The Ripoff Society

This regrettable phase of rampant capitalism can be referred to as the Ripoff Society.

In the Ripoff Society, anything that can be charged for, will be charged for. Whatsmore, the charge will increase over time and the deliverable will be reduced. The deliverable will be reduced in quantity and/or quality.

Also, marketing in the Ripoff Society becomes increasingly deceitful because any allowed measure of deceit licenses sellers to nominally boost profits (increase amount of ripoff) by duping more buyers into believing the opposite of the truth. Therefore sellers will fully use every allowed opportunity for deceit, no matter how small, to increase profit. A simple example of this is seen with the proliferation of fake reviews, where the seller has paid to have positive reviews of their product by those that never owned it, yet boosting sales marginally. Others will pay those who have purchased a small rebate for leaving a fake 5-star review, fooling the next buyers into a phony, ginned-up sense of quality. I even worked at a place that had a regular contest and prizes for the employee that wrote the most fake reviews of their Greeting Cards and services. We see little white lies and omissions in advertising all the time. Another common example is found in packaging where a larger box or bag says “more” to the consumer but, upon opening, a much smaller thing or amount of things is discovered. The Ripoff Society is essentially a socially sanctioned mechanism of stealing time, the Primary Resource, from other people in the form of money that they work for using their and others’ time.

Any time the cost of an item rises beyond the base inflation rate (itself fed by Ripflation), it’s likely because of the Ripoff Society. A perfect example of this is “convenience fees” charged when you buy tickets to an event online as opposed to the box office. It’s actually more convenient for the vendor and costs them less to process, fully automated, but they found a way to penalize you for saving them money! Many unscrupulous companies follow such practices where instead of passing on the savings they accrued via automation or virtualization, they double-down on profits and greedily charge more, not just increasing profits but profitability. Sometimes, a fee is added on top of a price which once included a service or feature which is now offered a la carte, such as airline luggage fees. By breaking it into a separate charge, they have in fact increased the clerical cost of business to keep track of it all so it’s a self-created tax upon which the separate charge to build.

The Ripoff Society is a viral condition that spreads throughout the body of society at every level and becomes an aberrant norm. It is by no means limited to shareholder-driven corporations seeking ever-increasing ROI (they are the core perpetrators of the normalized meme) but could just as well be found with a local plumber or mechanic. No, I’m not talking about the garden variety ripoffs perpetrated by shysters and dishonest businesses. This is something much more pernicious and insidious. These are the little ripoffs that society winks its eye at, giving silent permission because “everybody is doing it.”

The instances of this are far too numerous to list any more than one could list each cell of a metastacized cancer but here are some prime examples:
— ATM fees (the automation penalty)
— Various banking fees
— Internet registrar recurrent fees and other Internet-related
— SSL Certificate renewal
— False, overstated or fictional claims and white lies in marketing
— Convenience fees (automation fee)
— Various township fees (tax upon tax)
— Any disproportionate penalty fees
— Exorbitant luggage fees
— Various disproportionate add-on fees
— Various licencing fees
— Insurance deductibles and copays on top of Premiums

It’s not that a fee is necessarily uncalled for, but that there is an unspoken license to arbitrarily raise the fee with no correspondence to cost. Viewing people as mere quantifiable consumers with no attendance to the qualitative state of being human has allowed companies to continuously make life more expensive and often less satisfying. Indeed, many of these practices are illegal and fraudulent, yet because of their ubiquity, it is almost impossible to enforce laws that are broken on such a massive volume of transactions.

Certain recurring fees such as those associated with Internet registrations and security certificates (SSL) that merely represent a continued state of existence, yet incur no tangible liabilities to the “provider” are built-in ways of charging you for doing nothing at all. What’s more, the entities that charge you have been ordained with special powers by an arbitrary process that we are expected to accept. Who made GoDaddy or Network Solutions (eg.) the keepers of web domains and the setters of prices thereof? Why does my security certificate need to be renewed each year on top of my hosting fees? I understand hosting fees because I am using up space and bandwidth on a server but to pay over and over again for it to be a secure connection is a ripoff. All Internet sites should be secure as a baseline, not for an additional fee above nominal hosting costs. Yet billions of dollars are silently extorted from millions of users every year—because they can and because we let them.

The Ripoff Society manifests itself in so many ways, they become hard to recognize and eventually some ripoffs become normalized. For example, we’ve all seen the instructions on a shampoo bottle: Lather, rinse and repeat. I remember doing this as a child and how clean my hair felt after washing my clean hair the second time. That innocent “repeat” was no doubt concocted in the backrooms of marketing departments to get us to use the product twice as fast so we’d be back to the store twice as soon to buy more and repeat buying! I’ve since been able to convince myself my hair is darn clean enough after one cycle of shampooing.

