Book Review: Yuqi Na reviews Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition

You are an iSlave. When you can’t stop buying digital gadgets or checking Facebook, then you’re already enslaved, like workers on manufacturing assembly lines, only in a different way. ‘iSlavery’, according to Qiu, is ‘made possible by the latest digital technologies of our time’ which ‘sustains a planetary network whose central nexus is the Apple-Foxconn alliance – or Appconn – the “masters,” so to speak, who owns, manipulates, and exploits untold numbers of iSlaves’ (p. 6). In contrast to tech gurus’ claims that 21st-century digital technologies have brought us a new world, Qiu points to the many horrible parallels between 17th-century slavery and the ‘institutions and practise similar to slavery’ in today’s digital media industries (p. 172).