restaurant East Side Downtown
There is a pizzeria right in the middle of the city where I studied. I did not frequent that pizzeria back in those days, but other people do and did. It begins to gather a line or queue from the early morning through noon into the afternoon and evening. You can hardly get a seat there let alone a table. It is highly profitable, and the pizza chefs do not see a moment of rest. I cannot imagine how they cope with being forced to bake pizza hour in and hour out. “If you cannot stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen” and so on, but still.
For all that, it was revealed some time ago that the pizzeria does not bake its own dough. Pizza foundations arrive frozen and prefabricated from a food factory somewhere in Southern Finland. So, the glorified task of the baker is to just take a frozen foundation, sprinkle all kinds of toppings ordered all over it, push it into the oven, take it out and serve it as an “Italian delicacy”. The whole place is a kind of fraud. The pizza salad they serve with the pizza is delicious, but I wonder if even that is real or just styrofoam soaked in vinegar. In addition, you cannot share personal secrets at the pizzeria, as it is so crowded and full-seated. Inter nos. For now, I have set a moratorium on going there.
Tablets vs. Mobile Phones
What unites mobile phones and tablets is that the latter tend to be magnified versions of the former without telephonic qualities. All the same, I could not use a mobile phone while I can use a tablet. Everything is facile on a tablet. I can work my way around banking, blogging, e-mail, game that I play, government’s services, reading newspapers and tuning in to my streaming service of choice. It is just intuitive and nice. In contrast, mobile phones are a mess, at least when it comes to Android. I cannot manage any of that on a mobile phone. I could not travel around the world with a mobile phone to save my life. Still, the vast majority of the world’s population seem to thrive on that pesky little rectangle just alright.
What all of this boils down to is that there is no reason why you should follow the masses wherever they might be going. They can be misguided and wrong. They may choose alternatives that are popular but not right – for you, at least. Consumeristically and technologically speaking, there are always people who swim upstream and you could be one of them. You may choose an Atari ST over a Commodore Amiga. You may choose a Range Rover over an SUV. And you have your reasons, pragmatics being chief among them. Whatever you choose, be proud, and remember that 100,000 flies can be wrong.
Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t). Aiheeni on ajatuksia herättävä kannanotto vastuullisen kuluttamisen puolesta. Annan konkreettisia esimerkkejä, joiden takia minun kannattaa olla 3. puhuja puolellani. Puoleni ajaa käsitystä ihmisestä omien valintojensa herrana ja vastuunkantajana.
Polar Ice Standpoints Society 