I had just seen in the afternoon that the Ministry of Railways said they would not, and in fact had no authority to, prohibit browser ticket-grabbing plugins, and I felt somewhat relieved. I never expected them to go find the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to ban them instead. I can only sigh.
The reason for banning ticket-grabbing plugins sounds very high-minded: the plugins are indeed effective, but they are unfair to other passengers.
Is that so? Indeed it is. A ticket is released and within a few dozen seconds it has been snatched up by ticket-grabbing software—what are the other passengers supposed to do?
But the key issue is not fairness or unfairness, but what kind of fairness. If train tickets are always in a state of supply-demand imbalance, and in the end there will always be some people who cannot buy tickets, or cannot buy the tickets they want, then in terms of the result it is bound to be unfair. Rather than saying that we pursue a fair outcome, it would be better to say that we pursue the final unfair outcome by means that are as fair as possible. Fairness is always relative, not an absolute standard that can issue a one-vote veto.
When denouncing ticket-grabbing plugins, even some neutral netizens bring up migrant workers who are weak in internet technology—“You people know how to tinker with these plugins, but what about the migrant workers?” Yes, what about the migrant workers? That is indeed a question, but it is not a question that has only just been raised now.
Originally, migrant workers’ internet skills and internet access conditions were weak; this did not appear only after geeks developed ticket-grabbing plugins. The problem should have been raised as soon as the Ministry of Railways launched that damned 12306 website and put online ticketing in the top position.
Migrant workers are smart. Although they lack internet access, they do not lack the ability to communicate with others. They can organize a group and ask someone to help them. Just by paying a few yuan in labor fees, they would not need to buy a computer, would not need any training, and could make up for their technical shortcomings and buy tickets. Isn’t that great? But no, that road is blocked. Good Samaritans who helped buy train tickets were suspected of ticket scalping, detained, and heavily fined—who would still dare to help?
Migrant workers are not very good at using computers, and most of them do not even have personal computers. But mobile phones are widely used, aren’t they? If there were a ticket-buying app for phones, or at least if the website were made more compatible with mobile phones, then migrant workers could even buy tickets during breaks while on construction sites. Isn’t that great? But this road is also blocked. 12306 claims that it will develop a mobile version, but nothing has happened for ages. Yet if someone else wants to develop even a phone app that merely checks tickets, the Ministry of Railways still has to step in and restrict it.
Even if migrant workers can use computers, they rarely have online banking activated. So if train tickets could allow more payment methods, ideally with home delivery and cash on delivery, wouldn’t that make it easier for migrant workers to buy tickets? But this road still does not work. 12306 only allows a few online banking services, and third-party payment methods like Alipay are not allowed, let alone home delivery and the like. If you won’t do it, can’t other e-commerce platforms do it for you? They would not even charge more—they’d only charge a delivery fee. They could spend the labor to help migrant workers grab tickets and also deliver tickets to their homes while enabling various payment methods. Wouldn’t that be great? But of course, this road is still blocked; apart from 12306, no one else may sell them.
There is no help for it. Migrant workers cannot ask good Samaritans to buy on their behalf, cannot buy by phone, cannot ask online merchants to buy on their behalf… They can only obediently learn computers themselves and go online in person to refresh for tickets. But migrant workers are nowhere near us college students, who can sit in front of a computer all day and refresh whenever there is nothing to do, and whose internet access is all monthly flat-rate. They work very hard, and if they want to go online they may have to pay by the hour. How could they possibly be as capable of burning time as we are? So then, if a good Samaritan voluntarily designed a plugin that greatly shortened the time and effort required to refresh for tickets, and automated submission also saved migrant workers the trouble of learning to adapt to that inefficient 12306 website, wouldn’t that be great? Needless to say, this road still does not work.
We can see that originally there could have been many more convenient ways to buy tickets, but not a single one of those ways was not banned. And whenever each path is banned, “fairness” can be used as an excuse: after all, each new path only makes life easier for the people who use that path, so then you can ask: what about the others? Thus the solution is to restrict additional channels as much as possible and only open the very few channels under monopolistic control, so that everyone is leveled out. Of course, people may also accuse these monopolistic channels of being unfair, but the monopolist says: this is the only way; otherwise, which method would you say is more fair?
In fact, there is no one “method” that would be more fair. But if, from the very beginning, we had opened up all kinds of channels, and from the very beginning had opened our arms to civil organizations and the wisdom of ordinary people, then when countless channels bloom like a hundred flowers, a more fair environment would certainly take shape.
The monopoly of power can only sustain fairness on the surface. Monopolists like “fairness” because fairness is the excuse they use to maintain power. But in substance, unfairness has not been eliminated; instead, it has become an institutionalized kind of rationality.
And every step of opening up will, on the surface, seem to bring a kind of unfairness. But in the long run, a diverse environment of competition and mutual aid will ultimately be fairer than a one-man dictatorship of monopoly. This is the paradox of fairness—to maintain monopoly in the name of fairness, and to promote fairness by breaking fairness.
So I have always been advocating: talk about freedom, and don’t talk about equality. If we change our line of thought a little, and stop getting entangled in questions such as whether migrant workers buying tickets is fair enough, and instead care about whether migrant workers buying tickets is free enough, the situation may well be different.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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