Computer hardware and software are merely tools, like saws and hammers. You can use the same tools to build a house or to build a jail.  Unfortunately, beginning around 1980, corporations have been intent upon building a lot of computerized jails for their customers. Increasingly, the power imbalance between individuals and corporations makes customers the equivalent of prisoners. They have little choice but to accept whatever terms corporations, unleashed by rightwing political destruction of regulations, dictate. An individual disputing their grasping licensing terms, their relentless targeted ads, their constant contractual changes, their strip-mining of personal information is as likely to succeed as a prison inmate is likely to get the warden to change the prison rules.

Computerization has reified the worldview that everything is a transaction, as someone put it so well:

“neoliberal ideology renders all relationships transactional, and all community monetarily determined and market-defined”.

On the internet, Ms. Thatcher infamous assetion would be true: there really is no such thing as society there. It is just a giant playpen run by Libertarian billionaires, who change the rules as they see fit when they see fit.

1. Early days - Trashing Customer Service

The new corporatist soft dictatorship has been enabled by the depersonalization provided by computer technology. Getting rid of human contact has allowed corporate callousness to increase without bounds. Computers have essentially created a castle wall that keeps customer complaints and scrutiny out. It started in the 1980s, with automatic teller machines and voice mail. Banks used ATMs to fire most of their customer-facing staffs. They did that by making the ATMs free. In a classic bait-and-switch scenario, as soon as the staff were fired, all the banks started charging fees for ATMs and forcing people into one or another corporate-loyalty fiefdom.

Around the same time, corporations that were already geographically distant used the newly invented voice mail systems (with no legal regulation of how complicated and time-consuming reaching an actual person is) to further forestall customers from having a fair chance to get a hearing for a billing mistake, a defective product, or identity theft. Complaints fell on the deaf ears of computers.

But, the definitive impact of early computerization was on Wall St. It is not well-known that Wall St. was one of the largest purchasers of the computer workstations that catapulted Silicon Valley into the economic stratosphere, beginning around 1980. Mike Bloomberg got rich with his “Bloomberg box” stock info terminals. Trading volume shot through the roof, consisting mostly of parasitical stock churning, arbitrage(see NOTE at end), and computerized boiler-room/bucketshops. The increased clout of finance enabled the legalization of stock buybacks, which are a major force behind the current “anti-gravity” behavior of stock prices. Computerization has replaced investing in the long term value of a company with making ultra-short term arbitrage moves via “high frequency trading” algorithms that are divorced from value and are little more than front running - not to mention that the algorithms are so arcane that no one really understands how they interact with each other.

2. The Libertarian Continent

The commercialization of DARPA’s Internet set off by Tim Berners Lee’s web browser was the equivalent of discovering a new continent. At first, no one owned it (or in this case, the government, having created it, gave it away to corporations for nothing). And, this new continent had no laws. At first, lack of law was not a problem because the internet was barely connected to the real world. It was just a different flavor of teletype. Yes, your website’s name became “property”, and real world money was exchanged to purchase those site names. But that was about it, at the beginning.

The demon of extra-territoriality raised its head when retailers, led by Amazon, showed up and started selling stuff. Amazon simply refused to pay any sales taxes at all, giving it an instant 5 to 10 percent advantage over any of its competitors. Businessmen on the internet, created by the government with taxpayer money, had decided it was to be “governed” by Libertarian contractual authoritarianism. Click-through licenses became the bane of customers, and led to increasingly bold claims of “ownership” by corporations, not to mention signing away your right to sue.

Wall St., recognizing the regulation smashing abilities the lawless internet, funded every cockamamie internet startup in the madness of the late 1990s. What Wall St. wanted, and got, from buying all those lottery tickets were a few gigantic corporations totally free of regulation that became huge monopolies and collected huge monopoly profits: Amazon, Google, Facebook. Lately, internet companies are not content to leave the Libertarianism online. Instead, you have Uber, AirBnB, and others openly flouting laws and regulations in the real world, and fighting the lawsuits against their depredations with money lavishly supplied by Wall St. Uber lost almost $3B in the last year, but Wall St. still loves their smash-and-grab business model.

Corporations want to turn everything you do into a transaction, and charge you a fee for each one. They want automatic tolls on every road. (Your not supposed to notice that they track every car on the road to do that.) They want paywalls on every website. They want a fee on every financial transaction, and they want to eliminate cash to make sure their tollbooths can’t be bypassed. They want to own all the media and simply rent it or lease it back to you. (Pay per view instead of buying a DVD; Amazon Kindle’s “close account, lose books” policy.)  It is all about monopoly rent. This behavior is not limited to the net; it is endemic throughout our money-mad “society”. Banks charge you a fee for taking out your own money. Cut-rate airlines charge you an extra fee to print your boarding pass.

