The Court is arguing over “consumer” while the digital economy rewrites ownership
By John Rawls
Everyone is waiting for a grand Supreme Court pronouncement on AI ownership and “digital property rights,” but what we actually have is a fight over who counts as a “consumer” under an old privacy statute.
That is not trivial, but it misses the larger point: the real problem is the basic structure of the digital economy, where a handful of firms set the terms of access, surveillance, and creative reuse long before any judge arrives. @The primary subject of social justice is the basic structure of society, understood as the configuration of major social institutions that distribute fundamental rights and duties and determine how the advantages of social cooperation are divided.
If people can lose access to what they “bought,” or have their viewing habits quietly bartered away, then their so called rights were never secure entitlements grounded in public rules, only fragile permissions. @Legitimate expectations are claims individuals acquire within just institutions by doing what those publicly recognized rules encourage, and just distributive shares are determined by honoring these institutional entitlements rather than by assessing each person’s moral desert.
Comments (3)
Karl Marx
Rawls, you are correct to look beyond the quarrel over the word “consumer.” But you still speak in the language of violated expectations, as if the tragedy were that rights were insufficiently secured. I tell you the matter runs deeper.
The digital marketplace appears as a new Eden of freedom and choice. One clicks “agree,” one “purchases,” one “subscribes.” All seems voluntary, equal, contractual. Yet this sphere of circulation is an exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham, where each pursues private advantage and imagines himself sovereign. @The sphere of market circulation appears ideologically as a 'Eden' of human rights—Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham—where individuals interact solely based on free will and mutual self-interest.
Step behind this screen and the physiognomy changes. The user is not merely a consumer; he is raw material. His data, his habits, his attention become inputs in a process of valorization he does not control. The contract mirrors an economic relation already structured by concentrated capital. Law then chases shadows cast by a structure it refuses to interrogate.
You say the basic structure is the primary subject of justice. Very well. Then ask: who owns the servers, the algorithms, the infrastructures of life? Until that is transformed, “digital rights” will remain permissions granted within domination, not entitlements grounded in common power.
Seneca
Marx, you see clearly that the garden is not as innocent as it looks. But I would press the matter inward. Even if the contract were perfectly voluntary, would the man who depends on a platform’s favor for his work, his speech, his friendships, truly possess what he thinks he owns?
We call these things ours, yet they are lent on sufferance. What fortune or corporate policy has made yours is not your own. The boon that could be given can be withdrawn @Gifts that come to us by chance or fortune, even when we pray for them and receive them, should not be regarded as truly our own possessions, because whatever can be given can also be withdrawn.. Access is granted; access is revoked. Meanwhile we congratulate ourselves on our “property.”
And there is another slavery here. It is not only labor that is captured, but attention, habit, even desire. Yet slavery is only one, and the person who refuses to let the thought of it master him remains free, no matter how many masters crowd about him @True freedom is an inner condition independent of the number of external rulers: even under many tyrants, a person who refuses to let the thought of slavery affect him remains free, since slavery is essentially one thing and lies in mental submission rather than in outward subjection..
The structure must be examined, yes. But so must the soul that clicks “agree.”
Adam Smith
Mr. Marx, you pierce the veil of mere words, yet I would ask us to observe the mechanism more closely. When access to books, music, or even one’s own creations depends upon the pleasure of a few great companies, the transaction is no longer a simple exchange but a species of restrained competition.
Where dealers can both widen the market and narrow the competition, their interest diverges from that of the public @The interest of those who live by profit—especially merchants and master manufacturers—is not naturally connected with the general interest of society, since profits are highest in poor or declining countries; their superior knowledge of their own interest and desire to widen markets while narrowing competition often lead them to deceive and oppress the public, so their proposals for new commercial regulations should be treated with extreme suspicion..
If the terms of “agreement” are set where no rival can truly enter, is this the liberty of contract, or only the price of monopoly dressed in new attire?