That's somewhat the point of my recent monarchy article... that and a political system that prizes accountability and responsibility rather than managerialism and false egalitarianism.
The libertarian Right needs to embrace some sort of antitrust measures. Much of this nonsense would go away if there was more competition.
Also, a computer OS with a crypto serial number for each instance could be used to make selling shrink wrap software viable. The license would be by machine vs. by person. With a proper public-private key structure, the machines could be anonymized.
An imperfect solution, as one would need to repurchase software when a machine wears out, but with some copy protection, licenses would get cheaper.
Most of this nonsense was caused by the Biden administration using the threat of regulation, including antitrust regulation, to force the tech firms to do what it wanted.
Parler was deplatformed on January 10, 2021 -- before the Biden Administration started. Mass censorship was happening in 2020. All my sites (in my real name, with a much more centrist tone than I use as Fabius Minarchus) disappeared from Google.
Do you know about the Clearances and Enclosures in Britain and Ireland? A somewhat similar phenomenon in the US was ranchers consolidating small farms.
Anyway that is what is happening with AI. Maybe worse. AI is the wholesale theft of the intellectual property of the whole world. And that’s right down to the skill of health insurance workers to handle claims. The AI barons have stolen the added value capacity of billions of people at a stroke, as well as stealing the work product of everyone who ever put that work product online.
It is the biggest act of theft in the history of humanity. They stole everything off us and they want to rent it back to us using the one-sided model you describe in the article.
The article brings up an important issue, but mistakenly assumes this sort of thing is limited to the digital economy. I would suggest that this problem is pretty much everywhere including in the physical realm. That scenario with the business having its lease terminated “for any reason or no reason” is exactly how employment law works most in most states. If your boss sees you one weekend wearing a MAGA hat (or a “resist” hat, it makes no difference) he has every legal right to tell you not to bother coming in to work on Monday.
The fact that you can’t negotiate contract terms with Microsoft is no different than with a large apartment complex which is undoubtedly owned by a private equity fund. Go to pretty much any bricks and mortar store and ask to negotiate their product warranty. Not happening. Contacts that you can’t meaningfully negotiate are nearly universal and termed “contracts of adhesion”. They suck and ought to be outlawed.
Ultimately the problems are based on uneven bargaining power. You can negotiate the price of real estate when there is one buyer and one seller, but big business has no incentive to negotiate with ordinary schmucks. And the fact that business has been consolidated into near monopolies is one of the main root problems. Private equity is buying up everything from veterinary practices to car washes to plumbing outfits. Another root in patent law which gives a government enforced monopoly to companies. There are very few true markets left, but there are reforms available. Matt Stoller has a great Substack on monopolies that I highly recommend. This week he talked about what’s really happening with egg prices. https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation
Yep. I was going to bring up John Deer, some of the automotive companies & others trying, sometimes successfully, to license rather than sell their products.
The healthcare industry has a similar dynamic. Miss too many appointments and they won't deal with you. But you don't get to see the full price of the service until you show up -- or even afterwards.
Many overlook this problem these days because insurance or the government generally picks up the big bills -- and the medical industry is generally pretty good at giving a heads up for the copay amount.
But to have a real market for medical care, the ability to turn down an overpriced procedure without penalty should be mandated.
I get a tad annoyed when people compare a potential tech dystopia to feudalism, "serfdom" and all, because actual feudalism involved a reciprocal asymmetric relationship between the peasants and the lords. The serfs very much did have rights and privileges, and I have heard it argued that they were more practically free on a daily basis than most people now. Yes, the actual middle ages were better than whatever WEF dystopia the bugmen have planned for us. I am also a medievalist in that I think appreciating some of the moral and cultural values of medieval Europe would improve modern society. Part of why we even have problems in the first place is arguable because we are too dissimilar to the middle ages, being to wimpy and effeminate.
I appreciate your point of view as I am similarly suspicious of “historians” perspectives on that time. However, using the general meanings of those words today does describe where we are and appear to be going.
Can you fit debanking (and other forms of denial of financial access) into your framework?
If you do, it might make it clear that the problem is wider than just contract law. It’s a generic massive power imbalance. Probably accelerated by the unprecedented rapid scaling / huge scaling of these entities, and the increasingly intangible (digital) nature of more and meld of what counts as “value” or access to “value”.
Thank you for very eloquently putting into words something about "contract law" that has always rubbed me the wrong way!
As if some 95 IQ schlub has equal bargaining power with that faceless megacorp that can hire the best lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists money can buy. I too fear that attempting to rectify the contract law problem California-style will just make things worse. So....wat do?
