Captives of the free market

We know a lot and much more than we can process. We know so much that we often feel powerless to fight for common sense, justice, truth. We hope and believe that life itself will find a balance between good and bad, and that the truth will emerge eventually. We do know though that common sense, truth and justice depend on a difference between the costs of pursuing them and the benefits of doing so. We salute this idea every day hoping that it is untrue.

But we also know something we do not want to know. We know that the source of everything, good and bad, is our wallet.

The wallet is our strength and our weakness, our tiny sold soul. It is by way of the wallet that capital enters our lives big time. Retailers know all too well that our wallet is a very shy bird, cautious, indecisive, hesitant... But once it opens its door, the chain of voluntary economic slavery is closed. 

Our work becomes the object to be systematized and rationalised by highly productive business systems, and our days are passed according to the protocols of “free” movement of goods, services, people and information, our households are fuelled by widespread energy, public utilities and communication networks... Freedom boils down to a question of how long a chain we are able to finance every month. The freer the market, the more we crave freedom.

Double life of the wallet

There is a genuine strategic war of global dimensions raging in our wallets. Our purchases shape the power positions of market suppliers, and the more dispersed and globalised our purchases, the less influence we have on their business policies. Our small wallet is a source of global capital power as well as its victim.
The moment we open our wallet, our small-scale consumer intimacy and global corporatism collide.

Connections run at lightning speed and through a plethora of intermediaries that capitalise on the financial flow of our money. Inversely, our small wallet lives an extremely monotonous life. It takes a deep breath once a month and then exhales slowly all month long. It is connected to many automatisms, such as standing orders, instalments, subscriptions, contributions, etc.

All these are the so-called essential expenses. “Well-informed” advisers and experts try to convince us of the urgency of certain necessities and of new necessities that we have not even thought of until now.

Digital watchdog 

A more intimate view from the wallet reveals its shy and suspicious nature. While the wallet is hiding in pockets and handbags, it is preyed upon by a multitude of predators better equipped with information and very sophisticated tools to trick the judgement of its owners.

As long as the wallet is in the hands of a sensitive and vulnerable consumer, it is in constant danger. It needs a watchdog of its own, a watchdog that can sniff out well in advance a predator that jeopardizes it.

The dog’s pedigree is the owner's financial ability, its character is shaped by their monthly expenditure, its playground is a digital jungle, its food is the savings it sniffs out. The more attention, care and nurture the owner gives it with data, the better it knows the wallet it is watching and a better friend it makes.  Its hyper-sensitive nose can accurately detect the right opportunities and as well as risks preying on its wallet.If the supply and demand market is a cat and mouse game in which the cat is getting fatter, our watchdog now turns it into a cat and dog game, and the cat can no longer indulge in lounging away.

Once we unleash our digital wallet watchdog, no retailer feels like laughing anymore. Our wallet’s digital nose can sniff out all the clues left behind by the suppliers in a flash and go on the hunt for the best deal. All the well-known marketing tricks we have known so far become superfluous, because our watchdog has no consumer failings.

The watchdog sees it as a game. It is no longer a dilemma of money or life, it boils down to money only, since the owner entrusts their life unconditionally to the watchdog. And it is this trust that is worth much more to the wallet-owner than the savings that their friendship brings him. And so, their best friend ventures out into its digital playground even more cheerily. In the digital relationship between the watchdog and owner, trust regains its price.

Now it is necessary to win the trust of the wallet watchdog. This proves to be a much more demanding task than playing on human emotions and lack of information troubling the owner of the wallet.

It becomes a battle for the trust of this hypersensitive and unconditionally devoted servant, who immediately sniffs out every cunning intention and suspicious manoeuvre of the suppliers venturing into its digital playground.

The point of the digital wallet watchdog is to enable us to exit the constant pressure of rationalised consumption, accounting dullness and banking omniscience. These turn our existence into sums, balance sheets and financial perspectives and confront us again and again with the impossible dilemma of money or life. Now, our digital nose can unerringly follow the money, so we can answer the impossible dilemma without fearing for our lives: “Money, please.” The only thing to remember is to look after our canine friends on a daily basis – to feed them fresh information and take them for regular walks on the World Wide Web.