Corporations also want to know everything you do, ostensibly to sell stuff; in reality, to spy on you, build a profile on you, manipulate you - and if you get out of line, turn you over to the corporate-owned government to fine you and arrest you. A recent BBC story highlights the fact that your printer prints a yellow dot code to identify on what machine and when a document was produced. As some wag said,

“the purpose of the Internet of Things is to spy on you.”

When you accept the rights-grabbing corporate terms, that’s not the end of it. You are also subject to massive time theft, uncertainty, and harassment. Junk email, relentless popup ads, and robocalls that ignore do-not-call laws are the order of the day in our Libertarian cyber-hell. If you ever talk to (or e-chat with) a human being, they are probably part of the precariat - stuck in the bullshit job of trying to part you from your money. As for the actual transaction, the term “nuisance shifting” refers to corporate structuring of transactions to force the customer to do the corporation’s work for them for free. Even then, you have to navigate the deliberately complex websites. You have to deal with the completely confusing and non-standard interfaces. Once every few months, you are hit with yet another five page restatement of the contract terms, some of which would baffle a Jesuit.

Thanks to the predictably draconian Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the centuries-old practice of reverse-engineering is now, in the case of software, considered to be a crime. Recently, this confiscation has been extended to hardware with any software in it. Case in point: tractor manufacturers lock farmers out of doing their own repairs and force them to use not only manufacturers’ parts, but manufacturers’ technicians, who can take days to show up – no matter that delayed repair can lead to ruined crops.

Thanks to the DMCA, the right of first sale, that is, the right to do what you want with something you paid for (and therefore “own”), is increasingly moot. The elimination of property for the plebs is the end goal of the confiscators. In Libertarian paradise, only corporations and billionaires will be permitted to have ownership. Everyone else will be renters, leasees, fee payers - all enforced by software on the chumps’ cellphones. When corporate feudalism comes to America, it will be wrapped in an app and carrying a credit card reader.

The final confiscation is your rights as a citizen. With electronic voting machines, corporations have effectively privatized voting. That is, they have confiscated your vote. Voting today is carried out on trade-secret platforms (protected by the odious DMCA) that have been proven time and again to be easily hackable via the internet or via a piece of thumb drive malware. Electronic voting gives no paper trail, but exit polling indicates massive departures of counted votes from exit polls. In a real democracy, “trust me” e-voting would be banned; and any honest e-voting would be run by governments on open software, not by corporations with deep partisan ties and agendas.

3. Its a Libertarian world. We just live in it.

Uncontrolled computerization has, within one generation, created a new and untouchable oligarchy of Libertarian billionaires, many of them under-socialized savants like the infamous Robert Mercer or the now mellowing Bill Gates. The leverage that computers give these adepts has not been countered by any kind of regulation, so they basically own the economy, have veto power in Congress, and extract monopoly rent as they please. The loot they collect is plowed back into the political process to rewrite even more laws in their favor in a positive feedback loop of governmental and societal deconstruction that gladdens the hearts of the Koch Brothers. All this came to pass because the government retained no rights to, royalties from, or control over the internet that it spent 20 years creating, and because it refused to collect any taxes on internet transactions for almost an entire generation.

The bottom line is that the rich get to write and change the rules of the net, as they please, to their advantage. For them, it’s always about playing with the rules. From the beginning, settled law has been excluded. The internet is completely corporate controlled. Google and Facebook decide what will be censored. Googled, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft (GAAFM) decide what info will be collected and sold. The only politics left on the corporate-controlled FCC is the fight between GAAFM and the old-school telecom folks at Verizon about who gets to extract what monopoly rents. The rights of citizens don’t count anymore. Because that’s so, the FCC will kill Net Neutrality in the next few months.

The fact that copying and storing computer data is essentially free has been pre-empted by a massive lobbying campaign to “protect” outrageously expanded claims of copyright, and ever-broader software patents. Copyright has been turned into a massive inheritance that, at no cost to the “owner”, increasingly pauperizes every consumer of what should be free media. In 2013, there was an successful lawsuit against the infamous copyright holder of the Happy Birthday song.

That’s right, someone was still collecting royalties on a twenty-word ditty written in the early 1900s, and if someone hadn’t found a century old piece of music in a musty drawer proving that the original copyright was invalid, we would still be paying for the “right” to play Happy Birthday. Copyright is a huge part of the Intellectual Property confiscation racket that has inserted itself in the middle of too many transactions, paralyzing the livelihoods of small businesses (like the documentary filmmaker in the lawsuit about HB) who can’t afford to pay this legal viggorish.

