The System Is Working as Intended

 Many years ago, I read an article about a man who needed to install iTunes on his computer for some reason. I don't remember exactly why, and I can't find the article again. But for some reason, even though he didn't want to use the programme, he needed it on his computer.

He was disturbed to find that iTunes had taken all of the music in his library, most of which was in a lossless format, and much of which was unique, original, or hard to find, and replaced it with lossy, low-fidelity mp3 versions.

When he called Apple support, it took him a while to find someone who was able to address his concerns at all, but when he did, she simply kept repeating the phrase, 'The system is working as intended.'

In other words, it was a feature, not a bug. The software was designed to do this. I don't pretend to understand why. But the way iTunes was written, it was meant to upload all the original files to the server, delete the originals from the customer's hard drive, and replace them with downgraded mp3s.

Fortunately, the man in the article had backups of his files elsewhere. But the fact remains that Apple had intentionally designed a system that worked according to their own best interests, and not the interests of the user.

The system is working as intended.

That phrase has stuck with me ever since I read that article. It represents the callous lack of concern that those in power (in this case, Apple) have towards those on whom that power is founded (the users). The software was designed to maximize the benefit for the designers, at the expense of the users.

I have had many occasions to think about that phrase recently. The pandemic has shown us what a few knew and some suspected, but pretended not to know. 

The system is working as intended.

I once asked my father (who is knowledgeable about such topics) how capitalism seems to violate the law of conservation of mass (I know those are two unrelated topics, but the general principals seem like they should still be applicable). I had just seen a TV show which showed the amount of money in a capitalist system increasing. More money was just magically appearing, and I didn't understand where this additional currency was coming from.

My father explained it to me thusly: 'The pie gets bigger.' He said that money was not a representation of a specific amount of value, but an amount of work. The more work people do, the more money comes into being. An oversimplification, but that's the general idea.

But what really stood out to me (and I didn't get a chance to ask him on that occasion, and there have been no further opportunities since then) was the nagging question: if money represents work, why is it that the people who are doing the least work are the ones getting the most money?

The CEO, the stockholders, the owners of the biggest businesses, do none of the work. They sit behind a desk all day, maybe making decisions, but not putting in the work to actually take customers' orders, prepare meals or other purchased items, serve those orders to the customer, rectify situations in which the customers are upset or there is a problem with the purchase... why are they the ones getting all the money?

The system is working as intended.

I've since learned that that's exactly what capitalism is. One person, or a small group of people, own the assets (the business, the rental property, the intellectual property, etc); that person is the capitalist. All the benefits of those assets are given to the owner, regardless of what work (if any) the owner does. The people who do all the work (the cashiers, the cooks, the waiters, the delivery drivers, the stockers, etc) receive a tiny fraction of the value of the work that they do.

A venti Pink Drink at Starbucks costs $5.25. That is about 72% of the minimum wage. An employee at Starbucks would have to work about 43 and a half minutes to afford a single Pink Drink. Yet it takes that same employee about five minutes (at the most) to make a single Pink Drink. This barista can make at least 15 Pink Drinks in the time it takes them to earn enough to buy a single one. That's almost $80 income for Starbucks. The employee is getting a little less than 7% of the value of the drink that they themselves are making. Most of the rest goes to the CEO, the stockholders, the owners who wouldn't be willing to make a Pink Drink even if they wanted one.

The system is working as intended.

I work as a teacher. In my home state of Oklahoma, the amount of funding for public schools has decreased steadily for several decades now. Yes, we got a pay rise in 2018, after concerted action, but that was a fraction of what we asked for, a fraction of what we deserve, a fraction of what would be a competitive salary in any other profession, but even more to the point, did nothing to address the other demands we made. No extra money was given to fund school buildings, materials like textbooks and computers, support staff like custodians and cafeteria employees, smaller class sizes, better curricula, etc.

Despite public scandals like the mishandling of funds by Epic Charter Schools, support for charter schools and private schools continues to grow in Oklahoma. Not only among legislators, but by the public. We have been completely taken in by the lie that for-profit models are superior to publicly funded institutions. For-profit organizations work exclusively towards that goal: profit. They will universally cut corners, hide flaws, and deliver substandard products in pursuit of the bottom line.

