We’ve been here before.
We outlawed “enslavement”, the ownership of people as if property. We outlawed “involuntary servitude” intending to prohibit the work-around arrangements — debt peonage, coerced “apprenticeships,” contract laws with criminal penalties — and anything else that could recreate slavery’s compulsion without calling it “ownership.”
Yet today we tacitly publically grant all others the legal right to use our behaviors as if our personal agencies are public assets.
This commonly accepted assumed right to use each other (as if public-use-assets) hides itself inside a dark loophole in the Constitution —a loophole through which the right to free speech has come to trump the right not to be involuntary servants.
Is It a Form of Slavery?
- Thirteenth Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude … shall exist within the United States.”
- Traditional slavery was explicit ownership of people.
- But: if corporations and political actors hold a recognized right to treat people’s attention, choices, and learning as harvestable resources – they are granted a legal right to use humans as if they were assets.
- This is arguably a structural form of servitude: not ownership of the body, but of the conditions of the mind.
The current regime effectively licenses a form of slavery in all but name – vastly more insidious because it operates invisibly, pervasively, and with the full protection of speech and commerce doctrines. The legal system simply hasn’t caught up to this recognition.
Constitutional Argument Waiting to Be Made
- Our rights to life and liberty must subordinate any claim of “speech” or “property” that enables systematic manipulation.
- Just as product liability protects us from unsafe physical products, we need an analogous doctrine protecting us from unsafe cognitive/behavioral products.
- Failing to do so tacitly grants corporations a constitutional right to enslave attention and agency.
On the Question: Should People Be Considered Property?
- Explicitly: Almost everyone today would say No. The abolition of slavery is universally understood as moral bedrock.
- Implicitly (in practice): Most people live, consume, and vote as if this is settled. The very idea of owning another human is repugnant, outside the moral imagination.
- Where people are: Broad consensus against human beings as property. That battle was won in principle and law by the 13th Amendment.
On the Question: Can People Be Manipulated Involuntarily into Economic or Political Servitude?
- Explicitly: Most would say No. If you asked directly, “Should corporations or governments have the right to manipulate your choices without your consent?” most people would reject it.
- Implicitly (in practice):
- Billions engage daily with platforms, products, and political media that are explicitly designed to manipulate behavior.
- People treat it as normal commerce, entertainment, and politics rather than as servitude.
- Consent is often reduced to a “click” or “scroll” that masks coercion-by-design.
- Where people are: Functionally complicit. They accept involuntary manipulation as the “price of participation” in modern life, without framing it as a violation of liberty.
Why the Difference?
- Slavery’s visibility vs. manipulation’s invisibility.
- Slavery was embodied in chains, auctions, plantations – impossible to deny once confronted.
- Manipulation is hidden in code, interfaces, and market abstractions – easy to normalize and ignore.
- Legal closure vs. legal loophole.
- The 13th Amendment drew a bright constitutional line.
- No such line exists yet for cognitive liberty; the First Amendment + property rights create a presumption in favor of manipulative practices.
- Moral confrontation vs. pragmatic drift.
- Slavery forced a direct confrontation between property and humanity.
- Manipulation creeps in gradually, always framed as “innovation” or “choice,” never as coercion.
The chains are no longer so obvious – more techno-economic. Most people are oblivious. The root is a dark loophole in the Constitution in which the right to free speech has come to trump the right not to be involuntary servants (as if we are all just inservantable assets – as if we are all conscriptable assets – as if we are all citizen livestock).
“We the people” are now “econo-bots” – and “polibots” – we are treated as predictably, strategically, covertly manipulable crops that can be seeded and harvested.
We must constitutionally redefine involuntary servitude to include manipulating people’s agency into economic or political subservancy.
The above was excerpts from:
For how this fits in ….https://davidboulton.com/politics-ethics-links/
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