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ABSTRACT
Slavery is a powerful and emotive term describing an abhorrent infringement of fundamental human rights and should not be applied casually. I relate the practice of slavery to two different concepts of “alienation from self”: first, as being “owned” as property by a third party; and, second, as being “owned” in a more informal, contemporary sense, through the removal of an individual’s ability to govern her own life. This dual meaning of alienation from self leads me to consider self-ownership in a legal sense as well as, less formally, as having the agency to determine one’s own life. From both perspectives I claim that the increasing trafficking of personal data to supply algorithm-based analytics and AI is enabling a new form of digital enslavement that has the potential to curtail liberty and cause harm. I suggest that the conceptualization of problematic digital practices as a new form of slavery is a much needed addition to the mainstream critique of the collection, aggregation and trafficking of personal data, which has focused mostly on individual privacy. This focus, in turn, has obscured and diminished the seriousness of concerns about collective and individual autonomy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributor
Mick Chisnall BSc (Maths) PhD (Pol. Sci.) pursuing research at the University of Canberra’s Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA) and is the Director of his digital consulting business, Information Ergonomics. His research interests include socio-technology, discourse analysis, actor network theory, digital governance, ontology and epistemology. His career outside academia has included working as a senior executive with the ACT Government, leading its IT organization. Before this he worked in a private industry as an IT executive and consultant.
Correction Statement
This article has been republished with minor changes. This change do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 A term first coined by Toffler (Citation1980) referring to an individual who both consumes and produces a product; typically used with respect to online services. For more details see for example Ritzer, Dean, and Jurgenson (Citation2012).
2 See for example Brace and O’Connell Davidson (Citation2018).
3 Nevertheless slavery, mainly in its contemporary form, as “modern slavery”, it is still widespread and arguably increasing (Batstone Citation2010).
4 See Quigley (Citation2018) for an extended account.
5 Duality refers to something with two paired states rather than a Dualism of two separate things.
6 Thus, it could be argued that psychological harm is in fact a form of physical harm.
7 This position is not shared by existing legislation. European law, for example, recognises the importance of personal data to the individual, but does not recognise her “ownership” of that data. It constructs the issue rather as a need to find a data protection regime that balances an individual’s “self-determination and control over his data” while “not restricting, personal data flow and accommodating the competing interests of others” (Purtova Citation2014).
8 A non-ownership concept of slavery based on an alternative type of “alienation” will be developed in the next section.
9 “The ‘mosaic effect’ [is] the idea that disparate pieces of information—though individually of limited utility—become significant when combined with other types of information (Czajka et al. Citation2014; Pozen Citation2005)”.
10 “This entity which each of us is himself and which includes as one of the possibilities of it Being, we shall denote by the term ‘Dasein’” (Heidegger Citation1962, 27).
11 Both governmental and commercial systems continually overstep minimal requirements with the use of mandatory fields to gather information. Where such data is collected legally, the prosumer is inevitably presented with extended mandatory legal boilerplate and notices of privacy policy which the majority either accepts without reading or fails to understand their true implications (see Radin Citation2013 on “boilerplate” and information asymmetry). The fine line between enticement and entrapment goes largely unsupervised and unregulated online.
12 This begs the question “safe from whom?”. Inevitably the issue comes down to “trust in government and politicians” which is now, in Australia at least, at a 26-year low (Evans, Halupka, and Stoker Citation2017, 20).
13 A meme which originated in the popular BBC television sketch show “Little Britain” 2003–2006.
14 Annual income data was assumed to be evenly spread per fortnight (Henman Citation2017).
15 “Fuzzy Logic” refers to logic based on the assessment of “degrees of truth” as distinct from the Boolean binary system where a statement is either True or False. For a fuller account see Cintula, Fermüller, and Noguera (Citation2017).
16 The US Federal Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act 2007 also banned the use of genetic information in recruitment decisions. In 2019 this provision was amended to allow employers operating employee welfare schemes to access employee genetic information, so weakening protections available to employees.
17 Laura Rodriguez, director of policy, communications, and education at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.
18 later syndicated in the Sydney Morning Herald.
19 McMahon, Buyx, and Prainsack (Citation2019), for example, cite Paula’s case of a woman who loses a baby and continues to be inundated with “baby” advertising material. See also Ebeling (Citation2016).