Legitimisation

Roughly five centuries ago, indigenous peoples across the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa began to encounter a particularly aggressive form of “European hospitality.” Not content with simply saying hello, Europeans arrived with flags, firearms, and a staggering sense of entitlement, swiftly laying claim to other people’s lands and resources. Resistance was typically met with massacres — yes, including women and children, because apparently conquest was a family affair. Survivors were often rewarded with disease, chains, or both. Charming. ...

There’s a certain charm to grey areas. They’re neither here nor there—like a politician’s promise or a cookie consent banner. Let’s have a wander through three choice examples of how law, tech, and coercion intersect in a fog of plausible deniability. We’ll start where the term “consent” first gained cultural weight—sexual consent—and then follow its cheerful migration into digital life, courtesy of everyone’s favourite data vampires. 1. Sexual consent: A legal fiction? Let’s be honest. “Sexual consent” exists mostly as a legal construct. It’s the tidy phrase we reach for when courts, lawyers, and HR departments need to put human messiness into bullet points. ...

You’d think something called the General Data Protection Regulation might actually protect data. You’d be wrong. Along with its elder cousin, the ICCPR, GDPR was hailed as the Great Hope™—a beacon of digital dignity in a world run by surveillance capitalists. But instead of taming the beast, it handed it a clipboard and told it to tick some boxes. The GDPR officially kicked in at the stroke of midnight on 25 May 2018, like some sort of data privacy Cinderella. It was meant to give users the sacred gift of choice—to say yes or no to having their personal lives vacuumed up, analysed, monetised, and passed around like cheap party favours. What we actually got was an avalanche of “consent” banners and passive-aggressive pop-ups saying: “Agree or get lost.” ...

That fine, silken cloak draped over the naked emperor of power, carefully stitched with phrases like “you ought to”, “you must”, or the always-a-red-flag “we are required to”. One might almost think these words were woven by bureaucrats with a thesaurus in one hand and a sledgehammer in the other. At its core, legitimate power is the quiet agreement that some people get to tell others what to do—not because they’re better, brighter, or morally upright, but because we’ve all tacitly accepted a hierarchy that says, “Yes, you get the chair at the head of the table… and I’ll just sit over here by the bin, cheers.” ...