A Fatal Cancelation In the Kingdom of Ebay
The tragic story of a cyber-captain who was subjected to a lifetime revocation for a failed purchase and travelled to Silicon Valley. Instead of advanced capitalism there, he encountered an archaic feudal structure…
The other day I wanted to buy sandals that were only available on Ebay — one copy and the right size for me. As it turned out, my old account, which I had not used for about ten years, was blocked. It was almost impossible to get feedback. Ebay was blocked from user complaints by a sound-reflecting screen and bullet-proof Panzerglals. The chatbot offered to contact them through my account, but my account was blocked. Finally, after studying dozens of complaints and recommendations on forums, I tried to write through another company, Facebook. For this I had to dig through old SIM cards and addresses of rented rooms, but even after sending all the necessary information I received a negative response. A half-bot half-employee politely added that they knew the reason for my blocking, but would never reveal it to me.
At that moment, I felt a shamover, a slight shame + hangover, that anxious state when you wake up after a drunken party in absolute unconsciousness. Feeling tremors in my hands and a buzzing in my head, I started going through scraps of memories and unreasonably feared something terrible I might have done in my youth. What cyberstalking did I do ten years ago? What rules of the ebay community did I dare to violate? Whose digital security did I jeopardise? I remember that period of my life vaguely, vaguely and distantly, as if I were hungover. I think I was making a movie and buying an old film camera. I remember a problem with a money transaction. Paypal, a company formerly closely associated with ebay, froze a couple of hundred pounds in my account and would not transfer it to the seller. I called Silicon Valley for days, where they refused to tell me the fate of my money.
This feedback system, which is created by Ebay, Paypal and many other monopolies, can be characterised by the concept of "incastellamento" (incastellation). This term is used by historical science to describe the process of widespread construction of castles in Mediaeval Europe, which became a hallmark of feudalism. It is no coincidence that Peter Thiel, the inventor of the Paypal payment system, who is also known for his monarchical views, refers to this very socio-economic formation: "No founder or CEO has absolute power. It’s more like the archaic feudal structure. People vest the top person with all sorts of power and ability, and then blame them if and when things go wrong." Silicon Valley techno-giants, like mediaeval lords, establish their own jurisdictions, and when things go wrong, they hide like clams in the noise-proof shell of their fortresses.
In Facebook messenger, I asked again whether my revocation was for life and whether there was anything I could do to reform myself in the future, because even criminals, I added, after serving their time, return to society, get a job and sometimes have families. The half-human half-robot repeated that my account was blocked forever, and there was no point in starting a new one, as all my attempts would be immediately stopped by the security service. The last time I decided to stand up for myself, I wrote to my match on Tinder, whose profile said "works at Ebay". But he too, after hearing my horror story, laughed and recommended using any other marketplace. Neither appeals to common sense nor sexual corruption could remove the locks. A bot from India and a match from Santa Cruz made me realise that my cancellation has no statute of limitations, no right of appeal, no public penance, no penal correction. It is a life sentence and irredeemable karma. Cancellation by Ebay is corporate fatal cancelling.
When faced with the impregnable fortress of the IT giant, I felt like the malenkiy chelovek, the small, unimportant and powerless man, a common figure in Russian 19th literature. An anonymous and unattainable bureaucracy decided my fate. In Russian novelist of Ukrainian origin Nikolay Gogol's “Dead Souls” there was a Captain Kopeikin, who lost an arm and a leg in the war with Napoleon. He went to St. Petersburg to pound the pavement of government offices and the palaces of high-ranking nobles in the hope of receiving compensation for his war injuries. The literary hero, who failed to reach the monarch's favour, looked at the inaccessible luxury, which was transmitted through the glass to the street and only intensified thanks to one and a half-sized mirrors. The excessive capital's wealth seemed to him something “oriental” because of its foreignness. In it he saw "Scheherazade fairyland", “the hanging gardens of Semiramis”, "Persia itself".
