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#++++++++++++++++++++++
We live in a world increasingly controlled by tech corporations that shape our behavior, work environments, and social interactions. These companies are commodifying human life, turning individuals into products through massive data collection. Every interaction, every preference, and every digital footprint is harvested and capitalized on for profit.
This emerging socio-economic structure mirrors the feudal systems of the past, a phenomenon best described as " technofeudalism." In this digital revival of feudalism, users function as serfs, cultivating the "digital land," analogous to cloud infrastructures and algorithmic platforms controlled by modern tech lords.
This project aims to expose this new social system by implementing a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN) to generate seals, trained with corporate terms of service and privacy policies.
context
"Technofeudalism" is a concept coined by Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis in his book "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism". According to Varoufakis, the key features of technofeudalism include:
Historically, feudal societies used seals as symbols of power and ownership. These seals visually indicated the authority of feudal lords over their subjects and possessions. Based on this symbolism, this project takes a critical look at today's power structures by generating digital seals that visually express the dominion of corporations over modern society.
The central intention of the project is to expose the hidden mechanisms of corporate control by combining medieval iconography with language taken from digital terms of service and privacy policies. Using a conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN), the project generates symbols trained on authentic historical seals and textual content from problematic sections of corporate policies.
implementation approach
The project involves a systematic approach consisting of three parts:
1. Data Collection and Preparation:
Approximately 10,000 historical seal images were collected from the SIGILLA database, a research initiative that aims to archive medieval seal images.
For the text segments, I used ToS;DR ToS;DR, an archive that extracts and critically analyzes corporate terms of service and privacy policies.
The images were pre processed with resizing, numerical conversion and edge detection using OpenCV filters. Textual data was also transformed into normalized numerical sequences.
2. Model Architecture:
Text Encoder: Transforms the normalized text data into numerical vectors.
Generator: Takes random noise vectors and the converted text vectors, then combines them to generate a new seal image.
Discriminator: Evaluates the generated images against the real historical seals along with their textual contexts, and tries to differentiate between a generated image and an original image.
3. Training Process:
Both the generator and the discriminator were trained at the same time. The discriminator is given images and text vectors and learns how to identify original and generated images. Then the generator tries to create images in a way that the discriminator thinks the images generated are the real ones. Every epoch the learned weights are stored.
After training, the cGAN can be used to generate new images by feeding it sections of terms of service or privacy policies, also using the described text encoder and generator. The new image is then scaled and passed through a canny edge detector to ensure a clean result.
TikTok: Your data is stored all over the world, including in countries where data protection rules may differ from the ones of the service's jurisdiction or those of your country jurisdiction.
Facebook: The service can use follow -up technologies in third -party websites to follow your activity online while you do not visit their site.
Amazon: The service's website sets third-party cookies (cookies that do not belong to their domain) for purposes not including statistics and analytics.
results
The resulting seals are noticeably different from authentic medieval originals. Often quite abstract or unclear, these seals symbolize the lack of transparency inherent in technofeudal practices, where intentions and implications are intentionally obscured from the affected individuals.
In order to visually emphasize on this theme of ownership and technofeudalism, the seals created were placed on personal photographs capturing scenes of everyday life, communicating the extensive and often invisible dominance of tech corporations over modern life.