The system is working as intended.

Many people insist that unfettered competition will force businesses to improve their products in order to attract more customers to their brand. However, we have seen time and time again that this is simply false. Companies do not compete; they collude. Just one example is printer manufacturers. It costs less than a dollar to produce a single ink cartridge, yet every company on the market sells these cartridges at around $35. Without exception, companies are charging a 7,400% markup because they can. Any of these companies could easily earn all the customers ever by simply offering cartridges at a price of $5. But none of them do, because they don't want to compete. They are in cahoots with each other, and by lying to us, manage to convince us that they're working in our best interests even though they clearly are not.

The system is working as intended.

This then boils over into politics. There are a lot of distraction issues in the political world; racism, sexism, drugs, immigration, public health, and so on. All of these debates serve one function: to keep the public distracted from what's really going on. From workers being exploited and billionaires raking in the profits, many times more than they could ever hope to spend in multiple lifetimes.

But even more than this, laws that are seemingly contradictory are passed every day. Abortion is a current hot topic, and many conservatives rail against the so-called 'baby killers,' but won't take any of the steps that have proven to actually reduce abortion rates: comprehensive sex education and easy access to birth control. This doesn't seem to make sense.

The system is working as intended.

The real reason those in power want to limit abortion as well as sex education and birth control is because they need a constant flow of new people to exploit. Billionaires can't become billionaires without workers working for pennies a day. They can't maintain their ridiculous levels of unnecessary wealth without hordes of consumers buying their useless junk. So they take away the methods that the lower and middle classes would be able to use to reduce the birth rate, and entire new generations of worker/consumers are created, just waiting to be exploited.

I have friends who frequently talk about people they know who are constantly reproducing for bad reasons. 'They make so many poor life choices,' they joke, as they talk about the young man who's girlfriend tricked him into impregnating her so that she could trap him into a relationship with her. As they talk about the woman who has ten children despite the fact that she is unable to properly raise them, leaving them uneducated, maladjusted, and prone to making the same 'poor life choices' that she herself made, mostly because she doesn't know how (or perhaps doesn't even know that it's possible) to have sex without becoming pregnant. As they talk about the couple who are so incapable of keeping their hands off of each other that they routinely forget to use birth control (or worse, actively choose not to use any, because they're too impatient to get started), and so produce a constant string of children that they don't have the resources to care for.

The system is working as intended.

And then we have tragedies like the most recent in a very long line of school shootings. A young man, who had just shot his grandmother, fled into an elementary school to avoid capture by the police. The police chose not to follow him into the building, and as a result, at least nineteen children and two adults were killed. The usual cycle of outrage, blame, finger-pointing, and ultimately, inaction, is currently underway.

People constantly ask, 'Why do we tolerate a society in which so many children are mercilessly slaughtered?'

The system is working as intended.

Gun sales are just another business. Just another way for billionaires to make more money. The lives of some strangers' offspring is a small price to pay for the millions of dollars that gun manufacturers (and their owners) make from the purchasing of firearms every year.

The reason conservatives fight so staunchly against gun control is because they stand to lose money if such legislation were passed. And sadly, the conservative politicians have managed to convince the lower-class conservatives that gun control is not in their best interests, despite the fact that it most clearly is.

The system is working as intended.

Make no mistake, the people in power (whether that power is financial power, such as CEOs, stockholders, and business owners; political power such as lawmakers, higher-level elected officers, and so on; or social power, such as preachers, self-help gurus, and lifestyle coaches) don't care about the well-being of the lower classes. We are chattel to them. They want us powerless, because that's how they get their power. They want us uneducated, because then we're easier to control. They want us to have no bodily autonomy, because that would rob them of their ability to increase their supply of chattel.

So when you find yourself wondering why the people in power seem to be working so hard to dismantle health care, education, public safety, protection for the lower classes; why they don't seem to care about systemic racism, entrenched sexism, religious, ethnic, ableist, or classist bigotry, just remember what the Apple customer service representative told that poor bewildered fellow on the phone all those years ago:

The system is working as intended.