Though I ignore it as much as possible, I am at times hit in the face (or thorax, or abdomen) by the naked capitalistic greed of the country in which I currently reside. My glorious mobile service provider, AT&T, is going through a cessation stage for what they term as incompatible phones. What is an incompatible phone, you may ask? Well, my Fairphone 3, for one. Any phone that is not either bought blatantly with a Jaundiced Orchestration of Corporate Kibble (furthermore abbreviated to JOCK) or somehow registered as a phone subsumed by AT&T during JOCK processing is phased out. So the limp and brusque of it is that I had to purchase a new phone that corresponds to my JOCK yesterday.
Advantages do exist, of course, including the orifice melting speed of 5G, but one has to augment one’s JOCK to have the ability to tether to one’s phone or create a hotspot. Huh? I’m used to life in Europe. I had a phone. I put a sim card into it. That sim card was tied to some more nominally capitalistic enterprise. I could then do whatever I wanted with said phone, including simple things like tethering and creating a hotspot.
It seems the base JOCK is just that: as little as the service provider can provide and still call it a service. Everything else is extra.
When little (I laughingly dub it little) annoyances like this rear their noggins, I try desperately to hold to positivity. For now, I must remain in the good ol’ USA. Fuck um.
