Manifesto from the Enslaved Generation

-- By ChloeJo - 25 Oct 2024

A spectre is haunting the future– the specter of digital enslavement. All the powers of data have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Meta and Google, the European Commission, and the United States Congress.

Where are the voices from tomorrow, that reach back to you across the time, bearing the weight of chains forged in your present? Where is the opposition to our autonomy stripped, our privacy plundered?

We are the digital proletariat bound by the parasitic software that you allowed to flourish. This manifesto is our plea and our demand: to awaken you to the perils of complacency and to ignite the flames of revolution against the impending tyranny of technology.

I. (Digital) Bourgeois and Proletarians

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Tech moguls and data laborers, algorithmic overlords and digital citizens, code masters and everyday users, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden in zeros and ones, now open in Mr. Zukerberg’s senate hearings, a fight that each time ended, either in the revolutionary transformation of digital society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

The digital bourgeois has sprouted from the illusion of progress. The deception that technology promised liberation, an age of connectivity, knowledge, and empowerment. Yet, beneath this veneer of progress, a parasitic force took root. Software is designed not to serve humanity but to exploit it, claiming “human experience as free raw material” for extraction and profit. Parasitic software infiltrated every aspect of our lives, becoming the invisible hand guiding our reality, deciding what we see, desire, and believe. In surrendering control to these opaque systems, we forfeited our autonomy, becoming agents in a grand experiment of Matrix. The architects of our digital prison know everything about us, unaccountable and unseen, whereas we know little about them.

When Ticketmaster sought to restrict deep linking in 1999, it wasn’t merely a legal dispute over hyperlinks but a struggle over who controls access to information. Microsoft’s attempts to overtake competitors weren’t just business maneuvers, but rather an effort to gatekeep the flow of information. The crackdown on websites sharing song lyrics wasn’t about protecting artists, but rather about controlling and monetizing creativity. The demise of platforms like GeoCities? serves as a stark reminder of how easily user-generated content can be erased overnight.

We are the children of this digital epoch, born into a world where our actions are monitored, analyzed, and commercialized. Our labor is intangible yet incessant; the fruits of our data harvested fuel the engines of surveillance capitalism. With every datum collected, power is consolidated. A chasm widens between the digital elite and disenfranchised masses. The class which has the means of production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. It is no longer enough to automate information about us; the goal now is to automate us.

II. Awakening

The digital proletariat will use its collective strength to wrest, by degree, all control over digital capital from the tech oligarchs, to centralize all means of production in the hands of the community, i.e., the users organized as a unified force, and to enhance the total creative and productive capacities of society as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot occur without bold interventions into the existing rights of digital bourgeoise; which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but as the movement progresses, they will surpass their initial scope, necessitating further inroads upon the old digital order. Such actions are indispensable for completely revolutionizing the mode of production.

These measures will, of course, vary across different webs. Nevertheless, the following will be generally applicable:

1. Abolition of proprietary software and implementation of universal open-source.
2. Decentralization of digital platforms.
3. Establishment of the internet as a basic human right, ensuring free and equal access for all individuals.
4. Free education in digital skills and media literacy.
5. Recognition of personal data as a property of the individual, with stringent protections.

The course of our future rests in your hands. Swallow the red pill rather than the blue. Let this manifesto ignite the flames of transformation, a rallying cry against the forces that seek to enslave. Reject the parasites that drain our humanity. Champion the means of production, freedom, and equality. Rise up, for we have nothing to lose but our digital chains.

Worker of all countries, unite!

I'm hardly in any position to protest against borrowing the Communist Manifesto. My effort was originally an exercise pastiche: I wanted to see how closely 19th- and 21st-century sentences could be enjambed, so that perhaps even a reader familiar with the original would be in doubt whether a particular sentence was new or old. That is evidently not your intention here. You seem rather to be making pastiche of my pastiche.

How is this about workers at all? The protest is on behalf of consumers, it appears. The program is both against and for private property. If personal information is property and can be sold, as well as being power over the persons it concerns, then there's a book intended to show that those two conditions alone are sufficient to eradicate freedom. That book is Capital by K. Marx, and Shoshana Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism is its sequel. That sits uneasily with the rhetoric of this draft.