And yes, at least the medieval serf of yesterday probably knew their overlord by name and face. Today's wagecuck (or even middle class striver) on the other hand faces an impenetrable wall of "see no evil, hear no evil" bureaucrats and functionaries that stand between him and the people who are raking in all the cash. It seems that techno-industrial paradigm will always lead to more and more centralization, which means less and less actual freedom for the average person. I think the only solution moving forward is to cut out the dependence on tech wherever and whenever possible. Easiest micro-example: go back to reading and collecting paper books. And buy/sell/trade them informally, using cash (as long as it still exists).
The general rule I live by is that if your business depends on a platform you don't really have a business. Whatever it is it's not yours. What Walmart did to you should be criminal - stealing $40k is outright theft. Unfortunately the courts and law serve corporations not people. Which effectively makes corporations super-people.
I mean, what if you DO read to the end? What are you going to do? Not use the service? And when all the alternative services have nearly the same contract, what then? You don't use any of them? Just like the main post, imagine if that seriously applied to everything in life. Your landlord or mortgage bank decides to kick you out of your home. You walk into a bookstore and they make you sign a contract allowing them to retrieve or modify any books you buy from them whenever they want. You go the park and have a political discussion with a friend, a cop kicks you out and explains that you can discuss it at home "freely", you just don't get the REACH of discussing in the park. You go home to read some books instead, but an employee from the bookstore is there with a new contract including some alterations, which you have to sign or they'll take your books.
It is exactly the same deal with non-digital goods and services provided digitally. From banking to phones to internet to utilities to food and grocery delivery or delivery of anything. Driving licenses passports ID taxes anything everything. The same power asymmetry. It’s global, it’s pervasive, it’s everything.
In 1776 there were no corporations in our lives (there were only a handful in the world). Corporations are now more powerful than most governments (and control the few governments that are more powerful).
A new social contract needs to constrain corporations’ power just line the Constitution constrains government power.
The problem is not contracts. The solution is not a quasi-marxist redistribution of bargaining power. It is that contract law no longer enforces actual consent or an actual meeting of the minds, nor does it take the doctrine of mutuality of obligation seriously either. The objective theory of contract imposed on the common law in the early 20th century by legal positivists undercut the natural law foundations of contract law and led to this.
I’m wondering if you have read Varoufakis on this? I hope so. It’s irritating that people on the right don’t mention Varoufakis because he’s a Marxist. So what - first and foremost he’s an anti-globalist. He coined the term Technofeudalism and his analysis is laser-accurate. Although what you have written here is 100x more accessible, to be fair.
No, I havent read him - thank you for the recommendation! I am not at all opposed to reading Leftists for their insights, I've read Michael Hudson and Steve Keene, etc.
My opinion as an attorney is that unilateral changes to a contract are clearly not binding...These are contracts of adhesion, and these companies would likely lose in court...What they are counting on is that your losses are too small to justify a lawsuit or an arbitration proceeding....
As for some solutions, I wonder if we could re-invigorate the statute of frauds. The statute of frauds requires that contracts involving land or over a certain monetary threshold (usually $500 nowadays) have to be *written* contracts, as opposed to oral contracts. I would assume that courts currently treat TOSs and various user agreements as "written" contracts even tho they are not physically written down. I know there is a trend of people valuing the physical and personal, which I think is important. We already have a lot of important contracts get notarized. I think it is reasonable that if a website wants users to agree to terms but the potential value exceeds $500 (or some other reasonable monetary threshold we decide upon), then that agreement must be written down or printed on physical paper, and the user needs to sign those papers in person. Interesting consequences can ensue! Also, using websites could be governed to a certain degree by implied (and maybe oral) contracts, which would do two things: 1) stick to common sense, the website can't just put *anything* they want into it, no weird arbitrary stuff, and 2) the complexity and ambiguity of implied contracts could allow for the recognition of practical inequalities.
Perhaps we need to redefine what is required to make a corporate contract or create a new regime of consumer contracts. These would need to meet certain requirements which deal with the power imbalances, especially those inherent in the digital economy. I also think that the exploitation of the Rental Laws in California was not due to a real equality between parties, but because Leftist lawmakers wrote the laws with the presumption that renters are always the wronged party and victims at the hands of landlords.
>> Is Digital Serfdom Inevitable? <<
Too Optimi... errr, I mean... Too Sanguine Pater! 😘
It'll be the Old, cruddy form of Serfdom, without the Techy gadgets.
And I guess you can add in a few firearms here & there.
Oh, & several billion dead. 😉
The old serfdom would be better. Have you already seen my latest article on Monarchy because I think you'd appreciate it.
The agri-serf of yore probably lived a way more free life than the average industrial wagecuck of today.
Agreed!
That's somewhat the point of my recent monarchy article... that and a political system that prizes accountability and responsibility rather than managerialism and false egalitarianism.
I will have a look now! Thank You good sir for bringing it to my attention!