We’ve all heard of conmen, snake oil salesmen, hucksters, shysters and scammers. They were traditionally relegated to the fringes of society such as the classic fellow from the 19th Century with his brightly painted wagon selling all manner of curative potions and elixirs. How quaint compared to the modern version who runs ads and infomercials incessantly reaching millions for hair tonics, pillows, weight loss solutions, crypto, etc. We even seem to admire the audacity and success of these modern cyber-hucksters and for some it becomes it becomes aspirational. But wait, there’s more! If you buy in the next 5 minutes we will double your order for additional shipping and processing fees. This has been completely normalized.

In the Information Age, people have found new “little” things to steal from you or at least ask you for. We are all bombarded with advertising wherever we venture. Sometimes one can’t help but see how desperate it seems as we’re reading a news article—big adds up top, ads on the side and ads interspersed throughout the body. Simply by viewing these adds you have registered in the big data as an “impression.” If you click on the ad, you have now elevated to a “click” and have been marked as a target or a sucker by Big Data. We’ve all seen the pop-up ploys to receive a newsletter, simply provide your email address. Once you have done this and agreed to be mined for this valuable bit of personal data, you will forever be receiving spam emails, offers and overabundant information that itself contains more ads. Each of these things steals more of your precious time and each results in a transfer of money from one account to another in exchange, but never to your account.

Of course, these websites and businesses are making a Faustian bargain to stay funded and to afford operation, but because of the first principle of Ripoff Society, they will always add more ads, ask you for more data and deliver less news and they themselves are passing along ripoff costs that they are incurring too. Then we know there are numerous companies that don’t ask you for information, they simply collect it as a matter of course and then resell it over and over to advertisers and market researchers. Companies such as Google and Facebook are built on these models, to provide a “free” service in exchange for harvesting information about you so you can be bombarded with all manner of targeted materials or put on various “lists.”

Then there is the Opt-in Ripoff where one tacitly gives permission to be further harvested. For example, if you donate to your favorite candidate, that information becomes permission to bombard you from every other politician or person in the candidates address book or with a similar agenda, like a Hydra that can’t be unsubscribed. The Ripoff Society is filled with this sort of pathetic overfishing, hoping to catch a sucker. At least in this case, you might get the right person elected who hopefully desires to reduce the Ripoff Factor with new laws and protections.

Beware of condoning the Ripoff Society or ignoring its continuous escalation. For if left unchecked it can lead to societal decay and violence because it chews away bits of our most precious resource, time, which then becomes an existential threat, even if on a subconscious level. The entropy of the Ripoff Society spawns a form of fractional enslavement and is counter to our deep-seated survival instincts. As the same things become more expensive relative to our incomes (Cost of Living), they impinge on our time resource which necessarily leads to a survival fight. We’ve seen dystopian fictional depictions such as Mad Max when the Ripoff Society has morphed into the Plunder Society where essentially everybody becomes a pirate, none for all and all for none. Rising crime rates will always correspond to a higher Ripoff Factor within the society and the Ripoff Factor will tend to be higher in areas of dense population where social entropy is increased and greater license is given to incrementally increase the Ripoff Factor (and the crime rates).

Of course, this will all turn out to be an ignorant phase of a society that has lost its compassion, empathy, purpose and meaning other than to blindly consume and extract time from others for no good reason. Later, in a Post-monetary Society the Ripoff Factor approaches zero and the Ripoff Society becomes a relic of a primitive past to be looked upon in wonder and derision.

Before delving into the more sinister aspects of the Ripoff Society, it’s worth taking a moment to imagine a world where the tables were turned and instead of a taker’s mindset, we were all conditioned to a giver’s mindset. In this more generous and kinder world each savings or new efficiency would be welcomed as an opportunity to pass along to the next person, to make the other less burdened, to make them slightly happier and so relieve some small degree of our own self-loathing by doing the right thing. This pay it forward attitude would eventually permeate society to the great benefit of all and it should remain a noble goal for a more enlightened time when we compete to give more rather than take more.

The Darker Side of the Ripoff Society

Make no mistake, the Ripoff Society can gravely harm or kill you or someone you love, or in its extreme, the whole of humanity can be harmed. Once the profit motive is allowed to guide actions above all other considerations, the necessary results are endangerment, leading to entropy and harm. No greater example of this can be found than the long tentacles of the petroleum industry that have grown into each corner of society as the fuel we conveniently burn all day, every day, and the plastics and chemicals we abuse the Earth with (and ourselves consuming micro plastics and other toxins). However, in this case, instead of a higher charge, we are often offered a lower price for the product itself but at the monumental expense of future generations left to deal with the consequences. So the actual ripoff is concealed as savings. In a certain way, we can’t blame these organizations because they are operating in a society that gives them tacit permission, each employee and executive themselves lifelong victims of the Ripoff Society and nurtured by it. But not all get a pass as when a more sociopathic blindness takes control and willfully conceals harm or worse, markets harm as benefit.

