Dealing with big companies

I almost panic when I need to get in touch with some big corporation. Costumer service calls, for example. You will use your phone to be tortured by an automatic voice telling you that “we value you”. No you don’t value me. You treat me like cattle going down, your costumers are like meat.

The bullshit is so extensive that words scramble in my mind as I try to put my ideas here. Being an entitled “entrepreneur” wannabe, for sure I think “maybe I can solve this shit and be a big corporation myself”. Oh no, what the fuck is wrong with me? With us - if you find yourself reading my ideas in this blog, I am sure we’re alike. So the deal we end up to: think different just to be equal everybody else.

This new idea is simple: to avoid doing business with big corporations. I know it is impossible hard. But for the sake of my mental health. That is something I am trying to pursue.

I took a course on happiness some years ago. On Coursera, I think. The teacher brings all the studies regarding what makes us happier. One fast thing anyone can do: quit social media. Social media as we know today is toxic in so many levels. You literally get healthier if you stop using that. In social media you are only data points for a big corporations pursuing money at any costs.

Even in my business this struggle is destroying my quality of life. Recently one major marketplace changed some rules about how to ship the products sold in their platform, and with that I was forced to stop selling there. I tried to contact them so many times, and all the replies seems to be automatic, robots. When I could see one human wrote back, it was just for a generic apology, “there is nothing we can do for you right now”.

This week the OpenAI organization released the “GPT-3 artificial intelligence model”. So many people were putting this as a breakthrough: “the end of callcenters! Better chatbots!”. With all humanity I have in my heart “fuck these people”.

Of course “artificial intelligence” will replace humans. They are forcing humans to do a horrible job. They put a human being to follow a strict script in a screen, and then they replace the human with a robot. “We made it! Artificial Intelligence”. Fuck these people. But they don’t make the rules, right? They are just “playing the game”. Who needs SkyNet when we have the almighty Capitalism?

Some corporations are impossible to strip off: utilities like water, power, internet connection service. At least their job is so strict that rarely I need to call the “Customer Service”. Internet provider may have some hiccups, and I thank god I still have my 4G! Other corporations are a bit less shit, so we pay a premium (hello, Apple).

Anyway, that’s almost a driving force for what I want to do in my life. Bitcoin looks so promise to me: I can have my own money, without being attached to monstrous big Bank Corporations. But it is really hard to use day to day due to low adoption, and it will be like that for long, or forever.

This rant about anxiety on dealing with big corporations is an open issue for me. If you relate to this, please contact me, via Twitter (hello last barrier to dropping social media entirely) or via email (rafael@hey.com). Hey, an email service created by Basecamp, is a good example on dropping big corps in favor of small business. I hope one day everything in my life is serviced by small business. The one humans take care of, that one humans say “Hello” when you call them.