I. On Permission
On December 4, 2010, four American companies decided that an organization no longer had the right to exist financially: Visa, Mastercard, PayPal, and Bank of America.
WikiLeaks had not been convicted by any court. No law had been proven to have been broken. But one morning, the money stopped going through, and it was as if the tap had been shut off. Not by a court decision. By a corporate decision.
If you think this is an extreme case, you have not understood.
Because what happened to WikiLeaks that day is exactly what can happen to you tomorrow, without you having done anything comparable.
Your bank account can be suspended for a reason the bank is not required to tell you. Your account on the platform where you work can be closed for violating a rule that did not exist last week. Your access to an essential service can be cut off because someone, somewhere, ticked a box in an automated system that no one truly supervises.
They call this terms of service. It is a polite way of saying: you have no rights, you have a tolerance.
And tolerance, by definition, can be withdrawn.
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The important word here is not prohibition. It is permission.
You think you are doing things, but in reality, at every moment, you are being granted permission to do them. That permission is so fluid, so invisible, so deeply integrated into the experience that you never notice it, until the day it disappears.
And on that day, you discover that everything you thought you owned was only a conditional authorization.
The real problem is not that these decisions are sometimes unfair. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not, that is not the point. The real problem is that they are possible.
An infrastructure that allows arbitrary disconnection remains dangerous even when it is managed by reasonable people, because reasonable people are one day replaced by other people, while the architecture remains.
So when you are told that you are free because you can do more or less whatever you want inside the system, ask yourself what would happen if tomorrow the system decided that you no longer could.
If the answer terrifies you, then it was not freedom.
It was a rental.
