Sirs, Madams and corporate lackeys,
I have just discovered that The Economist has been recurrent billing me for some time, possibly a few years, without my consent.
I used to trust you guys as The International Leading Voice of things my parents once called maturity, reason and sophisticated intellectual discourse. It is therefore with no small sadness that I must now add your publication to the infinite list of our current era's rip off merchants, advantage takers, information-age jackboots, screed promulgators and high minded street scammers.
I have NEVER successfully received a single issue from the digital subscription which I now believe was a deliberately misleading prototype. I am, further, not interested in negotiating any replacement content. I can see your cover art for free at the grocery store anyway. And that is so much more intellectual curiosity than most of my fellow Americans are capable of these days that it will have to suffice for both of our crossing paths of concern.
Yes, I did just use the word "And" to start a sentence. This use, like employing the word "couple" without the word "of" after it, is apparently accepted now by whatever editors still survive in their hidden places. Indeed, my writing transgressions are many. Maybe if I had actually received your subscribed content, in any format, I would have been able to personally increase by 8 or 9 percent the number of Americans who can write at the third form level. Maybe together we could have staunched the bloodflowing doom as America's new media miscreants do to political writing what Disney, The Walt Company (NYSE: DIS) has done to Rock Music. Dreams die hard, anon.
In any case, I will leave it entirely up to you as to how much of my stolen money you will return. I will trust further that the pickpocketing of my digital personhood will cease abruptly or soon enough thereafter. This kind of thing is maddening and I will accept no personal blame, other than trusting you, for how it has arisen. I do not disclaim, if your technology-rationalized thievery continues, future suits of compensation for my lost faith in humanity's greying rainbow. I understand that my voice screams unheard in the staccato wilderness of failed Internet ideas. Still I must proclaim: These gridwalling webs of intentionally hellish customer service, which have become a business-embraced global conformity, are equal to the deepest swimming pools of asphalt fire that any of your own tormented long-form poets have ever since forgotten. You then are also, as the man once said, part of that bright shining lie.
I am a writer, humble, irascible and only read by about 14 or maybe 25 people for any given essay. I have as many as 47 Twitter (Privately held) followers including many powerful vitamin marketers and United States congresspersons, (because either of them will "follow" anyone down into that deepening dry well of linguistic outrage). I am a grown man, so I don't use Facebook (NASDAQ: FB), but I can and will if it becomes necessary. I am on two small boards and I travel the world on my own boots as often as possible in constant search for knowledge, the smile of personal experience, and any single pounded heartbeat of humanity's better lost soul. I am an American and yet I still seek footprints in the mud, so to speak, to track the forward march of our epochal slog towards a moral destiny of greater worth.
The point being that I have no effective batter bar to ram against your corporate transoms. I don't "know people" (except maybe those kids at "Anonymous", come to think of it, who also follow me on Twitter, and off it, as they do all of us). I don't mean to threaten you even if I did have some useful leverage against the devastating trend and corporate tyranny wrought by this kind of petty cash lifting. It is not my way.
I only press the matter because I do have a genuinely brilliant kid in college. She studies overseas, obviously, because by "brilliant" I do not mean "just another perfectly schooled wealthy American kid", I mean; "This One is For The Ages Fucking Brilliant", and even The Economist's senior editors can not fully process what it costs a man to have that kind of burden in the nest. Writing the truth, as you well know, has never been less profitable. Every pfennig counts, in other words, and it is for a moral need.
(I will trust you further, even as my despised rival, not to tell my other, equally loved child, currently in and out of community college, that I have so used my own progeny in a desperate grasping lunge for pathos in this matter. I do become impulsive when bureaucratically frustrated. Besides, not for nothing, but you people are supposed to be the last refuge of philosophic sophistication or something ...)
The truth is that all I can bring to this battle is my honor, my impugned dignity and a few midnight sparks of the kind of socially awkward crackpot bloggery that probably makes you high minded British bastards cringe and wet your tuxedoed knickers. Still, think of recent events in Egypt as to the internet activism potential of a single voice. A Vox On Your House, so to speak, is my only sword of honor.
Maybe think of what we trash-witted bloggers just did to the Entire Republican Party with a little free internet and a few barrels of awful Starbucks (Nasdaq: SBUX) coffee. Think about what (the first) Martin Luther did with a bent nail and three ounces of cheap German ink...
And then, please, be dears and in the name of HRH the non gender specific Regent of your own Empire, send me my money back and cancel this failed G*% D@^^ subscription you limey, silk draped, intellect obsessed Gin tinklers!
Dollars preferred but Euros, or even a small box of high proof gold coinage will satisfy the wounds you have laid into my public and private heart. (And maybe the odd dram of long oaked Irish, just to prove your heart is really in it now lads.)
You have my relevant information. I have no subscription numbers or any of that digital pocket lint to further defend myself with. I will trust you to sort it out. After all, if The Economist can't untangle the electronic weftery of their own corporate data mills, what organization can? And where exactly does that really leave any of us?
With some vaguely warm yet fleeting illumination from corporatized civility's dying ember, across the waters and with a fractional olive branched hint of potential, though as yet un-earned, respect, I sign off.
As Regards.
(My Real Name)
I receive checks, piecemeal bullion, letters of marque or outrage and, obviously, really old whiskey shipped to:
(My Actual Address)
Sent from my really frustratingly de-humanizing iPad in America