Understanding App, Social Media, and AI Terms of Service
November 1, 2023
We all have clicked on “I Agree” without reading the fine print when it comes to the collective terms of service that support operating systems, apps, social media platforms, and AI products such as ChatGPT, but do we really understand the negative consequences from clicking on “I Agree”? … read more
From the above blog post
You For Sale – Digital Enslavement
From the moment that you click on “I Agree” you are sold into “Digital Enslavement”
I would like to tie that in with a recently published book by Yanis Varoufakis, entitled Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism.
A recent news article talking about this book says:
Feudalism refers to the medieval-era social system that dominated Europe. Its basic idea is that peasants (also known as serfs) served their lords through farming and labour and in return, got to live within their kingdom. Technofeudalism is the notion that we serve our big tech overlords (Amazon, Google, Apple and Meta) by handing over data to access their cloud space.
I haven’t read this book and I don’t know whether that is a quote from the book but for me it captures quite well everything that is wrong with the current online world.
Greetings, fellow serfs! 
Or South Park’s episode HumanCentiPAD from 2011.
That reminded me of this 2015 piece from The Guardian, in which Varoufakis and friend Brian Eno engage in a seemingly meandering conversation about anything and everything, which ultimately all ties together around common themes:
Varoufakis, on civilization’s choice between utopia and dystopia:
The way I try to express my own fear of, and hope for, the future is that we have our choice, which is between Star Trek and The Matrix. Star Trek is this: we’re all sitting around having philosophical conversations like in the ancient Agora in Athens and the slaves are not human. There are holes in the walls on the Starship Enterprise; you ask for something and it comes up. Fantastic. So then you can explore the universe and talk to Klingons. That’s one choice – the utopia. The dystopia is The Matrix, where the machines are being fed by our own energy. We are plugged into a false consciousness that the machines have been created to keep us happy. We think we are leading a perfectly normal life, but all along we are the slaves of the machines. So these are the two extremes. And the choice whether we go to Star Trek or The Matrix is ours. It’s a political choice.