All conquest, colonization and genocide begins with a simple declaration. This happens, Shoshana Zuboff says, because “declarations are inherently invasive [since] they impose new facts on the social world while their declarers devise new ways to get others to agree to those facts.”¹ The case of the conquest of America is archetypal since it shows what historian Matthew Restall calls the “conquest pattern” that the Spanish partly developed during their peninsular struggle against the Arabs:

The first aspect of conquest procedure was the use of legalistic measures to lend a veneer of validity to an expedition. Such measures typically included the reading out of a legal document, such as a conquest license or the so-called Requirement—the request for submission that was rather absurdly to be read to native communities or armies before hostilities took place.²

The use of the “Requerimiento,” which we have already discussed (6.10), declares that the Crown of Castile was the rightful owner whatever lands it wanted, just by the fact of claiming them, so that the inhabitants of the American continent immediately owed allegiance to this or that sovereign. This kind of declaration is as absurd (in so many levels) as a contract that has been signed by only one of the parties and is still valid for both.

Surprising as it may seem, this same pattern of conquest and colonization is being used in the digital networks of the 21st century. The new Requerimiento is the document known as the “terms of service agreement” that we accept every time we enter into, let it be said, a virtually unilateral agreement, with an online service. These agreements hide all kinds of abuses in the fine print and give an air of legality to the “original sin of simple robbery” of surveillance capitalists. (10.4) From absurd pranks such as when Gamestation, a UK video games store, kept for a day a clause in the service agreement on its website that read: “by placing an order via this website, you agree to grant us a non-transferable option to claim, now and for ever more, your immortal soul,”³ to the utterly appalling Flickr or Instagram’s terms of service which stipulate that all images hosted on its servers become their property, which gives them the right to sell them as advertising material to third parties.

Virtual colonization continues, says Zuboff, and 21st century invaders don’t ask permission,

the forge ahead, papering the scorched earth with faux-legitimation practices. Instead of cynically conveyed monarchical edicts, they offer cynically conveyed term-of-service agreements whose stipulations are just as obscure and incomprehensible. They build their fortifications, fiercely defending their claimed territories, while gathering strength for their next incursion. Eventually, they build towns in intricate ecosystems of commerce, politics, and culture that declare the legitimacy and inevitability of all that they have accomplished.⁴

This circumstance has given rise to what, following Zuboff's terminology, we could call the culture of “uncontract,” which is no longer “a space of contractual relations but rather a unilateral execution that makes those relations unnecessary. The unucontract desocializes the contract, manufacturing certainty through the substitution of automated procedures for promises, dialogue, shared meaning, problem solving, dispute resolution, and trust: the expressions of solidarity and human agency that have been gradually institutionalized in the notion of ‘contract’ over the course of millennia.”⁵ A further step in the depoliticization of contemporary society (0.19, 9.24).

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1. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 177. ↩︎
2. Matthew Restall, Seven Myths of Spanish Conquest, 19. ↩︎
3. Terms and Conditions May Apply. Dir: Cullen Hoback. 2013 ↩︎
4. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 180. ↩︎
5. Ibid,. 221. ↩︎