I Know I Said Yes, But I Meant NO
about consent under capitalism
We like consent. Especially for sex, medical procedures, and use of our personal data. Of course, there are grey areas. Some folks who don’t like sweets may think that the cookie banner that's legally required in the EU has ruined the internet. I like real-life cookies, but I hit REJECT ALL on the digital cookies because they are not sweet, they are sour. And the cake is so much bigger than this.
In 2020 when the crimes of monstrous sexual predators became known, and an open discussion about consent took place in the wake of Me Too, there were concerns that explicit consent risked ruining passion. We laughed at the idea of a man producing a contract and a pen before removal of panties to ensure he wouldn't be hauled up in front of a judge a week later, innocent of any wrong doing. We giggled about all those poor women with rape fantasies, who didn’t want to be forced into giving consent either. Those were muddy times. Clear for most of us, but muddy for some people.
That following year, WhatsApp presented users with an ultimatum of consent to share their data with Facebook, as part of their plan for interoperability. In response, lots of people downloaded Signal. Lots of others, I imagine, chose not to read the proposal, because reading would put them at risk of knowing, and knowing would risk forming an opinion, and forming an opinion might require making a stand, which takes energy. "I would love to leave WhatsApp but I'm just in so many groups" is a dependence effect. It’s about sticking with tradition, even if it’s bad. It’s about FOMO and belonging, regardless of circumstances. [And this is why I believe everyone should quit WhatsApp.]
Consent sounds like a question but is often a trade-off. We encounter incremental trade-offs maybe daily, and in the majority of cases we don't notice them because they are too small to feel like they matter. But they do matter, because without our consent, borne out by the billion daily trade-offs in society, the system would fall apart. It’s the system which holds us together in employment, which gives rise to production and in turn, to profit.
Many of these are legacy consents. The length of the working week, the working hours of the day. When we partake in these norms, when we trade-off for the opportunity to exchange our time and efforts for money, we are consenting to the whims of a handful of people for whom that trade-off is a pattern to accrue as much capital as possible. When we partake in the trade-off, we give our consent for it to continue, knowing that the only people who can change it are the those who have replaced the top-hatted rule makers of the past.
What would it look like to say no? To say, "I don't consent to this". For most of us, the trade-off is too great to test it out. In his book, The Age of Consent, George Monbiot notes that when a corporation (which to his mind is merely a tool) has rights that outweigh the rights of a person, it must be destroyed.
What are we supposed to do then with social platforms and apps that have become inevitable in our lives? They operate with our implied consent to their rules. This implied consent has a heavy price for us. We trade off social interaction with surveillance capitalism (see a response to Zuboff here: 1). We exist inside walled gardens that refuse to let us go.
To understand, think of this: Could you get a new job without LinkedIn? Could you run a small customer-facing business without Instagram? Could you take part in social groups in your community without a messaging app? We have consented to these fortresses with our millions of likes, and now we are beholden to both our devices and the men that run the apps on them.
The hard truth about consent is that the consenting parties are almost never on the same level, in our economy. They are hardly equals. When we consent to offer our time and silks for a salary, we cannot choose to reject elements of the transaction. We cannot choose to disobey orders from managers. We cannot choose our own promotions, our bonuses, the hours of our work. We cannot consent to the strategies of our company, we cannot consent to not shutting down our factory, we cannot refuse massive layoffs, we cannot refuse outsourcing.
This version of transactional consent that favours massively the employer, and the capital-owing class, is the backbone of the system. It is the blood of capitalism. The three major organs of the system: power, property, and capital, communicate through doctrines that are carved into law. The appear as immutable. These doctrines: proportionality, dispossession, and hierarchies, require massive acceptance from everyone in society.
We have no choice but to consent to this arrangement, to allow the beast to expand its territory. Specifically, we must agree to give more power to those who own more capital, when we allow humans to have as many votes as they have shares in a company. That is the doctrine of proportionality. We must agree to sit in our given place in the economic hierarchy, whether it is an organisational chart, membership into elite circles, access to social privileges. That is the doctrine of hierarchies. We must agree to dispossession, when land is taken for natural gas pipes, when our personal data is harvested by Big Tech and sold to advertisers. That is the doctrine of dispossession.
Consent in electoral democracy is yet another perversion of a social contract that is supposed to benefit both parties, equally. You vote for a candidate to represent you in government. You consent to giving them power to do things on your behalf, for your benefit. This blanket generic form of consent does not describe the specifics of the arrangement. We cast our vote and we go home. We come back in four years and do it again. During those four years, that politician has our consent to do essentially whatever they want. They don’t even have to pretend to keep their promises. Nobody forces them to deliver on those promises. In fact, they can do the exact opposite, only to expect our anger and punishment at the next election when we may decide to vote them out of office. This flaw in electoral democracy is called passive consent.
By keeping business as usual, we will not find cure for these massive problems with consent in our society. While consent always is an expression of a relationship between two humans, or between groups of humans, that relationship will always produce oppression if it does not have rules and boundaries to prevent bad outcomes.
Rules and boundaries are in fact entangled in the fabric of any society. You may be a hardcore libertarian and reject any rules, however, in the moment you step outside your property or your private space, you enter society, you enter the space covered by law, you enter the space of many other humans. Obviously, you may not consent to the law, or to how society is organized. Which leaves you only with the option of staying inside your house, if you don’t like the rules.
There is good news, though. We can fix these problems.
We can phase out electoral democracy and transition to legislature by lot. Ancient Athenians have formed their government from regular citizens selected at random, with some exceptions. That’s called sortition. We can do even better, since we do not have slaves anymore, and include all adult citizens in the random selection. In this way, we phase out political parties, corrupted politicians, enormous waste of time and money with elections, polarization around ideologies, lack of accountability. There is serious research being done about this much better form of democracy. It is being used already in selecting participants for citizen assemblies.
We can phase out unelected hierarchies and transition to economic democracy. Power cascades top-down in all unelected hierarchies, whether it is the Nazi Party, the military, or a modern corporation. From that point of view there is no difference between fascist, communist, and capitalist states. They all operate with unelected hierarchies. What if we had a simple rule, that no person should have a position of power without the explicit informed consent of those humans whose lives can be influenced by the person with power? What if workers had the power to consent who gets to be a manager over them, for how long, and with what salary? What if managers were selected at random, for a limited term, from a list of equally qualified interested candidates? What if workers had the power to fire a manager for incompetence or abuse, at any time?
We can bring informed consent to the forefront of transactions. Even now, when we consent to allow cookies in websites to collect our data, we do not really know in detail, how our data is going to be used. In all transactions that involve personal data, the ultimate use of your data should be disclosed upfront, to the most specific possible use. If you want to sell your personal data, you may do so, on the condition that you are informed about how the buyer is going to profit from it. You must also be compensated if the buyer gains financially from your data. Remember, your data is part of your person.
We can set explicit limits to consent. You should not be able to consent to separate your personal data from your person. Personal data is by definition an integral part of your identity. Much like you cannot remove an arm or parts of your brain and still be the same person, you can not remove your personal data without altering your person. Even better, if we want, we can also enjoy the social freedom to willingly alter our own person. This should also come with explicit knowledge about the consequences. Minors cannot fully consent to many transactions and obligations, because they do not posses the mental capacity to be aware of all consequences. Adults are only better at this game, but they also come short. That is why when you consent to something, you should be made aware of the consequences to your person. It is about sticking the equivalent of a SMOKING KILLS label on everything that is asking for money. It is also about sticking a positive label KNOWING IS GOOD on decisions done in your name that are also going to affect you.
Consent is everything. It’s about time we made it matter.