We are turning into subscription slaves
Philosopher Gwilym David Blunt says anyone concerned with the importance of individual liberty and human autonomy ought to be alarmed, because we are turning into subscription slaves.
I want you to imagine that at some point in the not-too-distant future you are losing your eyesight. Although blindness will result, it is not inevitable. You can have your eyes replaced with new cybernetic ones.
Would you buy these eyes?
Most readers would probably say yes, provided they are affordable, but simply ‘buying’ something is rather old fashioned in the not-too-distant future.
The company that makes them offers them as a subscription service with a rather long document of terms and conditions. These T&Cs mean that they know where you are, what you watch on television, what pages you visit on the internet, and what holds your gaze a little bit longer while you are out in the world. All this data helps them to better understand you as a consumer and they will obviously sell it on to interested parties for a tidy profit.
There are also ‘ads’. Third parties can pay to have their products appear brighter and more appealing, a pop-up might appear showing a five-star review from a famous ‘eye-fluencer’ whose content you watch, while other brands appear less vibrant and may even blur if you don’t concentrate on them.
At this point I hope most of you are rightfully alarmed at this, but would you still accept? The alternative, after all, is blindness. The thought experiment leaves us with a choice, endure a disability that will make functioning in society more challenging or retain one’s sight but at the cost of having our perception of reality manipulated.
This seems dystopian, but we are already being forced to make this choice. Think about all the data you feed into the algorithm through your smartphone, streaming services and social media, and how that algorithm comes back to you recommending products you may like, or news stories and articles that interest you or align with your values. You, of course, have the choice not to use smart phones, social media, or the internet, but as this technology becomes increasingly necessary to participate in society the price of opting out becomes unreasonable.
The proliferation of subscription services is just one way our social and economic lives are being mediated by big tech. This change is so profound that some people, like Yannis Varoufakis, call it ‘techno-feudalism’. In his most recent book Techno Feudalism, he claims that it has replaced capitalism with a system based on the extraction of rents for the use of a resource rather than profits from innovation.
Anyone concerned with the importance of individual liberty and human autonomy ought to be alarmed, because we are turning into subscription slaves.
Liberty is one of those concepts that philosophers love to debate, but for me it is the absence of arbitrary interference. This is an idea of liberty that underpins the republican tradition of political philosophy; it is based on the contrast between a free citizen and a slave. The latter is unfree because they are subjected to the arbitrary whims of their owner; even if this power is never used the slave will know that all their choices depend upon the permission of another person. A citizen of a free republic in contrast may experience interference from the law, but this interference is controlled by the rule of law and mechanisms of accountability. They are not vulnerable to the whims of the powerful.
Subscription services, and techno-feudalism by extension, undermine our liberty in ways seen in the above thought experiment. They replace ownership of a good with mere permission for use. This might seem trivial when it comes to the provision of media, as with Apple Music or Netflix. The loss of a certain album or television show from a library is an inconvenience, but what happens when more essential services or goods can be withdrawn? Or when the terms and conditions can be unilaterally revised? Consider the problems American farmers had with John Deere. The company forced farmers to take their tractors to authorised mechanics by employing software locks, essentially turning farmers from owners to renters. This has been challenged in the courts and the company has retreated for now, but the trajectory is alarming.
More insidious though is how they affect our choice. The ‘data rent’ we pay to use subscription services and other platforms, which is effectively unpaid labour, is fed into the algorithm. Our digital personas are commodified, sold, and repackaged back to us. This is not a neutral process. Social media has helped the proliferation of conspiracy theories or unhealthy models of beauty or unrealistic ‘influencer’ lifestyles. This is the use of arbitrary power to shape our preferences and our shared social world into compliance with the bottom lines of major tech companies.
But aren’t people happy? To this we might say a good slave is one who doesn’t mind slavery while the best slave is the one who doesn’t even realise they are in chains.
These forces seem unassailable, but so did feudalism at the dawn of the early modern era. We need to look to history. Techno-feudalism, I hope, can be tamed by a digital republicanism. One that accepts the reality of power but makes it non-arbitrary and ultimately controlled by the people it effects. The first step here is the reclamation of personal data and control over its use. Just as citizens in the Renaissance republics denied the great feudal lords’ control over their persons, we must deny the great techno-feudal lords’ control over our digital persons.
Dr. Gwilym David Blunt is a Fellow of the Ethics Centre, Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sydney, and Senior Research Fellow of the Centre for International Policy Studies. He has held appointments at the University of Cambridge and City, University of London. His research focuses on theories of justice, global inequality, and ethics in a non-ideal world.
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