Many deadly and harmful examples can be listed including, but by no means limited to:
— Cigarette and vape manufacturers and marketers
— Opiate manufactures and other pharma abuses
— Gaming addiction peddlers
— Automated spam, ransomware and other digital ripoffs

When companies achieve a monopolistic grip on a market, they can amplify the effects of the Ripoff Society by putting the micro-theft power in the hands of a few, affecting the many. Other related forms take place when multiple players collude on pricing such as is often seen with airline ticket pricing as well as generic drug pricing which is famous for back channel collusion. In these cases, there is a planned, immoral policy that is guiding the ripoff in a cold, Machiavellian manner.

Many such micro and macro ripoffs are nominal and ordinary extensions of the broader Ripoff Society, but every bit as many are premeditated and by design. For example, the concept of Planned Obsolescence, an artificial means to perpetuate consumption, first introduced in the automotive industry, whereby a product is engineered to become obsolete after a proscribed period, forcing the consumer to buy another, is neatly packaged theft. This grotesque practice has permeated business and has become ever more clever and diabolical in the age of high tech where sometimes even the exact date of malfunction of a product can be controlled or in some cases remotely triggered via network connections (usually after the warranty expires). Such engineering requires great foresight and prowess to pull off and those that practice it have contributed to our burgeoning garbage problems and have stolen many lifetimes of human energy from consumers who must work hard to pay for the new thing they otherwise would not have needed.

Speaking of smart people ripping you off, you may indeed be both the beneficiary and the victim of a pharmacological wonder drug that does indeed help you but the developer of said drug makes sure your payment becomes an annuity. Instead of a permanent vaccine, a yearly shot is needed. Instead of a cure, a maintenance drug is needed. Because the science is so advanced and done under such secrecy, you might never know. The side effects of such drugs may even require other drugs to mitigate that the said developer just happens to make. I can’t offer concrete proof other than flu vaccines which are annually given yet word has leaked that a one-time method for life-long immunity is possible and known how to do. Naturally, the charges will increase over time, due to the First Principle.

Also, there are practices that literally harvest nickels, dimes (and more) from the public at such a volume as to produce billions of dollars in profit such as the use of “key word” based advertising in search engines. Countless stories exist where the effectiveness of such advertising almost never is profitable by the user of the service but remains a major cash cow for the owner of the search engine who uses algorithms to tune in and maximize said profit based on the popularity of the key word, creating a completely uneven playing field for smaller concerns with limited advertising budgets that are quickly dried up with no results to show.

Perhaps even more insidious is the harvesting of personal data which is then repackaged and sold in an extremely profitable way that is never paid back to the original owners of that data as any sort of tangible dividend other than one may use “the service” for “free” and agree to be exposed to a barrage of targeted ads wherever one goes, even outside of their domain (because your information has been passed along already). This then perpetuates the system of trying to extract even more from consumers who theoretically, in certain numbers, respond to some advertising that fits their interests but not necessarily their needs. Some refer to this as false needs engineering.

We have become so good at ripping each other off that many of us have automated the process with various forms of spambots, viruses, auto-responders, unsubscribes that instead confirm your email address for targeting. Yes, you can be ripped off by a soulless bit of computer code these days, perpetrated by an unethical coder out there in the world, stealing your time and using resources up.

It’s not clear how those that concoct such things in the boardrooms of business can justify such blatant harm to the public but it is clearly a manifestation of unmitigated greed. While the short-term benefits can be put into a spreadsheet and calculated as a bottom line, the long-term effects are devastating and eventually will fall upon the practitioners or their children to deal with the consequences, very possibly as legal actions that could more than erase any temporary gains they imagined themselves to be getting at the expense of others.

Taken altogether, the Ripoff Society inevitably suffers from Ripflation where the cumulative nickel and diming becomes manifest as higher prices for everything, specifically, the time-cost of living — all because of thousands and thousands of tiny and not so tiny thefts being passed down the line and up the chain of production and distribution.

Once you become attuned to it, you will notice the Ripoff Society manifesting itself nearly everywhere you look in almost every transaction, bill, fee, purchase and otherwise. By taking trips to rural areas or less developed countries, you can temporarily step back in time and the Ripoff Factor will be reduced but even these quiet corners of the world eventually succumb to the viral urban tendency to make more money for delivering less at the expense of anybody and everybody.

“Little Joe never once gave it away. Everybody had to pay and pay.” ~ Lou Reed

This is based on a brief excerpt from my book: Wealth and the End of Money