From Cotton Fields to Data Farms: Progress as the Excuse for Exploitation and Intrusion

Digitally Rendering Caesar

Photo by Daria Strategy on Unsplash

Welcome to Message Mondays where I discuss moral philosophy and use historical analysis and context to address the issues of the day. Part one is available to all subscribers. As a thank you to paid subscribers who make my work Outside the Academy possible, more in-depth analysis is behind the paywall in part two.

Dear Reader,

In 1858, US Senator James Henry Hammond from South Carolina, delivered a speech attacking anti-slavery senators, like New York’s William Henry Seward in which he outlined the mudsill theory, a justification for slavery and rigid social hierarchy in the antebellum South. According to Hammond, every society rests on a "mudsill," or permanent underclass, who, like the mudsill for a building, their labor and subjugation provide the foundation for higher cultural and economic achievement by the ruling classes. In his reading the South was following the example of Athens and the supposedly great pagan civilizations of antiquity. Without this system, he argued that civilizational advancement was not possible and therefore the North and its anti-slavery agitators were threatening progress by pledging to restrain the ambitions of the Southern slaveholders who wanted to expand slavery into the western territories. In fact, to Hammond, the South was carrying the load of civilization while Northern industry was a chimera that merely deceived the white industrial worker into thinking they had it better than slaves. Of course, as you can imagine white men in the industrial North did not appreciate being told they were worse off than Black slaves in the South, and Abraham Lincoln responded forcefully to the mudsill theory in 1859 just before running for president as the Republican Party candidate. Yankee men did likewise from 1861-65.

I wrote about Lincoln’s response to the mudsill theory for the always cool Stephen Adubato’s Cracks in Postmodernity. See below.

The [Almost] Social Democratic Abraham Lincoln

While the United States abolished the slavery Hammond celebrated, the underlying logic of the mudsill theory - that societal development depends on allowing the supposed drivers of prosperity the leeway to exploit a designated target population - has left the analog 19^th century and its social Darwinism and reemerged in digital format. Consider the practices of surveillance capitalism, where companies extract, analyze, and monetize consumer data, often without meaningful consent. This new digital economy reflects the same fundamental dynamic: an elite class justifies its dominance through the exploitation of a largely invisible foundation in this case, user data and digital likeness.

The modern tech economy “depends” on the mass collection and commodification of consumer data. Consumers, we, often unknowingly, generate streams of behavioral information — through search queries, social media interactions, GPS movements, and shockingly, even biometric data— that are then harvested by the tech companies and repackaged into wildly profitable predictive algorithms and consumer profiles, a practice that forms the foundation a new economy of stealth exploitation. Users in today's data economy contribute value without control, agency, or fair compensation. Moreover, tech companies routinely justify invasive surveillance as necessary for innovation, convenience, and free services. The claim that people "choose" to give up their data is undermined by the reality of opaque terms of service, deceptive interface design, and a general lack of alternatives. They use a false autonomy of “choice” to justify the public’s loss of personal data ownership.

This pattern extends beyond surveillance capitalism to other forms of digital exploitation. Age-gating pornography through government mandates to prove those who view pornography are adults is an attempt to protect families and children from exploiters, and just like in the 19th century, the exploiters treat this like you are robbing them of a fundamental freedom.

The emergence of deepfake technology represents maybe the most brazen extension of this digital mudsill logic. Where traditional surveillance capitalism harvests our behavior, deepfakes steal our very faces, voices, and identities. The technology can now create convincing videos of anyone saying or doing anything, yet the response from Silicon Valley and official Washington has been a collective shrug. This lack of urgency reveals the moral blindness that comes from impunity.

Tech leaders frame deepfake technology as inevitable progress that will ultimately democratize media creation and benefit humanity. Meanwhile, women find their faces grafted onto pornographic videos, politicians are impersonated to spread disinformation, and ordinary people discover their digital identities have been stolen and used to commit fraud. “Progress.”

What makes these violations particularly insidious is how the exploitation is clothed in the language of liberation. We love liberty and progress, so the system preys on our biases to present the harm as the price we pay for our way of life. This reasoning treats certain aspect of our humanity as expendable resources rather than treating us as whole human beings with inherent dignity. The victims -predominantly regular workers and consumers, those without the resources and legal tools to fight back – are expected to deal with it for the common good.

The speed with which deepfake technology has advanced, coupled with the absence of meaningful legal frameworks to protect victims, demonstrates how we have forgotten the lessons of the reforming regulations of past technological and economic change. When profit-seeking successfully conceals itself in the morality of progress and aligns against human dignity, dignity loses, and we are all made poorer. Now we are told that privacy and informed consumer-consent are obstacles to the future. Just as artists should own their work, people should own their lives, including their digital lives.

Ideas from Across the Pond: Reclaiming Digital Self-Ownership

North Americans are not the only ones dealing with these concerns, rather we are merely the most susceptible to the false-autonomy arguments and appeals to progress as an unquestioned moral good. However, alternative models for digital rights exist that point toward a more human arrangement. Modern society, that is the digital society, requires that we have positive as well as negative rights regarding our privacy and identities. The European Union (EU) crafted a General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that developed a right to digital erasure also know as the "right to be forgotten" where individuals can request companies delete their personal data and in particular circumstances the organizations must comply. This is a step in the right direction. There are caveats as the official GDPR sites states:

The right to control one’s data is meaningless if people cannot take action when they no longer consent to processing, when there are significant errors within the data, or if they believe information is being stored unnecessarily. In these cases, an individual can request that the data be erased. But this is not an absolute right. If it were, the critics who argue that the right to be forgotten amounts to nothing more than a rewriting of history would be correct. Thus, the GDPR walks a fine line on data erasure.

Yet, it is the Danish Realm that has created the ingenious way of dealing with personal digital ownership. A new law introduced in Denmark’s parliament the Folketing would give every Dane a copyright on their own face and voice, including “realistic, digitally generated imitations.” Such a law in the USA would evade the specious free-speech claims of deep-fakers by making the grievance a commercial one rather than a civil liberty dispute. It also reenforces the proper understanding that an individual does not exist to serve the market, but the market exists to serve individuals.

Together, these policies suggest that democracies can develop frameworks where the real-world person maintains meaningful ownership over their digital selves. For Americans to break free from this new form of digital commodification, we must move beyond the language of autonomy to embrace the stronger concept of self-ownership. Autonomy, while valuable in certain circumstances, implies merely the absence of external coercion. Self-ownership goes further, asserting that individuals have a positive right to control and benefit from their own digital presence, data, and identity. This distinction is crucial because surveillance capitalism has learned to operate within and exploit the framework of formal autonomy — users technically "choose" to accept terms of service, even when making choices under conditions of information asymmetry and economic coercion. But an engaged democratic population can set new terms of service, with the law.