Many who live today look with dread on the massive surveillance machine and debt slavery racket that seems forever expanding. Occasionally, though, I see signs of hope that these massive social systems—based as they are on central planning concepts—shall fail.

Today I spoke with a bookkeeper at a supermarket chain that has changed out the brand of coin-trading machines for the very centralist corporate thinking reason that the new contractor puts more information in the hands of the retailer in the form of scanned cash voucher receipts, as opposed to the old style coin receipt that I used to have to sign and physically forward for redemption.

There is just one small glitch: the receipt printer uses the very same paper as the registers, with the result that up to 30% of vouchers are discarded as trash by the overworked and under-motivated staff.

And there is no one that can be contacted about this at corporate because all information based transaction concerns are now routed through a help desk in India, whose switch board operators speak a dialect of English as alien to American English as possible. Only one employee has the patience to spend the half hour necessary waiting on hold, to spend the 1 hour necessary to get a sentence translated, to get closer to a technical solution. So, vouchers go uncashed, registers with programming issues remain idle, with the retailers of this and other chains beginning to show systemic cracks that might pop up in the machine manned by our Masters’ Loyal Slaves.

When can hope.