Brave New World of Capitalism

I’m in the San Francisco airport – it’s about three hours before my flight leaves, and I’m already at the gate. I overestimated how much traffic there would be at the security checkpoint and gave myself a lot of extra time. But that’s alright. Much better than worrying.

So, I figured I would hop online (they advertise free wifi here) and give you an update about some things. I selected the ‚SF Airport’ wifi option and it said „connecting“ – and do you know what ? In order to get your free wifi (45 minutes of it), you have to watch an ad on the airport’s website. If you skip it, you can’t connect to the internet. Not only that, but I found the ad so astounding and maddening that I wanted to come to this word document and write about it immediate, but as soon as my word document was in front of the internet window where the ad was playing, the ad paused itself! I had to get out of the word window and go „watch“ it (I really played solitaire on my phone) in order to get internet access... Capitalism is freaking scary.

We talked about it a bit in my women’s studies class the other day (which is going on right now! Huh... weird! I’m skipping, obviously. They cancel classes starting at 2:30 on this Wednesday, but so many students skip the morning classes anyway an the professors have to do everything over again on the Monday after this break that I really don’t think it’s worth it to have class at all) – about how we confuse „choice“ with „freedom“ – we think, in a capitalist society, that we are free because we have the freedom to chose between things – ways we live, what peanut butter we buy, etc. But what we don’t see is that the system dictates the things we choose between in the first place.

But that wasn’t what I was going to talk to you about at all! I was going to tell you that I got my grade for my algebra exam – as I expected, not fantastic, but not half bad either. And actually, in comparison to the rest of the class, pretty damn good.

I think I’ll explore in the airport a bit and maybe find some lunch, then wander back here in time for boarding.