this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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Agreed. It's really hard to understate how ineffective "voting with your wallet" can be. The fact is simply that nobody honestly cares. Even if you get 100 people to boycott a company, would 100 out of millions of consumers really make a difference? Of course not.
And of course, you always have cases like this where everybody does it. Same thing goes for TVs - if everyone spies on you, the only real solution is to not have a TV. Yes, I know there are exceptions here and there, but bad practices like these force buyers into making compromises that they shouldn't have to. Capitalism should be predicated on companies offering the best product to earn their income. It should not be about companies having the least bad product and trying every terrible thing that they can get away with.
(Of course, we all know that capitalism is a farce.)
A system with the goal being best or even optimal for all involved would never be called capitalism, even if capitalism didn't exist.
There's definitely an economic impact to a vehicle looking or driving like shit. And I'm sure you'll see some amount of consumer migration higher than 0.01% of the retail base.
But there's also a lot of obfuscation, deception, and outright lying in the automotive sales industry. So its less a question of "Will consumers reject this feature?" and more "Will consumers even be aware of this feature?"
What happens when the retail customers have be commodified? What happens when the product is Surveillance and the real big money clients are state actors and private mega-businesses that benefit from tracking rented vehicles?
As we move closer to a full Service Contract economic model - one in which individuals don't really own anything and have to continuously pay to access even basic features of their home devices - I can see a lot of financial incentives in the system that preclude car dealers from leaving these features out.
Imagine a bank that simply won't finance vehicles that can't be tracked. Or a rental company that won't add vehicles to their fleet without these always-on internet features. Or a car lot that uses continuous tracking to manage its inventory.
Very quickly, the individual consumer becomes a secondary concern relative to these economies of scale.
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