Mobile technology is turning us all into feudal serfs

[Commentary] Mobile technology is essentially dematerializing all forms of capital into cloud-based commodities. It sounds so futuristic, but the reality is feudal: Our money, our friends, our whereabouts, even our thoughts and desires, are being siphoned into corporate servers, turning us into digital serfs.

Can we be free when our encounters with the media are dominated by an engineered response? Can we be free in a culture where information is exponentially propagated and propagandized? Is freedom possible with omnipotent eyes in the sky? How can it be when satellites, global positioning services, and geolocation devices increasingly direct and record our experience? By consciously expressing more dominion over our lives (and insisting that access providers hold to this ideal), we can transcend our technologies to ensure that the elements of life that sustain our humanity – our freedoms, our realities, our present moments, and predictive futures – will not vanish in the clouds.

[Walshe is a librarian and professor at Long Island University in Brookville, New York]