But imagine what would happen if I decided, like Captain Kopeikin, to go to a private audience with the founder of Ebay, Pierre Morad Omidyar. To fly in, hidden in the landing gear compartment, to find out why the hell I could not restore my account and buy my favourite sandals for the summer? I would have been greeted not by the ostentatious consumption of imperial St. Petersburg, but by the Protestant hypocrisy of modestly transparent modernist architecture. Thanks to the abundance of screens, the interior of this building would have immersed me in the flow of information, which, according to the design bureau NBBJ studio, reflects the transparency and horizontality of an IT-corporation. In reality, this immersive installation would have told me the following: "the state throws you around like a poodle over whom a cook has thrown a pail of water, ”from doorstep to doorstep, while the corporation throws you around from server to server. Hannah Arendt was right when she saw the origins of totalitarianism in bureaucracy!
Nevertheless, I would not despair and go to trample with my bare feet the capitals of his Excellency Pierre Morad Omidyar. And there I would see all the same things that once revealed themselves to the orientalising gaze of Gogol's veteran. The owner of ibay, who is not the richest of the IT billionaires, owns his own palace complexes, as his rank should be, but the functionality and laconism of his buildings, with which the aesthetic preferences of silicon Atlanteans are usually associated, are embellished with references to Arabian architecture. Ironically, what I would see in front of me is virtually the same “fairy-tale Scheherazade” described by Gogol. And it is not that much inferior to Putin’s alleged palace — all the same precious marbles and metal haberdashery. It is probably located in the flight zone, but it is protected from outsiders no less reliably. What's it to me that this fairy tale is more modest and somewhat more elegant than neoclassical phantasm? The west of Gelendzhik and the east of Nevada are equally distant from me. The good taste of the master, of which Russian liberal opposition dreams, will not restore justice in this bewildered world.
This transformation of capitalism, where platform billionaires monopolise all resources, is often described as neo-feudalism, both by critics on the centre (Joel Kotkin) and the left (Evgeny Morozov, Yanis Varoufakis, Jody Dean, etc.). In particular, Dean insists that the image of a non-capitalist world that is currently being broadcast by the mass culture of soap operas and video games should not be read as an alternative to capitalism, because such an opposition serves only to justify it. On the contrary, she argues, we should expose the neo-feudal tendencies within the existing economic order. We have long been living in a different system than before.
By definition, classical capitalism relied on private property, wage labour and commodity production. But under neo-feudalism, capital accumulation and concentration occurs less and less through the production of material goods and more and more through rents, credit and monetary speculation. A clear example from everyday life that Dean mentions is Uber and Airbnb: “One’s car isn’t for personal transport. It’s for making money. One’s apartment isn’t a place to live; it’s something to rent out”.
Such a confined world divides the world population into two main classes: a) techno-billionaires like Omidyar, these new lords, and b) ordinary internet users, i.e. countless peasants like you and me. Users are not proletarians of intellectual labour (or even the so-called "cognitariat"), but farmers who process new natural resources — seed data. We are like cyber serfs producing unique free content for the profit of our super-seniors, who in exchange for the information we receive feed us the lousiest and lowest quality advertising.
Traditional capitalism was supported by the bourgeois rule of law, which at least formally promised its citizens justice. What characterises the modern order is the desire of corporations to circumvent national laws by any means possible. For example, the economic weight of techno-giants allows them to evade taxes by violating state and municipal borders. Platform capital sets its own jurisdictions and executive authorities. This was the case under feudalism, when the landowner was the sole owner of the land.
In the parcellation of sovereignty, which so offends the leadership of semi-peripheral states like the Russian Federation, lies perhaps the fundamental difference between classical capitalism and its neo-feudal version. In the former case, it was purely a matter of economic pressure: each of you, we were told, had the right to change jobs or not to work at all. The landowner gives himself unique powers and rights and uses a method of extra-economic, legal coercion. He always leaves the cyber-peasant the right to leave the occupied land.
It is natural that such jurisdictions are governed by arbitrary bans imposed by social networks on their serfs. The decision is made by an artificial intelligence that is indifferent to semantic nuances or multiple meanings, by a small number of employees who may be driven by simple mood swings and sometimes by competitors who deliberately write complaints and denunciations against you. For example, when Instagram temporarily blocked my account without explanation, I was advised to write a complaint literally every day, so that one of them would happen to catch the eye of some lenient employee.