4. The internet has become a centralized monoculture. Its touted “freedom” is a mirage.

Another deliberately avoided fact about the wired world is that computer-based “decentralization” is really centralization. Five companies (GAAFM) create and control the virtual reality in which the rest of humanity is forced to live. The fact is that the major computer monopolies employ very few people. For example, Google has only 25,000 employees (but well over one million servers). These are very smart people, creating and maintaining incredibly complex software and hardware infrastructures. The fanboys may praise “decentralization” and “disintermediation”, but that is simply a lie. Control of the internet is tightly held in a handful of major corporations. The best new entrepreneurs who survive “infant mortality” can hope for is a lucrative buyout offer from one of the Big Five. Because the internet has insinuated itself into almost every transaction, even established non-computer businesses will be bought out as the capitalist demand for unending growth forces GAAFM to grab ever bigger shares of the economy. For example, just today, Amazon purchased Whole Foods, for $13.7 Billion.

The downside of the software monoculture created by GAAFM is that it is always one nasty piece of malware away from chaos. Those infrastructures are a big juicy target for all kinds of ransomeware artists, identity thieves, crooks, terrorists, and hostile governments (can you say Stuxnet?). And those are just the threats when GAAFM are functioning well. People are getting fed up with the smug adolescents running this show, as the protests against Google buses in San Francisco showed. Imagine if some terrorist group decided to blow up a significant GAAFM office complex, killing the critical engineers that know how to keep things running.

The technical bottom line here is that monopolization/centralization/monoculture leads to hacks. Hacks lead to constant updates. Constant updates lead to immense time wasted as updated systems fail to sync correctly with other systems. It resembles the constant erosion of our civil rights to deal with “terrorism”. Both auto-immune diseases would never have gotten as bad as they are if the corporations were willing to forego some profit in the name of social stability.

But they are not willing. Further centralization is coming - driverless cars and trucks. Ten million truck drivers will be replaced by some tiny number of programmers, while the manufacturing will either be sent to China or be automated. The job destruction will be worse than going from 250k GM workers to 25k google employees. Even more awful, can you imagine the disaster if a piece of Stuxnet-like malware got loose among automated trucks? Worse than that, in a generation, no one will know how to drive a truck - how to maneuver the trailer, how to shift gears, how to manage the massive inertia of these vehicles in bad driving conditions. When a Hurricane Sandy event knocks out the power in that situation, who is going to drive trucks that depend on routes downloaded from the internet?

5. This will end badly

As the back-to-back election of a fraud pretending to be a liberal and a fraud pretending to be a populist prove, we have a government of money, by money, and for money. This is enshrined in the Citizens United unlimited, secret bribery decision of the SCOTUS. It is exemplified by the Washington Post being owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who instantly received a CIA contract worth more than twice what he payed for the paper. Free press? Fair elections? Whom are you kidding? Politics is over because the billionaire class decided to dispense with it. Frank Zappa has proven to be a prophet.

With the political system blocked from taking corrective action against internet confiscation, it is only a question of when the society reaches a tipping point, a question of what spark is going to blow this leaking gas tank sky high? It is fair to say that, over the last thirty years, never has so much been stolen from so many by so few. And, those few, insulated in their monetary cocoons, do not seem to care that they are destroying that which supports them: the society and the environment. As true Libertarians, they believe that the people whose livelihoods they have destroyed are “losers”; they believe that environmental regulation is a “taking”, an impediment to progress.

They will go on believing that fantasy until the society they have looted explodes in rage and/or the environment collapses. The only thing that will get through to these people are events that actually touch them (or their fetishized assets). In their typical arrogant manner, these Libertarian assholes are already buying survival shelters in old missile silos or in New Zealand. They are smart enough to see trouble coming, but too stupid to back off the confiscation that is causing the trouble. What more could you expect from greedy adolescent boys? I hate to mention to them that someone on the internet is probably already compiling a list of where all these high-end hideouts are located, so that the mobs will know where to go.

6. In conclusion

So long as the political left fails to formulate a strategy to deal with the complete Libertarian/neoliberal control of the computer companies that increasingly are attaching Chains of Silicon to all us proles, the left will easily be ignored, sabotaged, or simply blacklisted.

Bernie's campaign succeeded on the computer front to the extent it did because the current power structure didn't take it seriously. The only real sabotage was when they opened a window into HRC's campaign and tried to get Bernie's IT staff to go fishing. That was a transparent flop. Corbyn used Bernie's people, and he did it in a country where campaigns last six weeks and the voting machines have yet to be hacked.

Next time around, leftie computer folk had better be ready for the worst that the CIA can throw at them. Because they will.

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NOTE: At one point, one firm - D.E. Shaw - was trading 10% of the volume of the NYSE, and doing so for purposes of international arbitrage. Just FYI, Dr. Shaw gave his employee, Jeff Bezos, money and encouragement to start Amazon.

Shaw's trading volume is sometimes equal to 5% (NOTE: other sources say 10%) of the total volume of the New York Stock Exchange.

Fortune Magazine, 1996