Do We No Longer Own Our Own Possessions?

In the 1980s, when I first began to suspect an out-of-control, technologically dependent world was emerging in every phase of human life, I started writing a novel with the tentative title “Plantation America.” It was my therapy novel, one that I returned to periodically but never seriously intended to be published. It was a way of coping with my instinctive aversion to an overly complex, ever-changing world that demanded more and still more time than what is allotted to each of us on this small spinning rock known as planet Earth.

As the years passed, one of my growing concerns was that big tech, despite its denials, seemed to have done more than its share to push a broader spectrum of workers, especially lower-income earners, out of their jobs.

The homeless shelters I read about in my region’s newspapers almost unanimously identify “economics” as the most prevalent reason for our burgeoning homeless populations. Recent statistics compiled by the Congressional Record Office reveal that “income disparities are now so pronounced that America’s richest 1 percent of households averaged 104 times as much income as the bottom 20 percent in 2020.”

Other studies have revealed that the income disparities of our time are equal to, or exceed the extravagances of the Gilded Age during the last half of the nineteenth century. The same is true for the 1920s before the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression of the 1930s. The major difference is that modern technology today has enabled powerful entities to engage in practices that create income inequality on a grander scale than ever before.

Big tech is not responsible for all of this, of course. They will often respond that they create jobs—which they do. However, those jobs are often dependent upon exploiting the intellectual properties others have created.

I did not anticipate all of this when I started writing “Plantation America” almost half a century ago. The flawed, perhaps paranoid protagonist in my ever-evolving novel was no economic prognosticator. He was a tiny voice that kept growing into a shrill cacophony of discordant voices that recognized an evolving cultural and economic disaster lurking in the shadows. I later named this alter ego and protagonist, “Horace.” He was a flawed narrator, but perhaps one who could occasionally stumble upon some small nuggets of wisdom.

Horace becomes increasingly fixated on what he thought was an electronically driven world that seemed to be taking over the very power we have to think for ourselves. He also became obsessed with what he believed was an electronically driven system that spied on everyone. He becomes obsessed with the idea that the entire world is being reduced to the status of an electronically controlled labor force that is replicating in modern life the plantations and slave labor forces of another era.

Horace’s seemingly bizarre views and theories were not widely shared by others. I, myself, considered it mostly fiction, not nonfiction. It was speculations on a dystopian future, not present-day reality. Still, I felt there might be some merit in Horace’s unorthodox ruminations.

Then, flash forward to June 26, 2024, when an article titled, “AI Devices Want More of Our Data,” appeared in The New York Times; it explains, “To make that work, these companies need something from you: more data.” And how is that possible? “In this new paradigm,” the article continues, “your Windows computer will take a screenshot of everything you do every few seconds. An iPhone will stitch together information across many apps you use. And an Android phone can listen to a call in real-time.” The article then raises the most obvious question, “Is this information you are willing to share?”

My first response was, “No, I am not willing to share the data I have created." My second response was based on several decades of returning periodically to my therapeutic novel. I realized Horace, who valued his privacy and felt it was under constant assault, may have sensed something most of us did not anticipate until almost half a century later.

Horace was apparently right after all.

Another article on the same subject appeared in that paper the very next day. It quotes Sasha Yanshin, YouTube personality and co-founder of a travel recommendation site, who said, “We’re being destroyed already left, right, and center by inferior content that is basically trained on our stuff, and now we’re being discarded.” Later in the same article we learn, “Many (AI) companies are also adding language to their terms of use that protects their content from being scraped to train competing AI.”

Isn’t there just a hint of hypocrisy here? It’s okay for AI companies to claim the right to use the intellectual property of others without compensation. However, they cry foul when they believe their ownership rights are threatened.

The current trends regarding intellectual and other property rights raise several unanswered questions: Do we no longer own our own possessions? Do we no longer have a right to privacy? Can others steal the fruits of our labor with impunity? Has the Internet turned into a form of legalized thievery?

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Plantation America became in my mind a metaphor for the power of modern technology that has the potential to be as insidious as earlier economic systems that rendered an entire race of people devoid of property and power.

Perhaps Horace was overreacting. He tended to do that. But how far off base was he?

Big tech’s claims that it has the right to all of our data render us as powerless as previous societies that lived in their own versions of Plantation America.

That is the dystopian future that is increasingly looking like the present moment in modern life.

Is the grip of modern technology contributing to a double standard regarding ownership of intellectual property?

Source: Marco Bianchetti, Unsplash