But while for some people ostracism is a matter of buying shoes or a personal diary, for others such a ban deprives them of years of collected subscriptions, sales channels, customer base and, in fact, the means of production. There are many captains and captainesses of the Kopeikins roaming the Internet: aggrieved Instagram sex workers, Facebook truth fakers, Twitter dissidents, Telegram terrorists, eBay tomb riders, and other online criminals and platform outcasts. All of them are hopelessly trying to restore their accounts or, trying to deceive the all-seeing eye of the security service, to create their avatars and start a righteous life from scratch.
To justify this system of exclusion, neo-feudal corporations invoke moral ideals and the patronage of an imagined “community.” For example, his Excellency Omidyar, like a true enlightened monarch, appeals to his faith in humanity. In his own words, eBay has become a testament to the fundamental virtue of human nature. If you have offended the community and violated its sacred rules, you will not be told the reason for the blocking. A half-bot half-employee of Ebay explained to me that the truth is hidden behind seven seals in order to prevent you from breaking the law again. And this is a pure Kafkaesque device: I don't know what I've been convicted of and how I can justify myself. All I can do is to suffer from unreasonable anxiety, shame-mongering and paranoia, finding some immoral thought or criminal intent in my every action. Catholic ethics and the spirit of neo-feudalism.
In reality, all these moral communities are nothing more than individual users competing with each other for attention, seeing the rest of the world either as competitors or as a source of enrichment. All that binds them together is commodity exchange and strong ties of reputation economy. Such imaginary communities of buyers and sellers and subscribers, are taking root in the place of fragmented societies, defeated labour unions, precarious employment, and atrophied solidarity. Even though techno-moguls appeal to eternal and universal values, for them any community is nothing more than guilty serfs from whom they must collect a tax.
With the expansion of digital platforms, the logic of enrichment is permeating various spheres of life. However, my case of fatal censorship is surprisingly at odds with this trend. Despite capitalism's call to "enjoy even if you don't want to," ebay is literally denying its vassals the right to enjoy consumerism. As a result of the blocking, I cannot not only sell, but even purchase other people's stuff, with my savings, scans of documents, two-factor verification, and shipping address. Before the cancellation by Ebay, I was sure that a fundamental but unspoken principle of the bourgeois world order is the right to buy. The right to consume, which, contrary to humanist rhetoric, is more important than all other rights, including "human rights". (Even if you want to buy a forbidden good or service, the seller will be punished first of all). But the future that Ebay depicts is capitalism in reverse, capitalism with a minus sign. Money is not convertible into goods, consumption without the pleasure of buying. The logic of rent does not require use, but only subletting or resale.
But what can be done to counteract the limitless power of techno corporations other than digital detox and boycotting brands that have no effect whatsoever? If the community of sex workers can solidarise with each other against unjustified blocking on Instagram and emigrate to, say, the land of Onlyfans, what can blocked sellers and, even more so, Ebay buyers do? To whom can I complain that I can not get my sandals or resell my camera? It seems that such fatal censorship can only be answered by what Nietzsche called “Russian fatalism” — "t that fatalism without revolt which is exemplified by a Russian soldier who, finding a campaign too strenuous, finally lies down in the snow”.
As we know from the history of the publication of "Dead Souls," it was thanks to this small inset story that the work was completely cancelled by its censors. And the point was not so much the unattractive image of the generals or the mockery of the true attitude of the state to war veterans. unlike Gogol's other "little people," after all the humiliation experienced in St. Petersburg, Captain Kopeikin did not accept the idea of fatal humility. He decided to take revenge on the deaf bureaucracy by forming his own forest gang near the city Ryazan. Much later, our hero was resurrected again, but already in a 1934 screenplay by Mikhail Bulgakov. There, this character turned into a rebel whose gang grew to a detachment and rebelled against Soviet violent collectivisation. It is not surprising that he was censored here as well.
And what will Captain Kopeikin become in an unwritten novel of the twenty-first century? It is likely that this Captain Bitcoin (kopeika is currency unit used in some East European countries) will gather a transnational army of crypto-peasants, digital queer guerrillas, and retired post-soviet hackers and head to Silicon Valley to expropriate the castles of techno-oligarchs, publicise the offshore assets of Randian IT-Atlases, and nationalise the jurisdictions of cyber-monarchs.