Modern society has a very large element of exploitation in it. This occurs at different levels and is manifested in different ways. All of us play a role in it. We are at the same time exploiters and the exploited. Over time, the level and sophistication of the exploitation has increased at an ever rapid pace. This increase has largely been driven by technology. In this sense, technology is an enabler and at the same time an enslaver.
One of the primary requirements for exploitation is information. In order to exploit people and situations, we need access to the appropriate information. This does not mean that exploitation will not occur in the absence of information. It will. It will merely be done at a very crude level. Every transaction and interaction has a physical component and an informational component. It is the informational component that is vital for exploitation to take place.
While we are surrounded by an invisible web of information, for most of history, it was very difficult to actually capture and use it in any meaningful fashion. The cost and difficulty of doing so was simply too large. Technology has always been used to try and capture this information. The development of writing and the increasing sophistication of writing materials were amongst the first steps in this regard. However, the pace of technological change in the past was simply too low to allow for widespread gathering of the necessary information. The industrial revolution changed that. The technological changes it engendered in many different fields increasingly enabled larger and larger quanta of information to be efficiently and ever cheaply gathered. This enabled exploitation on a previously unimaginable scale. The forced labor of Stalinist Russia was only possible by the technological advances made possible with the Industrial Revolution.
Today, with several different technologies converging, the amount of data that is captured on a daily basis by a wide variety of organizations is simply astonishing. The limiting factor right now is processing this information into usable knowledge in a reasonable time and at a reasonable cost and there is a large amount of serious research that is looking into this aspect. The advances made therein have allowed people to be exploited with ever greater efficiency and ruthlessness. At the same time, we have mostly been convinced that we are not being exploited at all.
A prime example of this is modern globalization. At the start of this process, blue collar jobs got outsourced. Middle class fears were allayed by the claim that advanced economies can concentrate on more value added, knowledge intensive work while the affected workers were convinced that job losses were their own fault. Again, technology was a prime enabler for the process by lowering transportation and communication costs to a level where management of far flung factories became possible in almost real time. Also from this time on the blue collar jobs that remained had this particular sword hanging over their heads. But technological forces also enabled the exploitation of middle class jobs. The knowledge jobs that were supposed to be the domain of the advanced economies can just as easily (and more cheaply) done by developing economies because no one has a lock of acquiring knowledge. This enabled middle class workers to be exploited as well by playing on fears of losing jobs.
Another great enabler and exploiter has been the Internet. This has allowed for new kinds of goods and services which have become integral parts of our professional and private lives. People can express themselves in ways that were simply not possible before. The rise of bloggers is an excellent example of this. Before the Net, the publishing houses acted as gatekeepers. They decided who got published and who did not. Here printing technology had liberated by lowering the cost of a book but enabled a group (publishers) to exploit another one (authors). The Internet enabled a larger group of people to bypass the gatekeepers and get themselves published at a nominal cost. Blogging has become a powerful and empowering phenomenon. At the same time, bloggers have been arrested and otherwise harassed for writing about things that powerful interests do not want to be generally aired: the most prominent example of this being Wikileaks. Again technology broke one form of exploitation and acted as a liberating force. At the same time, it made possible a different form of exploitation.
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