France has officially banned unsolicited telemarketing calls, and one consumer group is calling it a “small revolution.” But let us be honest about what is actually happening here: the French government has simply outsourced harassment to the one place where it cannot be hung up on — your local boulangerie.
For decades, cold callers were the acceptable villain. They interrupted dinner. They mispronounced your name. They wanted you to switch energy providers. You could hang up. You could block them. You could, in France, apparently just ban the entire practice. Problem solved.
Except now there is a vacuum. And nature abhors a vacuum almost as much as the French abhor small talk with strangers.
The real genius of this ban is that it forces citizens back into the one social contract they have been avoiding since the invention of the telephone: face-to-face conversation with people who have opinions about cheese. Lots of opinions. Unsolicited ones.
Consider the implications. Without telemarketing calls, your neighbor will finally have time to corner you at the market and explain, in excruciating detail, why your Camembert selection is objectively wrong. The woman at the post office will now have bandwidth to discuss her thoughts on your mortgage rate — which she somehow knows about.
The French government has not eliminated unwanted contact. It has simply made it impossible to escape. It is not a ban on telemarketing. It is a mandate for socialism through forced human interaction.
Vive la révolution, indeed.