Do you know why people vote for their jailers? People say they want freedom, but they pay for comfort. When safety and convenience are offered at a discount, comfort beats ideals nearly every time. 1) Freedom is abstract; comfort and safety are immediate. - "Freedom" is distant, probabilistic, and hard to visualize. - "Comfort" is: rent paid, card works, no one yelling at you, fast apps. Most people rationally prioritize a predictable floor over abstract autonomy. 2) The ballot is pre-filtered to "which jailer", not "no jail". Anyone who threatens the underlying control stack (surveillance, compliance rails, financial chokepoints) is filtered out, neutered, or turned into a cautionary tale. So the real question on offer is: - "Which manager of the same basic machinery do you want?" People vote for their jailers because "no jailer" is not on the menu in any scalable, respectable form. 3) Fear of chaos makes the jailer look like a protector - People are more afraid of unregulated downside (crime, riots, bank failures, pandemics, unemployment, social ostracism) than of slow-creeping control. - The jailer markets themselves as the only thing standing between voters and chaos. So voters will accept more surveillance, more emergency powers, more centralized rails, if these are framed as the price for stability and normalcy. 4) "Free" perks as on-ramps to controllable rails "Free" is almost never free. It's subsidized onboarding: - Cashback, reward points, and "0 fee" wallets → get you onto rails where every transaction is logged and gateable (shout-out Square). - Faster payments, instant settlement → lock you into specific intermediaries and standards. - One-tap logins and unified IDs → collapse your identities into a single choke-point. The perk is temporary sugar. The habit and dependence are permanent. After a year: - The incentive shrinks or disappears. - Your life is now wired through the same narrow pipes the jailer can squeeze. 5) How people become defenders of their own cage Once someone's income, social life, and records live on these rails: - Exiting feels like self-harm: "I'll lose my history, my ratings, my contacts, my access". - Admitting the trade was bad means admitting "I helped build my own trap". So they resolve the dissonance by: - Insisting the controls are "necessary", "reasonable", "for everyone's safety". - Voting for whoever promises to protect and extend the rails they now depend on. 6) Treat "free" as an entry drug, not a gift Whenever something is "free", "frictionless", or "automatic", assume it's an acquisition funnel. Before accepting, explicitly list: - Who runs this rail? (state, bank, platform, ID provider) - Who can throttle, freeze, or revoke it? (regulator, compliance, risk team, opaque algorithm) - Who sees the logs, and for how long? - What happens if I'm labeled risky / non-compliant / undesirable? - Can I function without this rail once I'm used to it? If you can't name a credible exit path, you're not taking a perk. You're voting for your jailer with your future dependence.