Not My Household Hats

For about fifteen years the arrangement was understood by everyone and written down by nobody. Your parents had the account. Your sister paid for a different one. Somebody's college roommate was on a third, years after anyone had spoken to them. It worked because nobody looked at it closely. Then the services started looking closely, and produced a word to look with: household. It sounds neutral and domestic, and it is doing an enormous amount of legal work. A household is now a thing that can be verified, challenged, and found wanting — by a device check, from an address you were visiting, at the exact moment you sat down to watch something. These hats are pointed at the policy and the word, never at the relative whose account it is. The grievance is with a corporation, which is the safe and well-tested target in this catalogue — the same reason the data-centre and the utility-bill collections work. Nobody at the family dinner is implicated. Everyone at the family dinner has been logged out at least once.