Little by little over the last five years, business, banking and government have been closing down the avenues available to the ordinary Joes and Janes. This isn’t a conspiracy: such would require concerted action by this crew, and that’s never going to happen. Rather, it’s the natural, unconsciously controlling way of the gonks obsessed with money and power.

I’ve posted endlessly in the past about the utterly risible levels of customer service on the net. There’s no point returning to this now, because a whole generation has achieved maturity believing that this sort of insulting treatment is what they should expect. Also, as all the main ISPs and other service providers have been recruited by all the governments to watch and listen to us 24/7, nothing will ever happen to change things.

During the last two weeks, I’ve written several posts about the Google/Verizon scam on multi-priced internet access, and the effective end of neutnet as an idea. Not only will this exacerbate the customer-care problem still further, it is a virtually foolproof way to hand power lock, stock and barrel to the multinational apps and news supply sectors – as well as ensuring the medium term death of effective mama-and-papa blogging. Finally, the dangers of controlling government insisting on a premium service only for them have been greatly enhanced.

Going forward, a lot of us will be – and already are – handling our liquid cash more carefully while looking for ways to get some kind of rate-based return on any spare cash. We need to do this because most of our pensions – with the exception of those for 600,000 UK civil servants – have been screwed by variously applied tax raids, annual caps, banking incompetence, corporate underfunding, hidden charges and fund management of a deeply ordinary nature.

The banks are already on the case of ensuring the average person’s inability to earn a return, by adding new charges and reduced services while clinging on to the government-imposed zero rates that were never necessary in the first place. This is especially true in the US, where within hours of the new regulatory authority coming into being, cash-dispenser, current account and overdraft charges were increased by all the majors.

Without technology (and virtual statements which, apparently, 5 out of 6 of us never read) all this would have involved greater cost and a far higher level of complaints.

So as government introduces stealth charges for every service (Council Tax charges for providing parking in your own Council area – on top of the charge when you get there – is the latest scam, I read) banks continue to rip us off and provide no investment income, and the world spirals into a rainbow of falling stock markets, how are we – the retired, the jobless, the disabled and the swindled – supposed to find new ways to make ends meet?

One way for the more interested minority has always been to invest in stocks, commodities, metals, new companies and other elements of extra-banking investment. Now this too is being vary rapidly closed off by ETFs (Electronically Traded Funds) and the arrival of mega-fast mass trades that only the Hedge Funds and other major institutions can handle or afford.

The three obvious consequences will be:

1. The small investor not hooked up to the hardware will be at a bigger and bigger disadvantage.
2. The manipulative directionalising of a sector will become ten times easier, and impossible to trace.
3. The stock markets will become further and further removed from the right situation – where bad stocks are seen to fail – to the wrong situation – where a certain amount of excrement can be mixed with the putty.

I’ve done a lot of preparatory investigation of this practice in the UK, and some on the US West Coast. It is obviously already being massively abused, and awaits only a whistleblower to grab the media’s attention. With help from leakers in this regard, I could at last move from being Brownonpillsblogger to something more distinguished; so feel free to furnish me with any information and/or leads that you can.

As a trend, however, the electrification of the stock trading system is just another dimension of a global trend right now: for ordinary investors, bank customers, web users etc to become third-class customers increasingly remote from the actions of a greedy elite.

While things look black – and quite clearly, at least 9 in 10 couldn’t care a stuff so long as they can watch X-Factor – there is yet still hope. A severe collapse of both the bourse and banking systems is now imminent, and there seems to me evidence that in a number of EU countries the political class will struggle to maintain order – or even survive.

One last time and then I’m giving up on it: the internet represents both the best weapon of opposition we have – and an unbeatable tool for irreversible social control in the wrong hands. We blow this opportunity at our peril.