paul wheaton wrote:
I am advocating a path where a billion people can add luxury and coin to their lives while taking funds from the companies causing the problems.
I believe the people complaining about this message are hired by those same companies and are desperately trying to keep this billion people buying their stuff.
I feel more aligned with Daniel's Quinn's take on this idea:
“Pharaohs
It took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place every day during the annual building season, roughly four months long. Few commentators on these facts can resist noting that this achievement is an amazing testimonial to the pharaoh’s iron control over the workers of Egypt. I submit, on the contrary, that pharaoh Khufu needed to exercise no more control over his workers at Giza than pharaoh Bill Gates exercises over his workers at Microsoft. I submit that Egyptian workers, relatively speaking, got as much out of building Khufu’s pyramid as Microsoft workers will get out of building Bill Gates’s pyramid (which will surely dwarf Khufu’s a hundred times over, though it will not, of course, be built of stone).
No special control is needed to make people into pyramid builders—if they see themselves as having no choice but to build pyramids. They’ll build whatever they’re told to build, whether it’s pyramids, parking garages, or computer programs.
Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.”
― Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure
Thus, no need to hire private spokespersons to pummel the masses with corporate messaging when the lemming effect, covering deep unrecognized fear, will do the
job with insidious efficiency.