I’m just a regular person making about $70K a year in a big city, and I’ve recently felt incredibly powerless dealing with private companies. For instance, my landlord’s auto-pay system had a glitch that excluded my pet rent and water bill. I ended up with over $1,000 in late fees. Despite hours on the phone, it turns out their system doesn’t really do auto-pay and requires a fixed amount instead of covering the full rent. It feels like a scam, and my options are to pay the fees or potentially spend a fortune on legal action.
Another frustrating experience was trying to cancel my pest control service. I had to endure a 40-minute call followed by 35 minutes of arguing, just to finally cancel. There’s no online cancellation option, and the process felt like a timeshare sales pitch.
Why do ordinary people seem so unprotected against these shady practices, and how can we change this? How does one person even start to address these issues?
I’d argue it’s because citizens have no voice. The media has there corporate narrative, but the public interest has very few organizations in advocacy of it.
Support local journalism (financially), work to break any media control on the narrative.
The first thing people could start doing is stop providing free labor to the media. It’s all over Lemmy.
Don’t link to a corporate news outlet. Link to an .edu or PBS or NPR or a quality international publicly funded news organization. Or better yet build your own narrative, your own opinions. Discuss your opinions respectfully on [email protected] . Build momentum and take away the corporate medias control.
Without a public voice advocating for the people, it will be very hard to change any legislation in the peoples favor.