Hope you enjoy it! Here's a link for convenience: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/neo-monarchy-a-blueprint-for-liberty?r=43z8s4
Thank You Kindly! 😉
The libertarian Right needs to embrace some sort of antitrust measures. Much of this nonsense would go away if there was more competition.
Also, a computer OS with a crypto serial number for each instance could be used to make selling shrink wrap software viable. The license would be by machine vs. by person. With a proper public-private key structure, the machines could be anonymized.
An imperfect solution, as one would need to repurchase software when a machine wears out, but with some copy protection, licenses would get cheaper.
The American right in general needs to stop simping for big business.
Bingo.
Most of this nonsense was caused by the Biden administration using the threat of regulation, including antitrust regulation, to force the tech firms to do what it wanted.
Parler was deplatformed on January 10, 2021 -- before the Biden Administration started. Mass censorship was happening in 2020. All my sites (in my real name, with a much more centrist tone than I use as Fabius Minarchus) disappeared from Google.
True, you had the deep state doing things like this before Biden.
Do you know about the Clearances and Enclosures in Britain and Ireland? A somewhat similar phenomenon in the US was ranchers consolidating small farms.
Anyway that is what is happening with AI. Maybe worse. AI is the wholesale theft of the intellectual property of the whole world. And that’s right down to the skill of health insurance workers to handle claims. The AI barons have stolen the added value capacity of billions of people at a stroke, as well as stealing the work product of everyone who ever put that work product online.
It is the biggest act of theft in the history of humanity. They stole everything off us and they want to rent it back to us using the one-sided model you describe in the article.
An interesting perspective.
The article brings up an important issue, but mistakenly assumes this sort of thing is limited to the digital economy. I would suggest that this problem is pretty much everywhere including in the physical realm. That scenario with the business having its lease terminated “for any reason or no reason” is exactly how employment law works most in most states. If your boss sees you one weekend wearing a MAGA hat (or a “resist” hat, it makes no difference) he has every legal right to tell you not to bother coming in to work on Monday.
The fact that you can’t negotiate contract terms with Microsoft is no different than with a large apartment complex which is undoubtedly owned by a private equity fund. Go to pretty much any bricks and mortar store and ask to negotiate their product warranty. Not happening. Contacts that you can’t meaningfully negotiate are nearly universal and termed “contracts of adhesion”. They suck and ought to be outlawed.
Ultimately the problems are based on uneven bargaining power. You can negotiate the price of real estate when there is one buyer and one seller, but big business has no incentive to negotiate with ordinary schmucks. And the fact that business has been consolidated into near monopolies is one of the main root problems. Private equity is buying up everything from veterinary practices to car washes to plumbing outfits. Another root in patent law which gives a government enforced monopoly to companies. There are very few true markets left, but there are reforms available. Matt Stoller has a great Substack on monopolies that I highly recommend. This week he talked about what’s really happening with egg prices. https://open.substack.com/pub/mattstoller/p/hatching-a-conspiracy-a-big-investigation
Yep. I was going to bring up John Deer, some of the automotive companies & others trying, sometimes successfully, to license rather than sell their products.
The healthcare industry has a similar dynamic. Miss too many appointments and they won't deal with you. But you don't get to see the full price of the service until you show up -- or even afterwards.
Many overlook this problem these days because insurance or the government generally picks up the big bills -- and the medical industry is generally pretty good at giving a heads up for the copay amount.
But to have a real market for medical care, the ability to turn down an overpriced procedure without penalty should be mandated.
I get a tad annoyed when people compare a potential tech dystopia to feudalism, "serfdom" and all, because actual feudalism involved a reciprocal asymmetric relationship between the peasants and the lords. The serfs very much did have rights and privileges, and I have heard it argued that they were more practically free on a daily basis than most people now. Yes, the actual middle ages were better than whatever WEF dystopia the bugmen have planned for us. I am also a medievalist in that I think appreciating some of the moral and cultural values of medieval Europe would improve modern society. Part of why we even have problems in the first place is arguable because we are too dissimilar to the middle ages, being to wimpy and effeminate.
I appreciate your point of view as I am similarly suspicious of “historians” perspectives on that time. However, using the general meanings of those words today does describe where we are and appear to be going.
Can you fit debanking (and other forms of denial of financial access) into your framework?
If you do, it might make it clear that the problem is wider than just contract law. It’s a generic massive power imbalance. Probably accelerated by the unprecedented rapid scaling / huge scaling of these entities, and the increasingly intangible (digital) nature of more and meld of what counts as “value” or access to “value”.
Thank you for very eloquently putting into words something about "contract law" that has always rubbed me the wrong way!
