Big Tech is Like the Sharecropping System

After the American Civil War, former slaves and poor white farmers in the South farmed land they did not own under a system called sharecropping. Contracts that gave the landowner a percentage of the harvest, required them to buy supplies on credit from the landowner’s store at prices the landowner set, and prohibited them from selling to anyone other than the landowner. The debt was structured so that a bad harvest (or even a good one, depending on how the accounts were kept) left the farmer owing more at year’s end than at the beginning. The system was legal, entered into “voluntarily” (by people with no other options), and reproduced the economic relations of slavery without the formal institution. Historians and economists have found systematic underweighting of harvests and overcharging of credit accounts. The system was designed to perpetuate indebtedness, not resolve it. To make a bad situation worse, the merchant providing supplies was often the same person as the landowner;…