A friend told us that due to a transfer of ownership of an online bank, he got his credit card blocked and a series of things happened that paralyzed his life.
He was no longer able to check his e-mails because he had activated on his credit card the direct debit for the expansion of his g-mail mailbox space; he could no longer buy on Amazon for business reasons, pay-pal did not work anymore and, of course, he could not withdraw his money from the bank or do the shopping.
This is recalling us another incident that happened in France two years ago. The credit cards got demagnetized and we could no longer refuel. Luckily, we had cash because otherwise we would have been blocked on the Normandy’s coast.
Two examples that show how fragile we are because we have put our lives in the hands of virtual services free of any real contact, above all human one, where it is often impossible to contact someone for clarification on what happened.
That is the reason why many of us were strongly alarmed at Trudeau’s decision to freeze the accounts of Canadian demonstrators. Action brought without trial against people who, until proven otherwise, are innocent. And that, it should be a judge, certainly not a politician, after a fair trial, to decide whether an offence has been committed and what the penalty should be.
Technological automation focused on maximizing profits together with this wave of unlimited authoritarianism that is spreading in the modern world are leading everyone to be totally dependent on uncontrollable mechanisms that can completely block life people for no reason.
Maybe the lockdowns that we have been forced to endure, in which suddenly each of us has been deprived of freedom even to leave the house without having done any wrong, could be not an incidental event but a metaphor of a new era in which we have entered. An era where everything related to the Human being, from material goods to the body itself, is in other people’s hands.
LAURA MALTAGLIATI
(Original article by ANDREA ZOPPOLATO & DUILIO FORTE)