As if some 95 IQ schlub has equal bargaining power with that faceless megacorp that can hire the best lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists money can buy. I too fear that attempting to rectify the contract law problem California-style will just make things worse. So....wat do?
And yes, at least the medieval serf of yesterday probably knew their overlord by name and face. Today's wagecuck (or even middle class striver) on the other hand faces an impenetrable wall of "see no evil, hear no evil" bureaucrats and functionaries that stand between him and the people who are raking in all the cash. It seems that techno-industrial paradigm will always lead to more and more centralization, which means less and less actual freedom for the average person. I think the only solution moving forward is to cut out the dependence on tech wherever and whenever possible. Easiest micro-example: go back to reading and collecting paper books. And buy/sell/trade them informally, using cash (as long as it still exists).
The general rule I live by is that if your business depends on a platform you don't really have a business. Whatever it is it's not yours. What Walmart did to you should be criminal - stealing $40k is outright theft. Unfortunately the courts and law serve corporations not people. Which effectively makes corporations super-people.
Unfortunately I don't see any of this changing.
What percentage of people even make it to the end of the user agreement before ticking the required box? Ignorantia legis neminem excusat.
I mean, what if you DO read to the end? What are you going to do? Not use the service? And when all the alternative services have nearly the same contract, what then? You don't use any of them? Just like the main post, imagine if that seriously applied to everything in life. Your landlord or mortgage bank decides to kick you out of your home. You walk into a bookstore and they make you sign a contract allowing them to retrieve or modify any books you buy from them whenever they want. You go the park and have a political discussion with a friend, a cop kicks you out and explains that you can discuss it at home "freely", you just don't get the REACH of discussing in the park. You go home to read some books instead, but an employee from the bookstore is there with a new contract including some alterations, which you have to sign or they'll take your books.
It is exactly the same deal with non-digital goods and services provided digitally. From banking to phones to internet to utilities to food and grocery delivery or delivery of anything. Driving licenses passports ID taxes anything everything. The same power asymmetry. It’s global, it’s pervasive, it’s everything.
In 1776 there were no corporations in our lives (there were only a handful in the world). Corporations are now more powerful than most governments (and control the few governments that are more powerful).
A new social contract needs to constrain corporations’ power just line the Constitution constrains government power.
The problem is not contracts. The solution is not a quasi-marxist redistribution of bargaining power. It is that contract law no longer enforces actual consent or an actual meeting of the minds, nor does it take the doctrine of mutuality of obligation seriously either. The objective theory of contract imposed on the common law in the early 20th century by legal positivists undercut the natural law foundations of contract law and led to this.
OK, so it is easy to criticize and difficult to create. What is your recommended solution then, sir? You obviously have strong background and depth.
Corporations are not people, lets start there.
I’m wondering if you have read Varoufakis on this? I hope so. It’s irritating that people on the right don’t mention Varoufakis because he’s a Marxist. So what - first and foremost he’s an anti-globalist. He coined the term Technofeudalism and his analysis is laser-accurate. Although what you have written here is 100x more accessible, to be fair.
No, I havent read him - thank you for the recommendation! I am not at all opposed to reading Leftists for their insights, I've read Michael Hudson and Steve Keene, etc.
My opinion as an attorney is that unilateral changes to a contract are clearly not binding...These are contracts of adhesion, and these companies would likely lose in court...What they are counting on is that your losses are too small to justify a lawsuit or an arbitration proceeding....
Could some sort of class-action case be a workable option?
Why or why not?
What would be required for this?
As for some solutions, I wonder if we could re-invigorate the statute of frauds. The statute of frauds requires that contracts involving land or over a certain monetary threshold (usually $500 nowadays) have to be *written* contracts, as opposed to oral contracts. I would assume that courts currently treat TOSs and various user agreements as "written" contracts even tho they are not physically written down. I know there is a trend of people valuing the physical and personal, which I think is important. We already have a lot of important contracts get notarized. I think it is reasonable that if a website wants users to agree to terms but the potential value exceeds $500 (or some other reasonable monetary threshold we decide upon), then that agreement must be written down or printed on physical paper, and the user needs to sign those papers in person. Interesting consequences can ensue! Also, using websites could be governed to a certain degree by implied (and maybe oral) contracts, which would do two things: 1) stick to common sense, the website can't just put *anything* they want into it, no weird arbitrary stuff, and 2) the complexity and ambiguity of implied contracts could allow for the recognition of practical inequalities.
I hope this helps!
Perhaps we need to redefine what is required to make a corporate contract or create a new regime of consumer contracts. These would need to meet certain requirements which deal with the power imbalances, especially those inherent in the digital economy. I also think that the exploitation of the Rental Laws in California was not due to a real equality between parties, but because Leftist lawmakers wrote the laws with the presumption that renters are always the wronged party and victims at the hands of landlords.