Personal Blogs

Tacit consent by way of the back door

[ 4 minute read ]

I think if we take all the digital interactions we are nudged into making and put them in a mixing bowl, with the essential idea not to put anything else in, such as emotion, and we bake the mess, we would pull from the oven a policy to collect data on every movement we make. The smell in the kitchen is not one of fondness or care such as a grandmother might make with cinnamon and icing sugar; it is a smell like a disc-cutter makes when cutting steel, or the smell of a slipping clutch on a vehicle passing by with the handbrake still on.

Just the idea of the acrid and pungent aftertaste in my mouth once the bolus is swallowed elicits feelings of absorbing carcinogenics in me. I think, this drive to profile each of us, while projecting a smooth veneer of compatibility with our modern lifestyles, once cracked the inner stuff is of worms and gaping maws of razor-sharp fangs. 

This last weekend I heard an LBC presenter make a brief exclamation of surprise. He noted on air that in October 2027 there will be a 'tax' on, I think he started his piece by saying drinks containers such as plastic bottles and tins or cans of 'pop'. As he padded out his startled piece I started to think he was including all tins and cans since he included glass as one of the things that would be taxed at the source. By 'taxed' I mean a surcharge of either 20p or 20% would be charged on every item that passes through a checkout or is otherwise bought, that is products that are packaged in glass, metal, or plastic. Apparently, this extra cost would be redeemed at specific recycling collection points. The presenter moved on, no doubt because he and his research team were blindsided by this revelation, and they would need to properly research the implications and how it is to be implemented.

I set to turning an imagined future over in my head. How would this impact on my life? I live in a village and so I would need to lug all my glass and empty tins to my local city, How would I be able to collect the returns money? It dawned on me then that it would necessarily go into my bank account and that due to the British public's tacit agreement to being filmed everywhere we go, there would be cameras at every collection point; just like the cameras at the bank ATMs. So, in with my card and the pin (obviously!) and look sweetly at the camera without a face-mask. Facial recognition. It would not matter that I do not carry a GPS tracking device in the form of a phone, my precise location will be known simply because I am not rich enough to avoid being tracked.

I dwelt on the way that the charge would be made. It would necessarily be twenty pence and not 20% of the product price. Everything recycled in this way would otherwise still have a barcode still attached and it would need to be scanned into the recycling machine. Waitrose coffee is more expensive than LIDL coffee and costs more in the south than in the north of England. Surely, reading barcodes and returning 20% of the purchase price is unworkable. The retailer would take the surcharge and then have to submit it to the government so the government can give it back to the recycling shopper, surely. That is expensive to implement on a national scale. It also means that the barcode meta-data held in computers necessarily needs to include information on the packaging. That is expensive for small retailers to have; they would need to maintain a continuous subscription to a bar-code data bank and a live and highly reliable and super-fast internet connection to check every single product during every transaction. Moreover, it must be unbreakable. A faulty internet connection would shut an entire shop or supermarket. Any competent bad actor could paralyse the country's food supply. Those vegetables in the wafer-thin plastic bag cannot possibly be considered to have packaging that can be recycled. Packaging that is definitely NOT bio-degradable. Scales at the recycling point would need to be frequently calibrated. I mean two cabbages have two plastic wrappers and if fifty of these are shoved in a recycling point 'bin' and weighed, the payment might only be for forty eight. That is a 40 pence loss to the customer. If not another thin wedge to add to a reason to riot then an angry driver who will be prone to road-rage.

No, I am certain that someone somewhere had a problem to solve. 'Look team. Not everyone uses the self-checkout in the larger supermarkets and not everyone face-times their family, so we have an incomplete 'picture' of the British population. We can't force them to do those things at present so what can we do?'

       'Make them pay a redeemable surcharge under the auspices that they do not recycle properly. We can film them while we read their bank cards at specific collection points for recycled packaging.'

 The 'tell' will be the absence of alternative packaging. I buy coffee in a glass jar. I would buy loose coffee from a vending machine that dumps it into a container I brought with me. Tinned tomatoes; a bit more tricky. We will never see vending machines dispensing loose produce, such as we used to see loose muesli mix in health food shops. They will inevitably always be banned on Health and Safety grounds. Personally, I would definitely go into a 'store / warehouse' full of vending machines that dispense cornflakes and milk and sugar and stuff. Logistically, it takes too long for each customer to receive their selection; there would be long queues and the 'warehouse stores' would necessarily need to be jointly-owned by the manufacturers that dispense their products (they save on the cost of packaging).

It is a dystopian world I paint; one that with precise positioning of the dispensing spouts, robots would inhabit. If  humans were to be anywhere they would be in their precisely parked cars; shifted by stepper-motors upon arrival in the car-park into slots. Robots would deliver carts of loose produce in bins with scoops chained to the bins. The customer would then transfer their purchases into their own containers and let the car drive them home. This would need to be in a car-park with a roof and probably heated too. Oh, they would need to look into a camera while their bank card is read to get into the car-park before they make their selections. Might we see mobile traders with analogue scales driving steam-powered vehicles in our streets dispensing loose product to householders who hearing their bell flock to their vehicles? 'Stop me to buy some!' The closest you might get to being filmed or noticed is a curious child's eye who doesn't speak our language sitting on the lap of a woman in the dark recesses of the van.

Interestingly, the LBC presenter did not mention cardboard as a packaging that will attract a surcharge. It absorbs water and weight and is of course, biodegradable. Is there not a prevailing presence of cardboard in supermarkets?