The hoops we jump through

Rules and regulations are an integral part of social life. They lay the foundation of the relationship among individuals and groups of them, and define an enduring set of desired and undesired behaviors that should help minimizing the conflicts between members of the society. These rules curtail our primeval limitless freedom for the sake of neighborly coexistence either forbidding us to do something that we otherwise might have feel inclined to do (negative precepts) or requiring us to do something that we would prefer not to do (positive precepts). 

These regulations, because their are influenced very strongly by the values in a society, are not universally valid: each culture defines its own and it is not infrequent that a subgroup will request from its members the compliance with stronger sets of rules than usually required outside of the group. For instance, as a general rule in Western societies it is forbidden to kill another person unless you have a strong reason to do so, but there is no regulation about what you should do with your Sundays. However, if you are a Christian in a Western society, besides not killing your neighbor you are expected to show up for the religious services on Sunday (among other things). In other words, the membership to a group requires additional compliance. Remarkably, it only works in one direction: belonging to a sub-group cannot allow you to do things that are forbidden in the society at large, or exempt you from your obligations.

Photo: Mike Souza

It might seem trivial that, when faced with a situation where a precept is of application, there are only two options: if the rule seems unjust, overreaching or illegitimate, one might choose not to follow it and face the consequences if they get caught, or one might believe in the justice of the rule and follow it. However, there is a third possible attitude: the reluctant compliance to avoid punishment. Although the result is the same (you follow the rules) there is a great philosophical difference because you never recognize the justice of the rule and therefore are entitled to criticize it, contest it or even to ignore it whatsoever if the risk of punishment drops to essentially zero.

The legal ability to contest the laws and have them reviewed or abolished is one of the key elements of any democracy: because they are meant to serve the society, which is to all effects a living organism, they should be kept in line with the changes of sensibility that happen in the society. The government, who is in charge of writing and upholding the laws, shall have its eyes and ears open to perceive these changes in the form of legislative procedures for the citizens to request a change in a law. And the same applies to any group with an aspiration of democracy.

The problem arises with private groups and organizations where the rules are not open to debate. When you sign up for a membership in a gym, you explicitly accept to submit yourself to the rules and regulations that the gym dictates, very often without having read the fifteen pages of fine print where they are enumerated. We sign without reading under the assumption that someone has checked the rules and found them not only acceptable but also compliant with the kind of rules that gyms are allowed to establish (gym owners also have their own set of rules to follow). We also hide behind the fact that many other users have also signed, so they cannot be that bad. And if later on we find one rule that is unacceptable we are always welcome to cancel our membership, even if that means following their rules one last time in the form of their cancellation policy.

However the situation is much less clear when the change in the rules comes from the group "government": the owner of the gym, the bishop of your faith, the board of directors in Facebook. Pushed by their own interests or by updated regulations in the wider society, groups and companies are frequently forced to update their rules, commonly knows as Terms of Service (TOS) or Terms and Conditions (T&C), potentially adding prohibitions or requirements that were not there when you signed up. And while essentially all companies these days are legally required to notify and publicize their changes, most of us are just as reluctant to read the updates as we were to read the TOS when they signed up in the first place. When this happens with your gym, you might be able to find a balance between how disagreeable the new regulations are and the additional effort (and cost) required to join a different gym. But that is not always a possibility.

In the case of de facto monopolies, the choice is much harder. If you are unhappy with the new TOS in Facebook, Instagram or Twitter the chances are that there is not going to be another Facebook that you can change to. Furthermore, if all your friends are family are using Facebook and the updated TOS do not trouble them as much you would not only be facing a change of platform (which is already hard enough) but you would also be giving up on all the friends that you have there and all the information (photos, posts, etc.) that you put in there. As a result of these difficulties, in most cases we have no choice but to jump, once more, through the hoops that the company puts before us for the benefit of continuing to use their services.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Facebook must have updated either their rules for the definition of spam or the algorithms intended to enforce those rules. As a result of that, several of my posts on Facebook that pointed to articles in this blog were marked as "spam" and were removed from the public view. There is theoretically a system in place to protest this decision and have it overturned but, as is the case with the real government, this process can take a long time, particularly during the summer season. Looking for a solution to this problem, I found that paying for a custom domain should normally solve the problem, because Facebook has probably blacklisted every address ending in ".blogspot.com", but certainly not "your.domain.com". I debated with myself for a couple of days but in the end I reached the conclusion that one dollar per month was not such a bad deal for the peace of mind that it would provide, so I decided to jump through the hoop once more and singed up for www.parttimedoctorand.com, where you should normally be reading these lines. Fortunately the transition was very smooth once I told the system the new domain, and the old links still work!

I started mentioning the concept of reluctant compliance and this is nothing but another case. It is obvious that I am not a spammer, considering the amount of time I devote each day to putting these lines together, so any human operator would have readily accepted my complaint and removed the blog from the black list, but the cost of non-compliance was just too high. Please feel free to comment on your cases of reluctant compliance below. Have a nice evening!