Like most companies, REZQ don’t miss an opportunity to monetise their employees’ behaviour. On top of essentially forcing their Front Line Teams to live aboard their ships (and thus allowing REZQ to mop up the money from all of the employees’ living costs), there are a number of ingenious ways that employers like REZQ hide triggers and tripwires in their systems to compel their staff to give them money for things they never asked for. Regulatory mechanisms in this galaxy are almost non-existent generally, but within a closed system fully controlled by an employer–such as a private starship–the opportunities for exploitation are so manifold that employees can quickly end up tied into so many tiny subscriptions that their pay is often a net loss.

Of course, the illusion of a free market full of choice is crucial for maintaining the discourses that prop up the hard-libertarian fantasy that forms the basis of this society: it’s important for anyone to be able to say “you had a choice, you chose to use that service, you made a bad choice, so it’s your fault that you have no money”.   And the bureacracy of cancelling any one of these services, if it indeed is a service that can be lived without, is so deeply and deliberately arcane and aggressive that it would take more time than most people have in their lives to actually succeed in opting out.