the state itself relies on private enterprise to carry out its own public functions

It’s not inherently a problem that the gov uses private enterprise. E.g. the courts have bathrooms and those bathrooms have toilet paper. I would find it a silly extreme to draw a hard line and say the gov must produce its own toilet paper, for example, in order to be freely separate from the private sector.

But in some cases indeed the outsourcing is reckless. Such as when the US gov outsourced flight services to Lockheed Martin who was then caught asleep at the wheel (not responding to air traffic safety radio calls).

So I’m okay with private sector toilet paper, but not enthusiastic about the private sector doing tasks that need safety or privacy.

To address these two points:

1. a right to be free from the private sector marketplace; and
2. the right to be offline

Both are impossible to achieve under the capitalist mode of production.

I don’t think so. But perhaps you are thinking of them as absolute rights. None of the rights we have today are absolute rights AFAIK. The two rights above could be protected at least to the extent that they don’t interfere with other rights under capitalism.

Just as capital monopolizes our time in the workplace, it monopolizes our time outside of it. The majority of our interactions inside and outside the workplace, are subjected to “the private market”.

The private market in that context is optional in most of the world as I know it. You don’t have to work for someone else under the umbrella of a private company. If you want, you can work in the public sector directly for the gov, or you can scrap employment entirely and do the off-grid survivalist Henry David Thoreau thing.

If you want to get rid of this, you have to rid yourself of the private capitalist market economy itself.

I don’t think so. I’m not trying to stop Alice from working for Bob. Live and let live. We need not scrap capitalism entirely just to have alternatives. Alternatives can coexist.

Sure, you can log off, you can refuse to have a cell phone, you can refuse all the things which your are subjected to, but you will effectively be barred from participation in society as such. You can’t see the ebooks needed to go to school, you will have difficulty accessing banking services, etc…

When you say being offline bars someone from participation in society, that’s too abstract & overly generalized. If company X demands that I have a mobile phone (e.g. Twitter demands I share my GSM number which they verify via SMS), I can scrap both. It sounds like your complaint is that they are bundled - that I cannot use Twitter without a phone. That’s unfortunate but I would not go as far as to force all capitalist players to support customers who want to opt out of the rest of capitalism. For me it’s good enough¹ that I can reject Twitter and mobile phones both together.

The only problem I’m fixated on is when a public service forces me to gave a mobile phone or Facebook account. Fixing that problem does not require scrapping capitalism entirely. It merely requires a right to be offline and a right to be free from the private sector. If these rights were to exist & I were to invoke those rights in the Danish university, it would not require ending capitalism. It would just require the school to give RSA tokens as a 2FA alternative.

Footnote 1: I’m neglecting the separate problem that elected gov officials are exclusively microblog-reachable on Twitter. But I address that at the end.

Boycotts accomplish almost nothing, and are far harder to organize than many people think.

Some people think a boycott is necessarily organized with some kind of goal or expected impact. That is not at all what I meant. I have hundreds of boycotts going right now just by myself personally. 1-person boycotts. These are not to take down a company. My goal with my unorganized solo boycotts is to simply ensure that I am not part of the problem myself. And to that extent the goals are accomplished. I should have a right to boycott regardless of whether the boycott brings down the company. It is in fact the boycotter who decides what the goal is.

You may think a 1-person boycott is weak. But consider this: I was the only student who boycotted Facebook. All the other students, staff, and the school itself all used Facebook. But because I had my 1-person boycott, everyone in the school was forced to step outside of Facebook if they wanted to reach me. I abandoned the school shortly after entry, but I could have (or should have been able to) stay & argue that the school was denying me a right to public education by imposing Facebook. I missed announcements of official school seminars & events by not being in Facebook. You can fix that problem by making school comms in-house. You need not scrap all of capitalism.

Let’s say you boycott twitter and it goes bankrupt. Twitter2 will just do the same thing under a different name. Unless it becomes a public utility, it will be in private hands and exist to extract profit. The only way out of these problems is out of capitalism.

The only problem with Twitter under the thesis of my OP is that elected public reps are exclusively microblog-reachable on Twitter. And worse, Twitter is exclusive. But that could also be fixed by installing a “freedom from the private sector marketplace” in parallel with free speech (1A in the US), which would then force gov reps into the fedi. We don’t need the impossibly giant leap of making Twitter’s existence impossible; we just need some public/private separation. Schools and gov reps & other people working in the capacity of their public duty should be forced onto gov-operated fedi servers so they are reachable by the public. I wouldn’t give a shit if they still had Twitter accounts for personal use only. Live and let live while serving the /whole/ public.

I appreciate all your references. I’ll have to check them out.